Sublime

The fact is, “exceptional Negroes” have always been a staple of an apartheid-like educational system that separates the “gifted” from the “normal,” and both from the “naughty” or “underachieving.” Sticks and stones will only break my bones, but words can lift or crush me.

The Princeton and Slavery Project, replete with documents, plays, and paintings, was an answer of sorts. It told the university’s sordid history, in part. There are now historical markers on campus and special tours. But the full consequences of the slave past haven’t yet been unearthed. They reached far beyond 1865. In the ’50s, James Baldwin felt

Storer—which, according to the exhibition signage, was one of three historically Black colleges in West Virginia—was closed after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. Its Blackness violated the prohibition of segregation. The other two are still open today, but have tiny numbers of Black students in attendance.

The rise of Black educational spaces, including church schools and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), aimed to counter local resistance to Black education.

the papers of the Southern Conference Education Fund, is my mother talking in 1974 about the indigenous prison struggle, meaning Black Southerners recognizing that locking people up was a tool of social control.

Princeton University’s first graduate student, future president James Madison, brought one slave with him to campus and another to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The latter he had to free: all that talk of liberty had ruined him, a poison to the rest of the plantation. He took the former home with him.

While in Denmark, Horton had been inspired by the model of the folk school, a place where rural workers learned skills but also developed social and political perspectives out of their collective experiences. Highlander was built on that example, an educational site for ordinary people.