This is excerpted from an open letter sent by Alvin Chambliss Jr., Esquire, of Texas Southern University, to Dr. Elias Blake Jr., executive director, Benjamin E. Mays Institute, concerning historically Black colleges and universities.

Chambliss is the lead attorney in Ayers v. Fordice, a twenty-year old case which argues that the state of Mississippi has an affirmative obligation to eradicate all traces of segregation in its public higher education system. Blake is a consultant to the plaintiffs in the same case.,

NAFEO is the membership organization of all historically and predominantly Black colleges and universities.

Dear Dr. Blake:

After talking to you for a long period of time about the critical situation public Black colleges find themselves in, I am compelled to write you an open letter that can and should be shared with the world.

I will not mince words because to do so, I would be betraying the trust of our young college students who I represent. Moreover, the situation is critical and we have very few people who are willing to put anything on the line. You and I have caught hell from our families who allowed us to work in the struggle for free while Ph.D. personnel walked around worrying not about their next meal, but rather, rank and tenure, salaries and foreign travel. Good people like Dr. Arthur E. Thomas, formerly of Central State, are chewed up and kicked to the curb while NAFEO (the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education) and its leadership looks on. I am not sure whether anything positive can be done ... but we must study this situation so that it cannot be replicated elsewhere. Colleges and universities must operate in the interest of students -- or, stated another way, without students they would cease to exist.

During April, 1992, the Mississippi congressional delegation asked, what do you people want?

As you know, the issue of public vs. private Black colleges caused many members on Capitol Hill to question whether we really knew what we wanted.