“Black student organizations have to be that transmission belt between the Black community and the academy,” Thomas says. “We’ve got a crisis, a Black youth crisis in these communities, so those Black students that can make it to colleges and universities have to reach back and do some modeling and some community service work and make sure these kids are in the pipeline and they are on the transmission belt.”
BSUs should not rigidly model themselves after the original BSUs, Garrett says. They should instead build on them.
“They should develop a worldview about what education should be in the 21st century for young Blacks and then move to organize around that,” Garrett says. “And that may serve to eclipse Black student unions just like Negro student associations were eclipsed. And that’s okay. But it ought to be eclipsed in a progressive sense around a progressive program of action.”
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