others, Negro and white, hope the flood of new publications and revisions will give a much needed lift to the Negro's self-esteem.

Also, a more extensive knowledge of Negro history by whites might help them discard "myths" about Negroes, says Erwin A. Salk, a Chicago mortgage banker and editor of A Layman's Guide to Negro History. For example, he says that most books, movies and TV shows about the West have only "tall, lean Anglo-Saxons" as folk heroes; a Negro is seldom if ever seen, even though the West had some 5,000 Negro cowboys at one time. One of them, Bill Pickett, is the man credited with inventing the bulldogging technique.

The publishers are doing all they can to spread the word. "There's a concerted effort to give the Negro his due," says an editor for Scott, Foresman & Co., which is readying two college texts on Negro history.

A 10-volume library

Publishers Company Inc., Washington, is producing a 10-volume series, the International Library of Negro Life and History, and already has sold out the first press run of 20,000 sets even though only the first five volumes are currently available. They deal with the Negro's role in the Civil War, medicine, the theater, and music and art. A collection of Negro biographies is also included in the initial volumes.

Afro-Am Publishing Co., a two-man Chicago firm founded in 1963, is prospering mightily. Great Negroes, Past and Present, the company's only book, has sold 62,000 copies and is in its fourth printing. And schools are snapping up visual aid materials on Negro history also sold by Afro-Am, says David P. Ross Jr., president.

The handful of scholars specializing in Negro history are being swamped with offers to write, advise, teach and lecture. "I've had to decline six lecture dates in California this school year alone," says Arna Bontemps, professor at the University of Illinois' Chicago Circle campus and a well-known Negro author. An estimated 10% of the nation's colleges now offer Negro history courses, compared with less than 5% five years ago.

Companies using Negro historical subjects for promotion or advertising are amazed at the public response. American Oil Co., a subsidiary of Standard Oil Co. (Indiana), has distributed more than 500,000 free copies of its 64-page booklet, American Traveler's Guide to Negro History.

First published in 1963, the booklet includes descriptions and photographs of monuments and landmarks pertinent to Negro history in 28 states. It has been used, among, among other places, in schools and in Job Corps training.

An advertising campaign for Old Taylor bourbon featuring outstanding Negroes has brought 100,000 requests for free booklets on the subject of the ads. Queries are coming from "schools, government agencies, churches, prisons and consumers," says an executive of National Distillers & Chemical Corp.

Perhaps the most significant breakthrough, however, is occurring in the general American history textbooks used regularly by millions of pupils, black and white. These volumes have long neglected the Negro. Ebony magazine has said that "black people have been made Orwellian non-persons in the symbolic world projected by textbook writers." Just last year Irving Sloan wrote a scathing review for the American Federation of Teachers on the poor treatment of the Negro in standard textbooks.

But there have been marked changes lately. Scott-Foresman has a new text for highschool seniors out this year that has two pages listing dates and events showing "the changing status of the American Negro." The text also mentions the "Harlem Renaissance," a literary movement of the 1920s, and in a chapter on the colonial period says that the labor of Negro slaves was a key ingredient in the development of the nation. The book, United States History, by Richard N. Current, Alexander de Conde and Harris L. Dañte, makes numerous other references to Negroes.

Some revisions of standard works have been exhaustive. One junior high school text, The Growth of America, written by Rebekah R. Liebman and Gertrude A. Young and first published by Prentice-Hall Inc. in 1959, was criticized in its original version by a University of California study group. It said the book "singled out" the Negro "not only for unsympathetic and inadequate treatment but for non-treatment."

The revised book, however, gets good marks from critic Sloan, among others. The book says Negroes "hated slavery," only acted "pleasant" and "obedient" to avoid their masters' disfavor, frequently ran away and plotted against their

masters more often than is supposed. Many other texts imply that Negroes were acquiescent under slavery.

The Prentice-Hall book also provides considerable material on the role of the Negro in the Civil War-230,000 Negroes fought on the Union side, 37,000 were killed in action, 20 won Congressional Medals of Honor-and points out the positive contributions of Negroes during Reconstruction. Mr. Sloan says the difference between the original and revised edition is "tremendous."

Often it's to the publisher's advantage to give fuller and fairer coverage to Negro history in general texts. One editor says more and more textbook buyers for school systems are checking indexes carefully to see how books treat this topic.

The surge of interest in Negro history has brought the names and exploits of many little-known Negroes to the attention of readers. Among them are Benjamin Banneker, who wrote the first American almanac; Jean du Sable, Chicago's first settler; Matthew Henson, co-discoverer of the North Pole; John James Audubon, the naturalist; Dr. Charles Drew, developer of blood plasma, and Elijah McCoy, an inventor who, it's said, built lubricating devices of such quality that buyers insisted on getting only "the real McCoy." (Other sources say this expression originated as a reference to a boxer, Kid McCoy, who shared his name with another pugilist of inferior skills.)

Tracing the history of Negroes in America has been difficult, however. As slaves, most Negroes were not permitted to learn how to read and write, so there are few documents from them dealing with this period. Also, some Southern states destroyed the papers of Negroes prominent during the Reconstruction. "Negroes didn't usually file their papers or publications in the Library of Congress," says Mr. Quarles of Morgan State. Many materials are scattered across the country and are poorly indexed, he adds.

In New Jersey, members of Alpha Kappa Alpha, a Negro sorority, are resorting to interviews with long-time Negro residents in an attempt to piece together Negro history in that state. They already know that as far back as 1790 New Jersey had a Negro population of about 11,000 including 3,000 freemen, and the sorority says some Negroes interviewed can trace their lineage back to African royal families.

There are some centers of material on Negro history, however, including Howard University in Washington and Atlanta University. One of the bestknown is the Schomberg Collection, a part of the New York Public Library System. Located in Harlem, the collection has 44,000 volumes and a vast quantity of uncatalogued materials. A few years ago, its reading room was used but little; now it's often crowded.

[From Time, June 14, 1968]

TEACHING BLACK CULTURE

One of the fastest-growing new academic specialties in U.S. universities is Negro culture. Whether prodded by militant black student groups, equally concerned white students or faculty conscience, the nation's colleges are rushing to add courses in Negro history, literature, anthropology, music and art. San Francisco State even has a course in "Black Psychology," while Colgate Rochester Divinity School this fall will begin a program of "Black Church Studies."

Negro culture as a discipline is so new that there are inevitable disagreements over precisely what should be taught and who should teach it. Some student groups insist that only a Negro can fully appreciate and convey the implications of black culture. There are not nearly enough professors-black or white-with academic specialization in the field. Partly out of practical necessity, universities generally agree that a teacher's color is irrelevant in matters of scholarship. "You don't need a Greek to teach Greek or a Communist to teach Marx," contends Rutgers Provost Richard Schlatter. Anyone with a valid claim to expertise in black studies can just about choose his campus. Brooklyn College has created a chair in Afro-American studies, offering up to $31,000 a year, but has yet to find an occupant.

STREET HOODLUM

In the debate over course content, scholars agree that Negro history has been both slighted and skewed by the university. The lack of a perceptive analysis of the Negro's role in U.S. history and culture, many historians now concede, raises

serious doubts about their own past techniques and insights. At the same time, universities are fighting the temptation-created by black student pressure-to romanticize the Negro past. Attempts to exaggerate the role of a Negro like Crispus Attucks, who was killed in the Boston Massacre, can be misleading. "He was just a street hoodlum who happened to get in the way of a bullet," says Notre Dame Historian James Silver, an expert on the U.S. South (Mississsippi: The Closed Society).

The guideline for creating new black culture courses, says Arts and Sciences Dean John Silber of the University of Texas, must be to "avoid racism in reverse-there has to be intellectual integrity behind the move." Although Texas has fewer than 200 Negro students, a petition for a Negro history course drew 1,800 student signers. The course will be taught by Sociologist-Historian Henry Allen Bullock. He intends to examine the Negro's origin in Africa and the clashes of African and European cultures, study the impact of the slave trade on the Caribbean and the U.S. South, and trace the development of segregation in the U.S.

NEW EMPHASIS

Some colleges are meeting the demand for a new emphasis on the Negro by expanding existing African studies programs. A three-year-old Institute of African Studies at Columbia now has 43 courses, ranging from the Prehistory of Africa to Primitive Art and Problems of Modern Africa. The University of Chicago offers nine courses on Africa, from its anthropology to its sociology, in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division.

Stanford, Harvard and Yale are debating whether to offer degrees in AfroAmerican studies. A proposed major at Yale would require specialization in a discipline, such as history, economics or political science, then examine the approaches of several disciplines toward Negro culture in a junior-year seminar, finish with a senior-year colloquium and a major paper. The leader in promoting black culture as a separate discipline, however, has been San Francisco State. Negro Sociologist Nathan Hare, who has a doctorate from the University of Chicago, supervises 15 courses, ranging from Avant-Garde Jazz to Ancient Black History and Swahili, but considers both the range and volume inadequate.

The primary purpose of the Negro-culture courses is, of course, to convey information, clear up misconceptions, and tell it like it is or was. This also often tends to ease racial tensions, although Michigan State Historian James Hooker sadly notes the case of one black student in his Negro-history class who disliked whites before taking the course, then "found out that Whitey had really known what he was doing to black people-so now he hates him even more." More often, though, the candid classes have a kind of "group therapy" effect, in which inner feelings surface and understanding grows.

[From the New York Times, June 23, 1968]

THE DEMAND GROWS FOR "BLACK STUDIES"

Harvard University last week announced that, beginning in September, it will offer a new full-year course in "The Afro-American Experience" and is considering a degree-granting program in Afro-American studies at a later date.

The alumni magazines of Yale, Dartmouth, Williams and Cornell last week featured reports on their institutions' Negro students, with stress on demands for "black studies."

At Yale, a student-faculty committee has proposed the creation of an undergraduate major in Afro-American studies.

Since academic innovations by the Ivy League are trend-setting, these developments deserve analysis.

Robert A. Dahl, professor of political science at Yale, said the program recommended by the committee is "an interdisciplinary approach to studying the experience and conditions of people of African ancestry in Africa and in the New World."

While students would get a broad view of the African experience, they would be required to concentrate on one of the relevant disciplines, thus building a knowledge of the cultural, economic, political, social, artistic and historical experiences of Africans and Afro-Americans.

HARVARD'S PROGRAM

Harvard, with the action program already mapped out, is even more specific. The new course will begin with African background and the Negro experience in American history through 1945 and, in the second term, will consider issues of race relations, psychology, civil rights, housing, employment and education from 1945 to the present.

A faculty group of four will be headed by Frank Freidel, professor of American history and biographer of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Prof. Freidel will be joined by a historian with special interest in poverty studies, a political scientist who specializes in African and American Negro studies and an expert on American and Latin American history.

In the beginning, the course will be limited to 200 students. It is comparable, as a social science offering, to the Introduction to Western Civilization.

Parallel to the course, Harvard's Institute of Politics of the John F. Kennedy School of Government will offer a series of lectures on the Afro-American Experience by visiting scholars, required of the students taking the course and open to others. And the Association of African and Afro-American Students will offer a series of films and television tapes on the subject.

These developments assume special importance at a time when "black studies" are being demanded across the country, often with far less stress on their relationship to the educational program as a whole and less convincing proof of intellectual seriousness than in the Harvard program. In particular, the question arises whether Afro-American studies should take the form of an undergraduate major, any more than, say, European-American, Italo-American or JewishAmerican studies.

POSSIBLE REASONS

Dispassionate answers might emerge from an examination of the following possible reasons for black studies:

(1) Political. In an atmosphere of militancy, the demand for inclusion of special courses in the curriculum is neither new nor hard to understand. When a segment of the population feels that its views, rights and aims are being ignored, its natural impulse is often that "there ought to be a course," as was the case when the issue of Communism was on the public mind in the 1950's.

(2) Therapeutic. There is nothing new in the need of minorities to find, and develop pride in, their ethnic or religious identity, especially within a campus community dominated by an alien element. This, of course, is why Jewish and Catholic students on WASPish campuses turned to the Hillel and Newman societies respectively.

One advantage, apart from creating an enclave of fraternity, is that such a retreat permits a non-objective approach to the discussion of one's past. It allows students to concentrate on their heroic past, omitting less glorious chapters. (3) Vocational. On this score, the Yale alumni review asks whether black studies would be geared primarily to the needs of black students, presumably to enable them to become teachers in Negro communities or academicians in this field. The reaction to this approach depends on one's view of the mission of the liberal arts college.

SCHOLARLY APPROACH

If the political, therapeutic and vocational approaches have serious limitations, there remains the straight, non-propagandistic scholarly approach that treats the African heritage as it would, or should, treat the Western or Judeo-Christian heritage. Indeed, a long-standing criticism of the American academic approach to mankind is that it treats history as though it started in Athens and ended in California.

It then becomes crucial that the Afro-American story itself is not relegated to an academic ghetto.

The first requirement in most colleges and schools is not the introduction of black studies but the reexamination of existing lily-white studies. This applies to history, economics, sociology, political science, psychology, along with litera ture and the arts.

The second requirement is tougher, in the present national mood. It is the caution not to substitute propaganda for omission, nor new myths for old lies. Martin Luther Kilson Jr., assistant professor of government at Harvard and adviser to Harvard's Afro-Americans, who will help teach the new course, asked this blunt question:

"What community or segment of Black Peoples should be used as representative of whatever the Black Experience is or has been?" Should it be, he added, the Republic of Haiti where Black Power has been oppressive of the black masses? Or black fratricide in Nigeria? Or the black experience with 200 years of white racism in the United States? Or the Negro slave traders who helped bring this about?

"In short, I would suggest most firmly that the Black Experience is truly nothing more than a variant of the Human Experience," Professor Kilson said. All men, black, white, yellow and red, Professor Kilson went on, are capable of oppressive abuse of power, without gaining from such experience any special will or capacity to rid human affairs of oppression. He concluded:

"Indeed, it is a common fallacy to believe that what is momentarily politically serviceable is ipso facto intellectually virtuous.”

Where does this leave black studies?

It seems to point to two efforts, not mutually exclusive.

The first, and most important to the intellectual integrity of American education as well as to the rights of Negro Americans, is the honest inclusion of the Negro past in the study of American and human affairs as part of everybody's general education.

This does not exclude as a second step, specific African or Afro-American courses as now introduced at Harvard, in conjunction with the regular disciplines. The risk that such courses might be turned into propaganda or political accommodation, especially at second-rate colleges which lack the resources of the best institutions and the strength to resist political demands, is obvious. Even at first-rate institutions the wisdom of offering an undergraduate Afro-American major, rather than deferring such specialization to the graduate level, remains at least debatable.

FRED M. HECHINGER.

[From the New York Times, July 8, 1968]
SCHOOLS TURN TO NEGRO ROLE IN U.S.
(By J. Anthony Lukas)

Who was the real McCoy?

According to most historians, he was Kid McCoy, a famed prize ring and barroom battler of the eighteen-nineties. One day, the story goes, he was taunted by a saloon heckler who said if he were the real McCoy he should put up his dukes and prove it. McCoy did just that. When the heckler came to, his first words were: "That's the real McCoy, all right."

But the educator William Loren Katz has another version. According to Mr. Katz, the real McCoy was Elijah McCoy, who gained more than 75 patents in the late 19th century for various mechanical devices. His best known invention was the drip cup, which fed oil to moving parts of heavy machinery. The tiny cup was so highly valued by machinists, Mr. Katz says, that they insisted on "the real McCoy."

Elijah McCoy was born in Canada, the son of runaway American slaves. But he figured in few American history courses until Mr. Katz, a pioneer in the teaching of Negro history, devoted nearly a full page to him in a new textbook.

Mr. Katz does not maintain a barroom dogmatism about McCoy. He concedes that the Kid's backers may have a point. But he argues that what has been wrong with the teaching of American history for so long is that few students' have had a chance even to hear about Elijah McCoy.

This kind of omission, comparatively petty though it may be, is the kind that advocates of "black history" are seeking to correct. Demands for the teaching of "black studies”—including literature, art and other aspects of the black experience-have swelled on campuses across the country during the last year.

These demands will have their first major results this fall when many colleges and universities introduce courses in black studies, often using new books that have been rushed into print by publishers.

The new focus on black studies raises anew the question: who is the real American?

Is he, as most American history textbooks have seen him, a bland, homogenized product of the melting pot, with all his ethnic peculiarities and angularities boiled out? Or is he a very particular person, formed by his own racial, ethnic and religious background and proud of it, yet living together with many other proud and particular persons in a richly variegated, pluralistic society?