Academic Strangers: Introducing My Historically Black, and White, Colleges

Article Archive Import Issue 109

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Academic Strangers: Introducing My Historically Black, and White, Colleges
By Chris Caldwell

Consider this conundrum:

Most Americans want racial reconciliation.
Strangers cannot be reconciled, for one can’t restore a nonexistent relationship.
African Americans and whites in the United State are largely strangers.

As a step toward bridging our divide and opening up paths to reconciliation, I want to introduce two colleges to each other and to you. One, where I teach, is a Historically Black College, Simmons College of Kentucky. The other, where I graduated, is what I call a Historically White College, Rhodes College in Memphis. Both are friend to me but strangers to each other. If the colleges were in the same city, the chances of any two of their students knowing each other would be low, and the chances of a Rhodes and Simmons student being friends would be abysmal, even though I know the individuals in my colleges would like to know each other better.

What stands between them? We often speak of the racial “divide” or “chasm,” but these images fall short. My schools and others like them are not set apart on some level plane, as, say, Republicans and Democrats are in Washington. Neither is there a chasm between them as might exist between feuding families. No, what separates my two colleges is a cliff. Rhodes sits at the top, with a three hundred million dollar endowment and annual tuition of $46,500. Simmons sits at the bottom, with no endowment to speak of and annual tuition of $5,300.

The cliff between my colleges is just one of many we fail to notice every day. Cliffs separate predominantly black and predominantly white neighborhoods, high schools, businesses, churches, and more.The cliff separating my two colleges is as sure as the cliff between the lawyer who gets his morning coffee at McDonalds and the woman who serves it to him. They may smile at each other, may even know each other’s names if he’s a regular, but make no mistake, they are strangers living at drastically different socioeconomic elevations. My colleges are strangers just as whites like me and African-Americans overwhelmingly are strangers. The cliffs between us are built partly of racial animosity, but primarily they arise from prejudiced structures and the sorts of class divisions laid out by Richard Reeves in The Dream Hoarders and by Richard Rothstein in The Color of Law. In short, we white and black folks seldom really know each other. We may have contact, perhaps even work in the same business, but typically this is what the great Howard Thurman called “contact without fellowship.” We live in the same country but do not know each other’s worlds.

And so, white America, meet Simmons College of Kentucky, a Historic Black College (HBCU), which the Higher Education Act of 1965 defines as any pre-1964 black college or university, “whose principal mission was, and is, the education of black Americans.” Most HBCUs, including Simmons, were established during the educational renaissance among African Americans after slavery ended, when the literacy rate among African Americans skyrocketed and African American schools and colleges were rapidly being birthed. Simmons was founded in 1879 by former slaves, along with a few white allies, and blacks who had not been enslaved. The buildings where I teach were built in part by former slaves.

For its first half century, Simmons College offered a broad liberal arts and sciences curriculum. In 1931, financial pressures brought it under the control of The University of Louisville (U of L), and it became Louisville Municipal College, the black college associated with the then segregated U of L. When U of L integrated in 1951, Charles Parrish, the star professor of Municipal College, was offered a position on the faculty, thus making U of L the first university in the South to integrate. This step forward for U of L was a disaster for Simmons, because the remainder of the Municipal College faculty and staff lost their jobs. Furthermore, Municipal College was forced to become Simmons Bible College and was permitted to offer only degrees in religion, so as not to compete with U of L for students. For the next half-century the school limped along, ultimately finding itself an unlicensed and unaccredited school with a student body of about 50. Since 2005, under the leadership of President Kevin W. Cosby, Simmons has returned to its liberal arts roots, is now licensed, accredited, and for the first time has federal HBCU recognition. The present student body of around 200 is tiny, but it is a far cry from the even tinier school of 15 years ago, and we proudly reside once again on the original Simmons campus.

The theme of the Simmons College story is the theme of the African Americans it serves–survival under oppression. Started with no capital by people who were denied capital, staffed by educators whose parents were denied education, forced to move, forced to change its name and its mission, its faculty decimated: Yet the school soldiers on. Every school and every person has to overcome obstacles, true. But the overcoming of fundamental, life-threatening, and enduring obstacles is uniquely the story of African Americans and their schools.

Now let’s take a look at the story of Rhodes College. Founded by The Masons during slavery in 1845 in Clarksville, Tennessee, the school later came under the control of the Presbyterian Church and relocated to Memphis, where it existed as Southwestern at Memphis until changing its name to Rhodes in 1984 (my sophomore year). As I look at my alma mater’s story through the lens of Simmons, three things stand out: Masons, Presbyterians, and Memphis. These three words indicate the white privilege that has been the wind at Rhodes’ back from the beginning. I know “white privilege” is a loaded term, synonymous with evil and guilt in the minds of some. But I see it simply as a fact, a reality of one’s story. And this next part is vital: If white and black folks are to move beyond “contact without fellowship” we whites must acknowledge the wind that has been at our backs. The winds in the face of the Simmons ship have already been made clear, but consider the difference in the Rhodes story. Where would Simmons be today if, instead of being founded by former slaves, it started with the weight of the Masons and then the Presbyterians behind it? And consider the Memphis cotton money, money inextricably tied to the slavery that made it possible. Rhodes is an “Old Money” school, and for much of its history, “Old Money” and “slave economy,” then “Old Money” and Jim Crow, were inseparable. Where would Simmons be today if its donors down the years had been the beneficiaries of these systems rather than their victims?

But to paint Rhodes as villain would be too simplistic. Did I see elements of racism at Rhodes in the 1980’s? Yes, but only at the edge of things. At the heart of Rhodes then and now is a progressive spirit. By today’s standards my curriculum at Rhodes absolutely underrepresented non-white voices, but Rhodes also challenged me to move beyond provincial Southern norms and fully supported me when I brought gay speakers to campus for a symposium on AIDS amid the early, panicky years of the epidemic. Furthermore, Rhodes now is consistently recognized as a model of community involvement and engages the inner city neighborhoods surrounding it in meaningful ways. In short, I believe the cause of racial reconciliation is moved forward if a young person attends Rhodes.

Even so, consider how radically different the schools are. Here is some data on our students:

67% are first-generation students.
33% have parents who did not graduate from high school.
78% are living at or below the poverty line.
85% are eligible for Pell grants.
33% work full-time during the semester.

While I don’t yet have access to the same information for Rhodes, it’s not hard to imagine how different the numbers would be.

Different students necessitate different missions. Rhodes takes well prepared high school students and challenges them to think more deeply. One’s ideas are nurtured by the roots of history and philosophy, and one’s views are broadened and skills sharpened. This is education purely and wonderfully for education’s sake, but it must also be admitted that this sort of education arms students to go out into the dominant white culture and thrive. My fellow graduates went to fine law schools, med schools, and graduate programs. Others stepped into great professional opportunities.

Like Rhodes, Simmons takes bright women and men and sharpens their thinking and skills. But unlike Rhodes, our students rarely step into college ready to tackle Camus or Erasmus. Many of our students were passed grade to grade by schools that had given up on them. They were not seen as “college material,” and expectations were dumbed down accordingly. Our mission is to first get them to college level, then move forward from there. A colleague once said, “HBCUs are easy to get into and hard to get out of.” That’s true at Simmons, where our attrition rate is high. If you measure us by the demands of our 100 level courses, you might see us as one of the least challenging schools in the state, but if you look at the academic distance our students travel in four years, and measure from point A to point B, I would maintain we may the the most challenging school in Kentucky.

Some of our star students will go on to do Master’s level work or take professional jobs. More typically we are giving our students a shot at moving from poverty to the middle class. A Rhodes grad who ends up with a middle class job working for the city is, in some ways, a mission failure; for us it is mission success.

One other thing is different about my two schools. Only rarely did anyone talk to me about my whiteness at Rhodes. Why would they? Those of us who are white–or as Baldwin puts it, “who think we are white”–have no reason to consider our whiteness any more than a fish has to consider water. But at Simmons we equip our students with what our college president calls “ethnic armor” to go out into a world that is often hostile. We pass along two traditions here: the intellectual tradition of the dominant white culture, but also the robust intellectual tradition of African Americans, for Du Bois's “double consciousness” is no less a requirement today than it was in 1903.

There is much more to tell, and I hope to do so in a book that will include personal interviews and a deeper dive into the stories of my two colleges. For now I offer these thoughts as an ice breaker between two honorable schools that represent parts of our society who cannot honor each other because they do not know each other. But let’s keep it real. Rhodes is honored in this country, just as all things are honored when they have power and prestige. Simmons, on the other hand, gets little respect. A retired university professor was discussing with me my new position at Simmons. (I joined the full-time faculty in 2017 after teaching at Simmons part-time while I was a pastor.) He asked me my age, and then declared, “You know, you’re still young enough to get a job at a real college.” We are a faith based college, but at Simmons most would say a man like that–to put it generously–is full of it. Such candor may seem antithetical to friendship. In fact, it is friendship’s prerequisite.

Chris Caldwell is Chair of the Sociology Department at Simmons College of Kentucky, an historic black college.