Sublime

Look anywhere where there is a preponderance of Black achievement, and graduates of Morehouse and Spelman are disproportionately represented in that number. Unsurprisingly, those campuses that produce the Black leadership class in this country are also sites of the growing pains of Black America, places where sexuality, gender, and class are played

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.