Tell Them We Are Rising

TELL THEM WE ARE RISING

TAKE ONE/ 16 February 2018                                                                                     

Scene: Ashé Power House, 1731 Baronne Street, New Orleans, LA

Act:  PBS/Indie Lens Film Screening: "Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities"

Purpose:  To view a short version of Stanley Nelson's most recent documentary, a visual narrative of many narratives, designed "to tell the dynamic story of Americans who refused to be denied a higher education and ---in their resistance --- created a set of institutions that would influence and shape the landscape of the country for centuries to come." (quoted from Ashé Cultural Arts Center newsletter, February 2018)

Brief report on TAKE ONE

                My impressions of this documentary were prejudiced by (1) the advertising of the film, (2) my intimate knowledge of HBCUs from having been on the faculty of two of them for 42 years, and (3) the testimonial delivered by Dr. Lisa Mims-Devezin , Interim  Chancellor of Southern University at New Orleans, prior to the showing of the film. The testimonial  was a variant of a well-known genre, the sermon for the choir, its only fresh aspect being Dr. Mims-Devezin's sharing of autobiographical facts. Like many of us in the audience who are alumni of HBCUs, she has unqualified love for her alma mater. I am anxious to see the documentary and more than slightly bored by a sermon I might myself deliver. My privileged knowledge of the histories of two HBCUs --- Tougaloo College and Dillard University---positions me to be at once sympathetically  and  severely critical of the documentary; I know too much of the public histories as well as the undocumented "fictions" of these institutions and can only be impressed by Nelson's excavation of the deep structures of history.  That the advertising claims the rich history of HBCUs "yet remains largely unknown" is a bit of a shock.  Have I been living for 74 years in a nation that is ill-informed about its mindscape?   Have I lived for seven decades among moral and ethical criminals? When I view the complete version of the film, I suspect I'll be less shocked and more receptive to the visual and verbal lore of the documentary.

                I do not write any notes as I watch the film.  I don't want my attention to the film's provocation of memories to be distorted by documentation of documentation.  There's more than enough of that in the recognitions triggered by the faces , voices, and body language  on the screen of people I have known in real life.  I watch the film in an aura of remembering.

                Certain features (especially the information gaps)  of the short version provoke questions and complaints that may be unfair; my analysis of  what Stanley Nelson has achieved may be insufficient.  He does a fine job of justifying the necessity for HBCUs in the history of the United States from the 19th century period of enslavement  to the present.  But as is the case with so much discussion of African American histories, the narrative remains in the prison of a racial binary that obscures the prescient insights of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America . Tocqueville did not buy the binary.  It does foreground the Constitutional  hypocrisy that begat both Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Topeka, Kansas as well as detailing in a poignant way the crucial roles of Charles Hamilton Houston and the Howard University School of Law in linking both cases. Houston's trickster strategy regarding the "separate but equal" doctrine ( alabaster treachery)  was most judicious.  That is highly commendable.  Less commendable is the ill-nuanced recounting of ideological tension between two giants of African American higher education, Booker T. Washington and W.E. B. DuBois.  These royal battles in our histories , manufactured mainly by OUTSIDERS and granted credibility by INSIDERS, ought to be scrutinized with extreme care.  We have had a surplus of them ----Hughes v. Cullen and Schuyler; Richard Wright v.  Zora Neale Hurston;  Malcolm X v. Martin Luther King, Jr. ; etc.  I am weary of battles that distort the normality of honest disagreement. And why does a documentary about rising seem to end with loaded hints about falling?

Comments to the Ashé audience

                The film should be used to think critically about more than HBCUs; it should force us to think about what is happening to higher education in the USA.  All colleges and universities are "at risk" in one sense or another.  Nelson cannot give us the whole story, because each existing college has a unique historical narrative that is still unfolding.  The whole story is not limited, as the film suggests, to the black and the white. Recall that we and all American institutions of higher learning occupy space stolen from the earliest inhabitants of what we call North America.  Genocide and removal  and simultaneous exclusion/inclusion are chapters of the story we can't ignore, whether they are told or not told in the film.

                I am not optimistic about the future of HBCUs.  Those that are public will become less obviously "black."  And many years ago a former president of Spelman and I agreed that by 2050, only five private HBCUs would be viable.  Mark my words.  Remember in 2051 that I told you so.

February 16, 2018

TAKE TWO/ 19 February 2018 (prelude)

Scene: 1928 Gentilly Blvd., New Orleans, LA 70119

Purpose: To view the complete PBS documentary and take notes for commentary.

Preparation: Re-reading DuBois's 1924 Fisk lecture "Diuturni Silenti."

February 17, 2018

TAKE TWO/19 February 2018  8:00-9:25 p.m. CST (a lamentation)

                The documentary crafted by Stanley Nelson and Marco Williams as seen on WYES-TV (New Orleans) needs a more informative subtitle ---" The Story of Black Colleges and Universities Predicated on Evidence of Things Unsaid and Thing Unseen."  It is wanting as a narrative of affirmation.  It is less powerful in making its point than Spike Lee's "School Daze," and can serve best as a catalyst for continual discussion of the as yet unfinished story.   The notes I scribbled attest to my disappointment.

                Amidst raving over the film "Black Panther "(2017),  the hype surrounding "Tell Them We Are Rising" (2016) pales.  Even if this  documentary is ultimately of greater biopolitical importance (check out  Carter G. Woodson' The Mis-education of the Negro and Giorgio  Agamben's Homo Sacer) than the sci-fi blockbuster, "Black Panther," the difficulty of Nelson's creating a praiseworthy  documentary remains.  Fantasy is seductive; in contrast,  a too-thin representation of the whole truth produces anger!  Some stories just don't lend themselves to time-limited telling.  The history  of HBCUs is one of them.

                The better part of compassion and sympathy leads me to shield Nelson against my subversive note-taking  and negative habits of the heart. Thus, the barbs are not to be directed at Nelson but at an absence of evidence in depicting a dream grown old, at the failure of a film to succeed in ways that a hefty book might.  And as far as film is concerned, Spike Lee's satiric "School Daze" trumps "Tell Them We Are Rising."

                The long dreams of  African American struggles to empower the mind occur on a vaster plane than is covered by colleges and universities.  And the documentary only succeeds in sketching questions that have to be dealt with by way of ice-cold discourses and critiques.  Only those questions can catch the lesson.  To begin the conversation "Tell Them We Are Rising" truly invites, let us generate such bitter questions as ------

·         Given the slave ship and plantation origins of black education, will it take as much time as was devoted to enslavement (the peculiar institution) to undo the pervasive, collective psychological  damage?

·         What do the debilitating limits of the white/black binary preclude our knowing?

·         Can black education that is not married to black nationalism and judicious African-centered perspectives  only partially defeat demonic whiteness? Do the "ghosts" of O.O. Howard, Samuel Armstrong, and Fayette  McKenzie still haunt the United States of America as far as higher and not-so-high education is concerned? And what must be said about the "ghosts" that work assiduously to ensure that our nation will drift into fascism and abide by a weird, unholy catechism?

·         What role does classical and revitalized "lynching" play in higher education? How do the new Jim Crow and contemporary forms of imperial desire plague African American education?

·         Is imbalance between the human sciences and STEM which now colors PWIs, HBCUs, and other iterations of higher education a dynamic that is beyond resolving?

·         If we revisit Booker T. Washington's famous Atlanta Exposition address, which embodied a compromise that produced maximum happiness in the arena of 19th century capitalism, shall we discover that 21st century capitalism demands a parallel production of "educated" labor?

·         Does the future viability of a limited number of HBCUs depend on specialized use of DuBois's ten critiques of black education (1906-1960) and Carter G. Woodson's insights in The Mis-education of the Negro?

·         Is something amiss in filmed historiography that foregrounds Slavery, The New Negro, the Golden Age, Freedom, and Today as interrelated "periods" through the distortions constituted by snippets of music and body language(s)?

·         For the sake of telling how African American are rising and falling in the 21st century  arenas of public schooling  and higher education, is it not obligatory to re-theorize and re-criticize such poetry as  James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing," Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" and "America," Langston Hughes's "Harlem," and Margaret Walker's "For My People"?  For the sake of a more adequate telling, must we not re-engage a small library of black radical prose?

·         Are HBCUs sufficiently unique "safe-spaces," or is it the case that certain endemic flaws of administration perform in concert with  rapacious racism and other "isms"  to render HBCUs  no safer than any location in a dying American democracy?

I do not abandon all hope, but I know that the documentary's hasty optimism lacks sufficient breadth and  nuance. It is, for better and for worse,  a tormenting  option.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            February 20, 2018