Miles From Harvard: The Black College

WHEN JOHN U. MONRO '34, dean of the College from 1958-1967, resigned his post to take a teaching position at an all-black, unaccredited college in Alabama, national magazines were flooded with praise for Monro's "noble sacrifice." The stories used all the current catch-phrases--a Harvard dean, southern blacks and Birmingham, Alabama--but omitted the issues which attracted Monro to Miles College.

With national policies and Supreme Court decisions heralding an "age of desegregation," many American educators in 1967 were convinced that the days of the black college were numbered. Few of them really cared about Monro's interests in the set of problems and objectives which Miles embodied as a black college. The news of the day was that "John Monro from Harvard" had gone there.

Monro never really saw it that way. He left Harvard to attack a fundamental national problem: "This country does a poor job for people who are disadvantaged at the start. The environment shapes them and they don't fulfill themselves. Why does a capable young man like George Jackson end up in prison? Society thwarted the whole operation for him." Last month in Birmingham, Monro said openly, "I was in a corner at Harvard. The school does pretty well with its scholarships, but it's a long way from where the main struggle is going on--it's going on here."

MILES COLLEGE, founded in 1900 as a grammar school for the children of the workers and farmers in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, is the only four-year college within 50 miles of Birmingham that admitted blacks before 1967. Now an open-door, recently-accredited college for black Alabama high school graduates, it educates most of Birmingham's black teachers and civic leaders. All of its top level administrators and all but 30 of its teaching staff are black. One of 90 private black colleges still operating in the United States, Miles has no endowment, but survives entirely on foundation grants, Federal government aid, and contributions from private citizens.

For the last ten years, the Miles faculty has carried out an active, organizational commitment to Birmingham's black community. Richard Arrington, a Miles graduate, one-time dean and now one of two blacks on the Birmingham City Council, calls the Miles experience "an awakening to community responsibility" as well as an education. "The college has always called for responsible student involvement in the community," Arrington said, "and students talk to me often about returning to Birmingham and the importance of organization." In the early sixties, Miles students organized a newsmaking boycott that forced downtown businesses to integrate their facilities for the first time. When other Birmingham organizations shied away from "politically tainted" Federal programs, the college secured grants to pioneer Alabama's first voter education projects, VISTA, Head Start centers and the Manpower training project.

It was this spirit of commitment to the black community that attracted Monro to Miles when he first visited the college in 1963. His visit coincided with the now-notorious Birmingham "riots"--when black demonstrators, calling peacefully for integration met with police dogs and fire hoses.

The riots had a lasting effect on Monro, and he still speaks of 1963 as a critical lesson for himself and for the Birmingham black community. "Everyone knows how brutal this society is. If you're in any kind of a minority, the name of the game is organization. The way to get there was obvious in 1962 and 1963. Martin Luther King mobilized Birmingham's blacks and they stopped this city the way that UAW stopped auto production. And they can do it again. That's how you get respect in this society."

Miles is becoming an institutional power base for Birmingham blacks, Monro says. "The black community has pitifully few formal arrangements to confront the strong, well-organized white society around it. The black college is far more than just a college, it represents a position of strength and concern."

Monro returned to Miles the summer after the riots to work with a faculty committee on the freshman program that has occupied every day of his last five and one-half years. "By the end of that summer, I knew there was something very special going on here, and I knew I would have to get closer to really do anything about it," Monro said. "Then they asked me, 'Will you throw in with us?' and that was the decision. We all understood that it was going to be slow."

THE DOUBLE COMMITMENT of the Miles faculty to education and organization for social change grows out of the double set of problems which Miles faces as a black college. Education at Miles confronts fundamental problems of race and social structure. Seventyfive per cent of Miles' 1200 students receive Federal poverty assistance, and the average Miles freshman--like his counterpart in most black colleges--has only ninth-grade level reading skills. "They can't dig up the money or the SAT scores to draw attention to themselves," Monro says, "and for a place like Harvard, they're totally out of reach." Furthermore, most Miles freshmen have spent 18 years in the black neighborhoods of Birmingham; their contact with the white community is highly circumscribed. "The problem of living in the black community and coping with the white community is what they have to come to terms with," says Monro. "Send them to a place like Harvard, and powerful white society will take its toll. Here the tone is supportive."

Monro sees Miles as a theater where Birmingham blacks can forge the skills and self-consciousness which 12 years in the Birmingham schools and black neighborhoods have stifled. "The question is," Monro says, "'Can you--in a year or two--repair what has happened after 12 years in a poorly funded, inefficient school system?' The answer is 'yes.' You can. You can do a helluva lot."

As director of Freshman Studies, Monro is at the forefront of Miles' two-pronged educational task. "The freshman year is where these kids hit the college. If we can make it supportive and informative, the problem is half solved." Over five years ago, Monro began to develop a core Freshman curriculum, based entirely on his daily contacts as an English teacher. "You learn something by the contact with students and that's the only way to improve," he says. "The curriculum has to account for the black student's interest--where he comes from." The contacts forced Monro to redefine his traditional theories of teaching and success. Good teaching became a readiness to scrap traditional ideas in favor of classroom gold--the approach that works." And success became any evidence of improvement-- "I work with the individual and I only want him to move up from where he starts." Monro points out that by the time Miles students graduate, their academic performances have no correlation to their scores in high school on standardized tests.

When his students' basic reading and writing deficiencies became apparent, Monro scrapped traditional ideas and defined several fundamental skills needed for college level work-- "I want them to think critically; to distinguish between the idea and the supporting detail." For example, he tested his students' vocabulary skills on those words used most frequently in the English language. Almost all the students lacked vocabulary control at the frequency group containing "a word like 'anxiety.' Now how can you deal with the idea, which is so central to the black experience, if you don't know the word?" Monro began immediately with a ten-word per day vocabulary program before moving into more advanced material.

Beyond that point in the freshman program, education becomes "a double transmission of skill and awareness," and the tone of Miles College becomes part of the classroom experience. The "classroom gold" which Monro has uncovered is a reading list of black authors--Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Booker T. Washington and others. "Forget all these ideas that Hamlet is culturally useful," Monro says. "The students need to digest and think about these men and hammer out their feelings in discussions with their peers. Every young black person has awareness built into him. One thing the black college can do is shape this thing. Black literature and black history get right down to the fundamental problem of racism, how it has affected these people."

For the top freshmen in each class, Monro has instituted an honors curriculum. The college now secures funds to send two Miles honors freshmen to Harvard Summer School each year. The program has helped boost the number of Miles students attending graduate school from five or ten per year in the mid-sixties to over 30 this year. "If we move four or five graduates on each year, it won't take any time before they're piling back as teachers, deans and community leaders," Monro says. "In the life of the college, that's essential. What's more, Miles College feels this obligation."

Two years ago, Monro catalyzed a workstudy program in which Miles students take a term off from school to work as interns in Birmingham businesses, labs and professional careers. Coming from steel-workers' families of eight or ten children, most Miles students have no idea of professional life styles, Monro says. "This program opens up expectations; when they come back, college takes on a ring of reality." The program also required a massive restructuring of the curriculum schedule, so that students returning from a semester in the community could pick up the normal sequence of courses. Yet Monro scoffs at the organizational task: "When you've got a program that's as dead right as this one, you don't worry about it. The only way to do it is to start."

Monro says that attitudes and orientations of Miles students have changed markedly during his years at Miles. Along with the small shift toward higher education, students have changed their career objectives. Whereas most Miles graduates went into education five years ago, Monro says that they now see teaching as unrealistic and unnecessary. "Black teachers are obviously losing their jobs, but other opportunities are visible." A newly-organized business major has become one of the largest programs at the college along with science and social science.

The politics on campus have taken a corresponding shift, Monro says. He describes 1969 as a period of "pronounced nationalism and separatism." "It was a good time for the white teachers to shut up," Monro says. "We did, and it worked out." Now he sees an emphasis on skills and careers, as reflected in the shift to new academic interests.

The curriculum which Monro has developed, as well as the honors program and the work-study option, act as intellectual and practical circuits between Miles' students, the black community and the city of Birmingham. "Our job is to hook Miles into the power structure of Birmingham," he says. Monro's view of education coincides with the double commitment of the college which Arrington described, and accounts for the dual set of problems which Miles faces. Yet Monro consistently maintains a low profile--which perhaps is the reason he has been so effective. "A white man can work at a black college, provided that the black community runs it," Monro says. "There's no question about that here--the black community runs Miles. I only work for them." When the class discusses personal identification with black authors, Monro hangs back: "The likes of me isn't much help except to take attendance."

THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN society--as Monro sees it--is tightly linked to the future of Miles College and others like it. "From the vantage point of the white community, everyone thinks the great white father is going to take care of the black man and we know he isn't," Monro says. "One reason white America does not see the need for the black college is that we really do not comprehend the existence of the black community in this country and the depths of the problems our black community must solve."

The reaction at Miles to the deaths of two Southern Louisiana University students protesting "Uncle Tom-ism" in the SLU administration illustrates Monro's point. In contrast to most large universities, there was no organized expression of outrage at Miles "for the same reason that black studies is not one of our largest majors," Monro says. "Here the point was already made--by the mere fact that Miles exists. Here the black student is 100 per cent; he's it. There was sorrow, pain and concern, but there was no felt need to strike out--you were supported and you knew it."

Birmingham's white community has an even larger stake in Miles, according to Monro. "I profoundly believe the good black college will help us to move toward a day of sound cultural pluralism--not assimilation--by strengthening the black community's sense of itself and its needs and pride in its heritage and its muscle and ability to do things for itself. The problem is a white problem. In segregating our black people, our Indian people, our Chicano people, what we white Americans have really done is segregate ourselves."

Monro is encouraged by his work with The Friends of Miles College, a predominantly white group of Birmingham citizens who seek areas for cooperation between Miles and the Birmingham community. The Friends supplied the funds for the Miles freshmen who attended Harvard Summer School last year. "It's a statement of concern and it's constructive," Monro says. "With this de facto isolation between the two communities, it's important that well-intentioned white people show it--show that they're there when you need them."

As for the future of Miles, Monro is optimistic. He predicts that Miles will eventually integrate its student body "up to a critical mass of maybe 30 per cent--but this is at least ten years away." For now, he is working on an exchange program with predominantly white colleges--including Harvard--as "a way for the white youngster to work out this racism--this part of himself."

Monro plans to remain at Miles, and in his same Freshman Studies position. There, he faces a problem which the dean of Harvard College cannot attack--that of making education and society accessible to those who find themselves "out of reach."

"The main issue we'll have to keep confronting is respect--that's the start--when confidence isn't by skin color," Monro says. "Relating somehow to the sound black college offers one orderly, rational way to begin to tear down the barriers we have built around ourselves." Without Miles College and its educational and organizational objectives, the future of Birmingham's black community probably would differ little from its past. Monro and other educators believe that unless colleges like Miles have a future, respect for the black community will continue to be defined in terms of boycotts and demonstrations, rather than individual leaders and institutions.

"The black college is more than just a college. It represents a position of strength and concern."