Afro-American Club

Last Monday night the Harvard Council for Undergraduate Affairs recommended to the Faculty Committee on Student Activities that the University should not recognize the proposed African and Afro-American Association. The reason the HCUA gave was the "discriminatory membership clause" in the constitution presented: "Membership of the Association shall be open to African and Afro-American students currently enrolled at Harvard and Radcliffe."

The Faculty Committee on Student Activities must now decide whether, in fact, this membership clause is discriminatory; and, if so, whether Harvard should extend recognition to the organization. There is little question that the Association will continue to exist regardless of University recognition.

The leaders of the Association have emphasized that he membership clause stipulates a "peculiar relation" to a geographical region, Africa. They define Africans as those peoples who did not come to Africa through invasions, including some Semitic peoples, but mostly members of the Negro race. The leaders of the Association say that a European whose ancestors invaded is still not African because his life in Africa is a result of their violence; they thus exclude Afrikaaners, who consider themselves Europeans.

Spokesmen of the Association have defined Afro-American to include Afro-Cubans, Afro-Mexicans, and Afro-Indians; they thus claim that no racial discrimination exists since Afro-Americans are often racially mixed. In actuality, this definition means that practically no American of any country can claim African heritage without at the same time claiming to be at least part Negro. An American without Negro ancestry can join the club, according to its spokesmen, only by taking up citizenship in a "free" African state; this, like all the definitions above, is clearly a criterion for membership which discriminates on the basis of racial background.

If the Faculty Committee on Student Activities does indeed find that the membership clause, as interpreted by the leaders of the Association, is racially discriminatory, the Committee will still have to decide whether to grant or withhold University recognition. Recognition implies the right to use the Harvard name and to use Harvard facilities for public meetings.

The University has a tradition of not recognizing undergraduate organizations whose constitutions discriminate against minorities. That unwritten rule exists because the University learned that the social aims of clubs which required discriminatory clauses were uniformly pernicious. The University very likely would not recognize a Harvard Anti-Semitic League or a Harvard Segregation Club, even if these groups did not materially harm other undergraduates. On the same grounds, the University can afford to tolerate the real discrimination of the final clubs: the clubs are intellectually vacuous and socially innocuous. Thus the Faculty committee will be justified in applying the University's tradition against discrimination only if it is convinced that the social effects of the proposed Association will be injurious and undesirable.

Apparently the Association's primary purpose is to form an intellectual community to discuss an important problem and to express an important point of view. Negroes in America are in a unique position. They must draw upon history and their perception of the present to determine whether they can in fact become an equal part of the American plurality, or whether they must turn their allegiance towards Africa. Americans, with or without African background, have not found it easy to articulate or accept this conception of the question, but it is a question which must be examined by Negro intellectuals, and on their own terms. By publishing a magazine and issuing policy statements, the proposed Association could help provide leadership in a debate that affects civil rights in this country and nationalism in Africa.

The students in the Association feel the need to debate alone. Their racial discrimination is apparently incidental and subordinate to creating a homogeneous intellectual community. Few, if any, Harvard students without Negro ancestors qualify to participate in this debate by virtue of their experiences or of their conception of Africans' and American Negroes' problems.

The Faculty Committee on Student Activities should ignore the recommendation of the HCUA and grant University recognition to the Association.