In January 1966, Younge, a Navy veteran, was murdered by a white man for trying to use a segregated gas-station restroom. Citing the murder, SNCC became the first civil-rights organization to openly oppose the Vietnam War. Both the student activist and Vietnamese civilians, the organization wrote, were killed for “seeking to secure the rights guaranteed them by law.” Later that year — and against the counsel of their elders — Tuskegee students successfully campaigned to elect the first Black sheriff in the South since Reconstruction: Lucius Amerson, who would go on to win four re-election campaigns. Thus, when Kwame Ture (né Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton published the Black Power movement’s definitive text, it was no surprise that they devoted an entire chapter to Tuskegee’s prospects as a model. “Tuskegee, Alabama, could be the model of Black Power,” Carmichael and Hamilton wrote in 1967. “It could be the place where black people have amassed political power and used that power effectively.”
This was the context in which a Tuskegee student, Ernest Stephens, theorized the Black University concept in 1967 in Freedomways, the influential journal of Black arts, politics, and ideas. The problem with Black colleges, Stephens argued, was that they “programmed” students “in white supremacy and self-hatred,” with “little or no emphasis” on a “realistic analysis of the Negro’s plight.” Black colleges suffer, he argued, from the fact that they are controlled by white-dominated boards of trustees. (At the time, only five of Tuskegee’s 23 trustees were Black.) “If the tone of education at Negro universities strays too far from white sanction,” he wrote, “the university will suffer financial loss.”
Stephens proposed an alternative model, an education that would help students to grapple with the realities of Black life. The Black university, he wrote, should “speak to the needs of the nation by speaking first to the needs of its oppressed black population.” His essay pushed readers to rethink the overall philosophy and purpose of higher education, and emphasized revising the curriculum to include 350 years of oppression. As he put it, there could be “no realistic solutions to black oppression until the problems are clearly understood.” Stephens believed that trustees, administrators, and faculty members were unlikely to push through such a radical reinvention of higher education. The work would fall to students.