Black Academia Increases Its Ranks

The 400 people who signed up for the National Black Graduate Student Assn.’s conference, which continues today at Claremont Graduate School, more than doubled the organization’s membership.

Its small size relative to other student groups reflects a simple and troubling truth: Fewer than 6% of the country’s graduate school students are black--about 94,000 in all--even though blacks represent more than 12% of the total U.S. population.

Concern about that truth underlies everything the organization does, from its choice of speakers for the five-day conference to its selection of the location.

“We need to help our young people understand that hard work is required for success,” said John Brooks Slaughter, the president of Occidental College and Friday’s keynote speaker. “We need to understand that society is changing and what was good enough yesterday is not good enough today.”

Amid such heightened concern about increasing opportunity for blacks, was it a contradiction to hold the group’s eighth annual meeting in California, which is experiencing a double-barreled attack on affirmative action--first by the University of California regents, then by a measure on the November ballot?

Conference organizers said their presence was intended as a political statement.

“There was concern about coming to California, but we were persuaded we would make a more positive statement by coming than by boycotting,” said Phyllis Gray, executive director of the group and a criminology professor at Mississippi State University. “We wanted to prove we are a force to be reckoned with . . . and that we are concerned about the future of minority scholars.”

The conference includes discussion groups on affirmative action and nurturing black intellectuals. It will feature speeches today by former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, co-chairman of the Atlanta Olympic Games, and O.J. Simpson attorney Carl Douglas, presentations of scientific research and a tour of black Los Angeles.

The conference theme is bridging the gap between academia and the African American community, a gap that participants said has turned many of their minority peers away from higher education and left them feeling isolated.

Merging academia and the African American community can mean very different things, conference participants said.

For Danny D. Howard, who next month will become the first African American to receive a doctorate in aeronautics from Caltech, it means humanizing the hard sciences. Educated in segregated schools in Mississippi, Howard has worked to recruit minority students to Caltech and to improve their reception once they get there.

“I’m very strongly grounded in my identity, so I don’t feel intimidated in any other environments,” Howard said. “But that’s not the case for everybody.”

It took a different turn for conference coordinator V. Nenaji Jackson, a Claremont Graduate School doctoral candidate in political science. Jackson’s research has focused on relationships between public policies and minority communities in the proposed Los Angeles-to-Long Beach freight rail line known as the Alameda Corridor.

“I always say that my education is dedicated to the African American community,” Jackson said. “If I can’t help my community, this is all worthless.”

For Aaron Harrison, however, the gap seems less apparent, and more challenging. Harrison was raised in a middle-class household in Santa Ana and heads off to Yale Law School next fall.

“I didn’t come from the community most people are talking about when they say ‘giving back.’ In Southern California, that’s usually South-Central” Los Angeles, Harrison said. “I have the naive sensibility that I want to help the African American community in areas where they are not well off . . . but I don’t know what that means yet.”

Harrison reflects the organization’s attempt to reach out to African American undergraduate students because, director Gray said, “they are the future graduate students.”

In the conference’s recruitment rooms, Patricia Melton searched for graduate students willing to teach at East Coast college prep schools. The schools have made gains in recruiting minority students, she said, but now their parents are pushing for a similarly diverse faculty to provide academic role models.

“Now these schools have parents saying, ‘We have no teachers of color. That is not acceptable,’ ” she said. “And it’s really not.”