BY MICHAEL JANIS
Graves Hall at Morehouse College.
In the last four years, the increase in discrimination and racism in the United States has taken many forms, from unchecked police brutality to the rise in hate crimes and in blatant sexist and white supremacist rhetoric. As a professor, since 2003, at Morehouse College, one of the nation’s oldest historically Black institutions, I have been deeply concerned about our students, young people experiencing unprecedented intellectual development and coming into political and social consciousness in a time of despair. When I think about the HBCU experience in a country dealing with an assault on democratic values and human dignity, two questions come to mind: What happens when those precious years of college are characterized by perpetual anxiety due to the increased threat of racism and racially motivated violence? In what ways does an HBCU serve as a sanctuary and as a beacon of leadership and hope?
The campus of an HBCU is a safe space, albeit one inextricably connected with the outside world. Even as they can feel safe on campus, students at Atlanta’s historically Black colleges strive to change a world in which they do not feel safe, now more than ever in their young lives. Last May, two students from the Atlanta University Center, Spelman College student Taniyah Pilgrim, and Morehouse College student Messiah Young became victims of police violence. The incident in which they were repeatedly tasered and beaten (in Young’s case resulting in a fractured wrist and a gash requiring twenty stitches) occurred as they were stuck in traffic at the downtown Atlanta protests against police violence after the murder of George Floyd. Shakim Muhafiz, a Morehouse College newspaper editor who covered Pilgrim and Young’s press conference, told me, “To see this happen to people that I share a campus and brotherhood with was a wake-up call. Being a bit naïve, I soon realized this could happen to me at any time.”
According to a 2019 summary by Vanessa Williams and Isabella Gelfand of Brookings, “FBI data show that since Trump’s election there has been an anomalous spike in hate crimes concentrated in counties where Trump won by larger margins. It was the second-largest uptick in hate crimes in the 25 years for which data are available, second only to the spike after September 11, 2001.” While we look forward to an era of hope since the election of Biden and Harris, we must live with the stark reality that seventy million Americans supported Trump and the mendacity, bigotry, and xenophobia he embodies—the sense in which the spike in hate crimes has not been “anomalous.” As political commentators have observed, Trump is not an aberration, unfortunately, but the logical culmination of tactics taken by the Right for several decades; the ultimate blow was the acquiescence and support of the majority of the Republican Party.
It is natural, I would venture, that at times we have taken for granted the relative safety of the HBCU campus, as a sanctuary away from the systemic racism that has been a fixture of American life. As scholars, we think about the towns founded by African Americans, primarily established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Florida to New York to Oklahoma, endeavors by Black Americans to secure their right to safety and sovereignty—during and after the era of slavery, when resistance and freedom also took the form of societies of maroons, cimarrones, and quilombos. In terms of literary examples, there are the nineteenth-century “critical utopias” about fortified Black sovereign states, such as Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America or Grigg’s Imperium in Imperio. When I walk by the oldest building at Morehouse, I have thought about how the first bricks were laid on the Atlanta campus over a decade before Griggs imagined a Black American empire within the White American empire, and precisely when European empires were carving up Africa at the Berlin Conference and the rise of lynching occurred during Reconstruction.
Although these historical examples are telling, we can also look right in front of us to understand the relationship between the terror of the past and the present. This year, African Americans purchased about a hundred acres in a rural area in order to create Freedom Georgia, a safe space for African Americans to live. Listed on the Internet, multiple counseling networks, safe spaces, offer support for African Americans due to the daily trauma, and the generational trauma, of racism in America. The long list of African Americans who have lost their lives due to police violence, in an era of unprecedented coverage and dissemination of information, reminds us of the assertion of Morehouse alumnus Martin Luther King, echoing the Négritude-era thinker Aimé Césaire: a society that enslaves and colonizes subjects will “thingify,” as well as exploit, Black citizens—a process of objectification and othering that has diminished, while transforming and refusing to disappear.
English major Julian Hemmings commented, “Our nation has had a major issue with protecting Black and Brown people from government-funded chains and bullets.” A political activist, Hemmings understands all too well the country in which he is coming of age. “I could’ve been George Floyd, Ahmaud, Trayvon, Breona, Amadou, Eric, Sean,” he added. “There are too many of us who have fallen due to our dark flesh to name.” As a result of the regression they have witnessed in the US, more students than ever have become politically active, joining Black Lives Matter, working on voter-registration campaigns, holding important positions in the media, undertaking studies in public policy and government.
In an editorial in the Washington Post last spring, Morehouse president David Thomas stressed the need for this generation to fight institutionalized racism, decades after basic rights were won by the Civil Rights Movement. While he expressed concern over the safety of our students, Thomas reflected on marching recently with his sons, noting that the power of the protesters “lies in having a strong voice and an even stronger commitment to the tools of nonviolence, and patience, as they seek to transform this country into the America it should be.”
Like other HBCUs, Morehouse makes an essential contribution to higher education, cultivating intellectual growth and helping students to become their best selves—and to become catalysts of change. “Morehouse challenges the reality that each dark child of this nation faces,” Hemmings said. “The College raises a crown of dignity and pride above the head of every Morehouse Man.”
Having taught thousands of Morehouse students over the years—brilliant young people like Shakim and Julian, who have shared their perspectives with me—I am reminded of the adage that the teacher must remain as teachable as the students. The world must continue to look for leaders in students and graduates of historically Black colleges. Founded after the Civil War when African Americans were denied education, these pioneering schools forged safe spaces in a hostile land. Today HBCUs still strive to teach how to make safe spaces universal.
Guest blogger Michael Janis is associate professor of English at Morehouse College, where he teaches courses on literary theory, West African fiction and film, and global modernism. He is the author of Africa after Modernism: Transitions in Literature, Media, and Philosophy and various articles on Africana literatures.
