Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 26, 1993 TAG: 9307260028
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: INDIANAPOLIS LENGTH: Medium
Inside her church, the pastor, the music, the congregation and the worship style are black. Inside, she doesn't have to keep her guard up. Inside, she can study black history and speak candidly about the indignities she faces simply because she is black.
"I can be myself," she says. "Sometimes when I have problems, the pastor tells me how to deal with these things without even knowing me. . . . You gain confidence. You're not going to be torn down and you can deal with the racism you have to face."
Separate by choice. Not anti-white, just pro-black. Three decades after the bloody civil rights battles for equality and against Jim Crow, the legal barriers may be down, but psychological ones remain and many blacks in America have concluded integration is not the answer.
"Black people knocked on the doors of the churches, of the private clubs, of schools where they were told they were not wanted," said Ernest Newborn, interim pastor at Faith United Christian Church, Davis' parish. "By the time the doors were opened, many of them had lost interest in going through.
"I don't think lots of blacks are interested in integration just for the sake of integration," he added. "They're interested in opportunity - equal opportunity."
Faith United has an unusual arrangement: It shares a building and staff with University Park Christian Church, a white congregation. Two ministers - one black, one white - perform separate Sunday services.
"It's a sign of the world invading the church with its agenda," said the Rev. Leon Riley of University Park.
Newborn said blacks "want to have something of their own. They find a certain identity here."
That mood is being echoed across the nation as blacks choose to live, attend school and socialize with other blacks, sometimes even in separate proms or reunions.
Prince Georges County in Maryland is among several flourishing middle-class black suburbs. Detroit, Chicago and Baltimore and other cities have Afro-centric schools, emphasizing African themes. And campuses such as Howard University in Washington, D.C., attract black students who have rejected integrated lifestyles.
For decades, blacks had their own clubs and fraternities out of necessity. But what's different now is that blacks are losing faith that whites will support or accept them on their own terms, said Elijah Anderson, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
"It's the acknowledgment that we live in two separate societies and that there is something to be gained by something being separate," Anderson said.
"Some black people are giving up on the American dream of inclusion and assimilation," he said. "A central assumption is that racism is a permanent feature of American society, and one way to deal with it is to avoid it."
Self-help and self-pride also help shape the philosophy of Afro-centric education.
Many black educators complain that textbooks long have ignored black accomplishments, writing about little but slavery and Martin Luther King Jr.
"When I was growing up, I didn't know anything about African-Americans except slavery," said Addie Johnson, principal at Coleman Elementary School in Baltimore. "When I really got to mingle with white people, I just felt inferior."
Juan Simpson, a comptroller who volunteers as part of a mentoring program for young black males at a New Brunswick, N.J., public school, recognizes the benefits of an Afro-centric education, but he doesn't subscribe to isolating children by race.
"When we start separating ourselves educationally and socially all the time, we never learn about each other and we don't tolerate each other," he said.
Anderson agrees.
"So many of these inner cities are suffering from social isolation," he said. "People grow up ignorant of the whiter culture and institutions by being kept apart."
Some college students say, however, that a predominantly black environment better prepares them.
Tara Winder, who will be a senior this fall at Howard University, recalls how her second-grade teacher in Baton Rouge, La., taught members of her class that they lost the Civil War.
"I went home crying," she said. "My mother said, `You're black. You didn't lose anything. If anything, you gained one step.' "
Her school years, Winder said, were marred by racial conflict. "I was trying to deal with the question, `Should I be ashamed of who I am? Am I doing something wrong?' "
She said her uncle worried about her attending Howard, saying, "You're going to walk out ready to kill any white people you see."
"It's not like that," she declares. "You get armed with this education and knowledge. You're proud of who you are."
by CNB