‘Fifty Educated African Americans’ (or, Why Black Enterprise?)

The following was forwarded to me by a friend. I’ve shared it with others, including many of the people I am honored to mentor, and today I was inspired by one of my mentors to post it again. It is attributed to David Evans, a beloved African American senior admissions officer at Harvard. Evans was among the higher education professionals who contributed their expertise to the article “Cracking the College Admissions Code” in the September 2008 issue of Black Enterprise magazine.

Evans’ missive is the first thing I’ve ever read that puts into perspective what we have to gain by encouraging, supporting and mentoring each other–and what is at stake if we choose not to. It seems also particularly poignant in light of Barack Obama’s historic position as our President-elect, and our excited anticipation of his official inauguration as the 44th President of the United States on January 20, 2009. It is in the spirit of the Black Enterprise mission that I am sharing it with you, and I encourage you to share it with others. Let it be a reminder to us that, no matter what level we are on, we must never forget our obligation to lift as we climb.

50 EDUCATED AFRICAN AMERICANS
From David L. Evans, Harvard University

For the sake of historical perspective, I have occasionally shared some inspirational tidbits with African American undergraduates at Harvard and other persons (as yourself) whom I consider sensitive to same. The following tidbits are my reflections on a speech by a visitor to my school in rural Arkansas when I was in seventh or eighth grade.

Our visitor revealed some statistics about Black History that were awe-inspiring and quite relevant to the rôle of educated African Americans today. He revealed to us that there were probably no more than fifty African Americans with college degrees in the United States when the Civil War ended. Moreover, there were almost five million newly-freed slaves who were, for all practical purposes, illiterate. Notwithstanding these overwhelming odds, this handful of educated men and women (and their descendants) worked a miracle over the seventy years following the War and “saved a race.” Frankly, they “saved a nation” because the United States could not have withstood the economic and political burden of more than 4,000,000 nomadic, unskilled black refugees.

With the help of Northern missionaries, sympathetic Southern whites and philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Julius Rosenwald, they founded more than 200 historically black colleges and thousands of schools during that period. This was accomplished in the face of

monstrous brutality including widespread lynching. I’ve read that between 1890 and 1910 upwards of 4200 blacks were lynched. That computes to a black lynching every forty-one hours for twenty years!

Our visitor reminded us that those fifty or so educated men and women could have remained in the North or migrated to Canada or Europe and enjoyed relatively comfortable lives. They chose

instead to look into their conscience, their religion, and into the future. They knew that without skills and organization, all that the ancestors had endured would have been for naught and chattel slavery would have been replaced with economic and political slavery.

He ended his talk with the daunting question raised in Genesis 4:9, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” He said that those few educated Black men and women in the 19th Century nobly answered that question and he urged all of us to contemplate it every day of our lives.

That visitor’s speech resonates today with even greater urgency especially among the statistics about black males and it suggests that: We must either keep our brother or he will assuredly keep us. He will keep us in debt, e.g., state correctional system budgets run into billions of dollars with California topping them all at $10,000,000,000! He will keep us in fear (many homes in our communities look like jails, with their locks and bars). He has already driven too many Americans to believe that we can imprison our way out of the problem even if it renders African Americans an ethnic group without functional males between fifteen and forty. Lest we think this is a problem afflicting only the black “underclass,” we need only observe the growing male/female imbalance in college, graduate and professional schools.
Could this portend a single-gendered black middle class in our future?

The following quotation that I first heard many years ago in Sunday School almost leaps out at me:

“As I approached the mountain I thought I perceived a monster, but as I came closer I saw that it was not a monster but a man, and as I came even closer, I saw that he was my brother.”

“I sought my friend and my friend forsook me.

I sought my God and my God eluded me.

I sought my brother and found all three!”

Best regards,

David

David L. Evans is a native of Phillips County, Ark., and holds degrees in electrical engineering from Tennessee State University and Princeton. Before coming to Harvard he worked in Huntsville, Ala., on the Saturn/Apollo Project that landed a man on the moon in 1969. While in

Huntsville he began a voluntary, one-man college recruiting and placement effort for African-American youth, who were admitted to many of the nation’s top colleges. His work was covered by the news media, and he was offered jobs by the College Entrance Examination Board, Harvard College, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was most impressed by Harvard College and its dean of admissions, Chase N. Peterson ’52, and came to work in the Admissions Office in 1970 on a two-year leave-of-absence from engineering.

During his time in Cambridge, over 15 times more African American undergraduates have matriculated at Harvard than in the previous 334 years. He has been a proctor in Harvard Yard, an adviser to first-year students, an assistant dean of freshmen and, he likes to think, a friendly responder to anyone seeking help. He has also been an adviser to the Harvard Foundation since its inception in 1981, and in 2002 received the highest honor that Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences confers on an administrator, the FAS Administrative Prize. At the Black Alumni Weekend in October 2003 some generous alumnae and alumni announced the establishment of the David L. Evans Scholarship Fund.

Alfred A. Edmond Jr. is the editor in chief at BlackEnterprise.com