The Institute for African American Affairs was established using the following documents to present its mission as well as introduce a set of academic Operational Imperatives:

• It must rid itself of the sociological notion that life in America's Black communities is indicative of a culture produced by the condition of poverty and has therefore no viable relationship to African cultures.
• Black Studies programs must be structured so as to admit that the life-styles of Black people are legitimate ones and can consequently be accepted as meaningful in the learning environment. Indeed, these very life-styles can and must be utilized to further the truly meaningful education of Black Folk.
• Black education must seek to rid itself of the typical lock-step pattern of American education. It must seek to establish a fully interdisciplinary, holistic approach to education, for knowledge cannot be compartmentalized and dispensed in individual courses. All aspects of the human experience are interrelated and must be taught as such.
• Black education must include community involvement as a legitimate classroom exercise in the attempt to train Black college graduates to "go back home," as it were, and work to remove the oppressive barriers which prevent our living the good life.
• In spite of its narcissistic tendencies Black Studies must never divorce itself from investigating the white world — its science, its politics, its economics, for if we allow this to happen, we run the risk of crippling those who come under the program's tutelege more than if they had stayed in white educational programs.
• Black Studies programs are not so interested in having an entirely black staff and student body, for that is irrelevant to the issue at hand: Where can Black people receive a decent education? All that black studies programs require of white enrollees and white faculty is that they be prepared to hear and teach the truth as far as that truth can be ascertained.

*FROM: "Black Education and You," The initial Institute for African American Affairs Program Brochure introducing the Institute's academic Operational Imperatives, October, 1969.

It's About People Not Things

The point I am making here is that we need more than unity and power; we need more than symbolic Blackness; we need more than a revolution which will metamorphose the hunter into the hunted, the oppressor into the oppressed. What we need, among other things, is an orientation to a new value structure — values based on people rather than on things.

In my estimation Black people today are not asking for a revaluation of some traditional value system, but rather have taken it upon themselves to look into their collective past and present for guidelines as to how they can structure their future. This then being the case, they have come to realize that if any newly created value system is to be valid it will of utter necessity have to be supported by means of thorough educational programming. An obvious ramification of this is that the standard American educational system cannot be relied upon to do the work. Aside from all the platitudes which profess that a college education is designed to stimulate the student's "curiosity, broaden his perspective, enrich his awareness, deepen his understanding, . . . and help him realize his potential as an individual and as a responsible and informed member of society." Black students are saying that this aim does not apply to them, for the "broadened perspective" has always meant that they give up those things which are in reality their only raison d'être — the Black community which bore them, their Black, hence African culture, their creative linguistic patterns, their communal social organization, Ray Charles for Lawrence Welk.

Moreover, as Black people begin to take count of one aspect of their demography, they are immediately made aware of the fact that America's Black community is, in terms of population percentages, younger than the white community: it has a higher percentage of youth between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four (the college age group) than does the non-Black population. However, and here comes the funny part, the majority of those Black persons making up this age group are not represented on the college campus. In 1964, the 234,000 Blacks enrolled in college numbered only eight per cent of all those Blacks in this age bracket; in 1968 the percentage was fifteen per cent or 434,000. This represents an eighty-five per cent increase in overall Black enrollment, but that is nothing to applaud, especially since white enrollment continued to increase from twenty-two per cent in 1964 to twenty-seven per cent in 1968. Indeed, in terms of total college enrollment, Blacks represent only 5.6 per cent of 7,750,000.

Colleges then are admitting young Blacks at the same slow rate that Nixon is removing troops from Vietnam. If it continues at this pace it will take centuries to arrive at anything approach- ing parity. This fact makes it more than difficult to effect revolutionary changes in value orientations beyond the wearing of dashikis, bubas, beards, naturals and sandals. It also makes the demands for the admittance of more Black students that much more strident since we see that our youthful and talented human resources are being denied access to college for all kinds of spurious reasons.

Lest I digress too much, let me back up a bit. I have said in the first instance that college to the majority of Black students suggests that they give up their Blackness (negative) and assume a white mode of operation (positive) in order to succeed in the American society. Typical of the educational system in America (and the world for that matter) is the aim of socializing all of those coming into it in terms of perpetuating the society's dominant beliefs, values, political structure, etc. Blacks are caught up in this socialization process which makes it impossible for them "to go back home." Black students, therefore, request (demand?) that their education proceed from another point of view, from another concept of social structure and administration, for if it's good enough for whites it is by definition not good enough for them. There must come a day when Blacks will determine what constitutes their society and how they will be prepared, educated, socialized to fit into it.

A major objective of the Institute for African American Affairs is to effect an educational program for full academic credit which will begin to explore alternative value systems, especially that system traditional to Mother Africa.

*FROM: E.W. Crosby, "People vs. Things," Black Watch, November 25, 1969.