Description
In this April 1973 column from The St. Louis American, Bayard Rustin reviews the transforming changes in American higher education and highlights serious mistakes being made in the name of minority progress. Drawing heavily on a book by Black economics professor Thomas Sowell titled Black Education: Myths and Tragedies, Rustin challenges elite colleges for changing how they define "middle-class" Black students. He notes that instead of looking at actual family income, school administrators label students as middle-class simply because they show positive, traditional traits like hard work, perseverance, and a desire to be judged as individuals. This twisted definition means that an applicant whose parents work as laborers can be locked out of financial aid even if their family income is near the poverty line.
The column details how universities reject qualified, hard-working students because they are looking specifically for "authentic ghetto types" based on radical political outlooks and a sense of alienation rather than high high school grades or test scores. Rustin explains that this practice leaves gifted Black students facing severe psychological anguish from being passed over, while pushing average students into alien campus environments where they face intense pressure and receive very little education. This isolation inevitably causes students to reject mainstream campus life and demand separate dormitories, eating halls, and organizations. Rustin warns that when these educational experiments fail, it reinforces harmful racial stereotypes that minorities cannot learn as easily as the rest of society. He concludes by quoting Sowell, stating that real education requires seeing students as important in and of themselves—not as clay to be molded or tools for political causes.
Historical Context
By the spring of 1973, American higher education was dealing with the intense fallout of the late-1960s campus rebellions, such as the armed student takeover at Cornell University in 1969. In response to these massive protests, elite universities rushed to set up early affirmative action programs and Black Studies departments, largely to satisfy federal civil rights quotas and prevent further campus unrest. However, this rush created a unique style of bureaucratic gatekeeping exposed by Black economics professor Thomas Sowell in his groundbreaking 1972 book, Black Education: Myths and Tragedies. Instead of selecting high-achieving students from working-class Black families, wealthy white admissions officers began targeting more radical, angry candidates who fit a pre-made "ghetto profile," mistakenly believing these students represented the only "authentic" minority experience.
This administrative trend created a massive conflict within the American left over the future of integration and academic excellence. Civil rights veterans like Rustin, working through the A. Philip Randolph Institute, viewed this practice as a dangerous form of white guilt and paternalism that actively harmed minority progress. Rustin saw that wealthy universities were using these separate, poorly funded tracks as cheap, symbolic tokens to look progressive, while completely ignoring the hard, expensive work of fixing segregated public primary schools. By analyzing this document, we can see how the fight over university admissions shifted away from basic legal access and became a central battleground over identity politics, highlighting Rustin’s constant warning that true liberation required mastering universal standards to win actual economic power in the competitive job market.
Rustin, Bayard. "Bayard Rustin Tells It Like It Is: The Myths of Black Education." The St. Louis American, April 12, 1973, p. 8.
