The University of Kwazulu-Natal (UKZN) hosts the annual J.L. Dube Memorial Lecture, named after the first president of the African National Congress (ANC) and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, John Langalibalele Dube. This year’s lecture was delivered by Professor Chad Berry, Academic Vice President and Dean of the Faculty at Berea College, Kentucky, USA and titled ‘I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table: The Enduring Power and Promise of Education as a Public Good’ (reprinted below). Inspired by the metaphor of the welcome table, from a well-known spiritual during slavery and later an anthem of the U.S. civil rights movement, Berry questions the accessibility and affordability of “the welcome table” in schools in South Africa and the US. Berry argues that belonging, inclusion, and a decolonized curriculum are critical to deep learning. CIHA has covered this lecture for the past several years and you can find transcripts of past lectures here.
I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table’: The Enduring Power and Promise of Education as a Public Good
by Prof Chad Berry, Berea College – USA
Introduction
I have thought of South Africa as my second country since 1984, when I was an undergraduate and learned about apartheid. Then, as a Ph.D. student, I learned much more about the history of South Africa and especially the similarities with the United States. I went on to teach my first university course several times, calling it “Continental Drift: The History of Race and Racism in the U.S. and South Africa.” I have taken several groups of students and adults on study tours to southern Africa
My study of South Africa has taught me a great deal about how I must be as a human being for someone else to be free.
I have deepened my knowledge of John Dube and have grown in my esteem for him as part of preparing my remarks today. As I’ve learned more about John Dube and Nokutela Dube, I’ve continued to think especially about the connections between their lives, your lives, and mine.
Here, I would make two points. The first is that the past continues to be relevant in our lives today, helping us clarify our options in the present and the future. This is the great moral imperative of history. Let me share with you the words of Steven Ozment, an American historian. He wrote:
If there is a mistake worse than believing that the present and the past are the same, it is thinking they are completely different. There may be worlds of difference between yesterday and today, but the past is not a different world. We are continuous. The past draws us to itself and we learn from it precisely because we discover ourselves there under altered conditions.[1]
In this way, we are continuous with the vision and work of John Dube today. We must all carry that vision and work forward.
The second point is just how connected this world is. The late Robert F. Kennedy captured the similarities and connections between the U.S. and South Africa perfectly if not ironically in 1966 in his speech in Cape Town:
I came here because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage.
I refer, of course, to the United States of America.[2]
Again, the racial histories of our countries are connected and overlap.
Moreover, there are more connections. For example, Dube traveled to Oberlin College, the first institution in the U.S. opened to people of color, in 1835, and women, in 1837. Oberlin trained one of Dube’s most important mentors, William Wilcox.
My institution, Berea College, had deep connections to Oberlin—many of our nine presidents have had deep Oberlin connections. Berea was founded in 1855, in a state in which slavery was legal, and became the first institution in the South that was coeducational and interracial, based on the Oberlin model. And as one of eight institutions in the U.S. that require all students to work on campus, it has had deep connections to Tuskegee, the institution founded by Booker T. Washington, who was Dube’s inspiration.
In the book The First President, Heather Hughes has revealed more connections. For example, when John Dube went to Adams College in the 1880s, “He had probably never seen Durban before. The town was then a low-slung, leafy settlement, laid out in an orderly grid that stretched northwards from the harbor. The streets were wide and unpaved—there would be complaints about the sand for years to come—and there was some suburban development creeping up the Berea.”[3] So there is a Berea in Durban just as there is in Kentucky!
Finally, I have learned that the Phelps Stokes Family contributed funds to Ohlange, and on my own campus is a chapel funded by Olivia Phelps Stokes and built in part by our own students. It is indeed a small world full of similarity. Of course, I cannot prove it, but I believe that the founder or one of the presidents of my institution might well have crossed paths with Dube on a fundraising trip in New York or while Dube was studying in Oberlin.
The importance of music in social justice movements in both our countries is also a similarity, and for that reason, I’ve titled my lecture “‘I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table’: The Enduring Power and Promise of Education as a Public Good.” This song originated as a slave spiritual, sung to relieve the pain and drudgery of a life in bondage, reminding the singer of otherworldly rewards—that with struggle, persistence, and God’s help, an enslaved person would one day have a place at the table.
In the 1960s in the U.S., the song was revived to provide empowerment amid lynchings, fire hoses powerful enough to peel bark off trees but aimed at protesting youth, and seething hatred uttered from white mouths. Here is a version of the song sung by Hollis Watkins. (PLAY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4EeE6ccU40).
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days, Hallelujah
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days
One of these days
I’m gonna be a registered a voter
I’m gonna be a registered voter one of these days, Hallelujah
I’m gonna be a registered voter
I’m gonna be a registered voter one of these days
I’m gonna tell God on old Massy
I’m gonna tell God on old Massy one of these days, Hallelujah
I’m gonna tell God on old Massy
I’m gonna tell God on old Massy one of these days
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days, Hallelujah
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table
I’m gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days
One of these days
The song, like all enduring anthems, can easily be modified for the particular cause. Like: I’m gonna feast on milk and honey, or I’m gonna tell God how you treat me, or All God’s children gonna sit together, or, for the purposes of today’s talk, I’M GONNA GET AN EDUCATION. Or even better, I’M GONNA LEARN AT THE WELCOME TABLE.
‘The Welcome Table’ as a norm in Education policy
I want to call your attention to the timeless metaphor of the welcome table. Once, the welcome table was in the slave owner’s house. In South Africa, perhaps the welcome table was in the in the European homes dotting the Cape from earliest times or in the white home in the 1950s.[4] In the segregated American South, the welcome table was the drug store lunch counter in the 1960s. Today, the hungry person living in an informal settlement in South Africa or a homeless person living on the streets in the U.S. has a clear idea of what the welcome table is.
My point is that today, the welcome table should be the norm in all education policy. But the welcome table in tertiary education in this country and in mine is not very welcoming. SO HOW DOES ONE LEARN AT THE WELCOME TABLE?
My first point: Belonging and inclusion and climate matter. These concepts, to belong, to be included, to have a supportive learning environment, are enormously important in fostering learning.
Only quite recently have we in the United States begun to see how a sense of belonging in students often correlates with their success. My colleague bell hooks writes a great deal about belonging and inclusion. For example, “As a classroom community,” she says, “our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence. Since the vast majority of students learn through conservative, traditional educational practices and concern themselves only with the presence of the professor, any radical pedagogy must insist that everyone’s presence is acknowledged.” And it can’t just be stated, she says, but rather demonstrated. The teacher “must genuinely value everyone’s presence. There must be an ongoing recognition that everyone influences the classroom dynamic, that everyone contributes.”[5]
And more recently in a book called Belonging, she writes, “I believe that we can restore our hope in a world that transcends race by building communities where self-esteem comes not from feeling superior to any group but from one’s relationship to the land, to the people, and to the place.” To belong, she argues, is to feel connected, balanced, self-restraint, generous, mutual, inclusive, and egalitarian.[6] Put quite simply, no student can learn if she doesn’t belong.
Our work here is not just about access to education; it is also about access to the kind of education most transformative. One cannot feel a sense of belonging if one does not discover one’s voice, one’s past, and one’s heritage in the curriculum studied. Those of us in the humanities in the U.S. have since the 1960s been resisting the Eurocentric canon, opening up humanistic disciplines to more inclusive perspectives, theories, sources, histories, writers, world views, heritages, and voices. I know South Africa is also engaged in decolonizing curricula, and such work is also an important part of belonging, inclusion, and climate. Here again, my institution has a connection.
Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black history in the U.S. and author of The Mis-education of the Negro, an enduring classic, was a 1903 graduate of Berea College, and he went on to earn graduate degrees from the University of Chicago, the Sorbonne, and Harvard.[7] His words have been helpful worldwide at decolonizing learning and infusing “Africanity” and “Africanization” into a meaningful and transformative education for people of color and indeed for all people. One of his most famous quotes is “Race prejudice is merely the logical result of tradition, the inevitable outcome of thorough instruction to the effect that the Negro has never contributed anything to the progress of mankind.” As Allan Boesak has related to me, “an education drenched in, dominated by, and directed by Eurocentric values, systems, and thoughts is in reality a ‘mis-education’ of the Black student.”[8] So it is right and necessary, in my view, for at least equal if not more attention to African resources, African thinking, and African world-views. This is precisely about feeling a sense of belonging at the learning table.
Education as liberation
This point is argued both by Carter G. Woodson and by bell hooks. And by the way, more connections: bell once taught at Oberlin, and as a little girl she attended the segregated Booker T. Washington School in her Kentucky hometown.
Going to that segregated school in the apartheid South, she says, “We learned early on that our devotion to learning, to a life of the mind, was a counter-hegemonic act, a fundamental way to resist every strategy of white racist colonization….Though they did not define or articulate these practices in theoretical terms,” she continues, “my teachers were enacting a revolutionary pedagogy of resistance that was profoundly anticolonial.” When school segregation was slowly dismantled, she was sent to integrated schools, taught almost exclusively by whites, and “Knowledge was suddenly about information only….It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle…. [W]e soon learned that obedience, and not a zealous will to learn [,] was what was expected of us. Too much eagerness to learn could easily be seen as a threat to white authority.” Where black teachers in segregated schools once believed that to educate black children was a political act, “Now, we were mainly taught by white teachers whose lessons reinforced racist stereotypes. For black children, education was no longer about the practice of freedom.” And realizing this, she lost her love of school. School now was merely reinforcing domination rather than fostering freedom.[9]
In the U.S., many universities like mine are based on the liberal arts tradition, which seeks to educate a student with critical thinking, communication, and broad knowledge in preparation for a changing world. As one scholar explains, “the liberal in liberal arts and liberal education does not stand in contrast to conservative. Rather, it derives from the Latin liberalis, associated with the meaning of freedom. Liberal, not as opposed to conservative, but as free, in contrast to imprisoned, subjugated, or incarcerated. And, he continues, “arts comes from the Latin root ars, art- meaning “art, skill.”[10]
And isn’t the notion of liberation why John Dube might have been called to found Ohlange? Indeed, it is, for he wrote, “In America, I have found the key to the liberation of my people, which is education. I have brought it back with me.”[11] Prof. Simangaliso Kumalo reminds us that “As an educationist, therefore, his approach to education was one that built a culture of independence and dignity in the learners,”[12] and let me remind you how insightful John Dube was because a century later we are still imploring the values that he articulated and modelled. John Dube had the welcome table in mind.
And isn’t this what Nelson Mandela was doing when he went to the school to cast his vote in 1994? In the words of Prof. Kumalo,
For Mandela, this was no ordinary day; as it was the day of the first democratic elections. …. Ohlange Institute, where the Chapel was located, was also no ordinary South African township school, for it was built by Dube, making it one of the first schools to be built and managed by Africans at a time when conventional thinking did not believe that Black people could develop and maintain institutions of their own….[13]
I believe that John Dube worked tirelessly to found and sustain Ohlange because of liberation. He wrote, “I long for the day when the Sun of righteousness shall arise with healing in his wings, and when on every hilltop shall be a school-house and a church. Then shall we say to Africa, ‘arise and shine, for thy light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon thee.’”[14] Education’s liberatory powers are why no slave owner in the American South allowed one’s enslaved people to learn to read. Knowledge was and remains power.
Bell hooks’s words written over recent decades could have been John Dube’s words written a century ago. She writes, “To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. That learning process comes easiest to those of us who teach who also believe that there is an aspect of our vocation that is sacred; who believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.”[15]
Elsewhere, she writes, “… [L]earning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labour for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.”[16] But again, one cannot be free when one is denied a seat at the learning table.
Freedom through education and economic opportunity
No other force in society moves economic and social mobility like education. And yet perhaps because of this fact, access to affordable education—particularly university education—is inequitable. It’s certainly highly unequal in the U.S. and here in South Africa. Perhaps that is because those who oversee the welcome table fear that inviting more to the table will result in having to share resources with more people, making these resources scarcer.
I am convinced, however, that making room for more at the welcome table doesn’t divide up existing resources, it creates more resources. Metaphorically, we get more food by inviting more to the table, not less. When you make room for more students at the learning table, you generate more economic output for everyone. How can powerful humans be so selfish?
In both South Africa and the United States, as well as in countries around the world, education is conceived as a right of all human beings. In fact, in the last few years, given the increases in costs in higher education in our two countries as well as elsewhere, free higher education is now articulated as a human right. Free higher education was a plank of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in 2016, and it certainly has been a core issue in the Fees Must Fall campaign here.
Interestingly, though, the United Nations in 1966 adopted a covenant that declared, “Higher Education shall be made equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education.” Although President Jimmy Carter signed the covenant in 1977 in the U.S., it has never been ratified by the U.S., and it was only signed by South Africa in 1994 and ratified in 2015.[17]
It is my view, and your great constitution’s view in section 29, that higher education is in fact a basic and essential human right.[18] And furthermore, it is a moral imperative in any civilized society. In short, I believe it is a public good. The European Student Union has written that “Education is a core institution of any society and one of the main pillars of modern civilization. It plays a central role in social and economic development, democratic empowerment and the advancement of the general well-being of societies….[O]pen access to all levels of education is the cornerstone of a socially, culturally and democratically inclusive society, and a pre-requisite for individual and societal development and well-being.”[19]
Increasingly, however, at least in my country, that notion of a public good is being challenged by those who see higher education as a personal investment—hence, open to some and not to others—similar to purchasing a commodity, such as buying a car or a home or even a ticket one purchases for a seat at the welcome table. In my view, this is a very ominous situation, and it portends a real challenge, not just to the higher education sector, but also to civil society. A U.S. report in 2015 stated, and I want to share this long quote with you:
Whether we believe that higher education is a civil right, an essential element of a full democratic society, or a fundamental requirement to enabling all to achieve the American dream … higher education opportunity and outcomes are highly inequitable across family income groups. Moreover, on many indicators, gaps are larger now than in the past. The disinvestment of state funds for public colleges and universities since the 1980s and the declining value of federal student grant aid have aided in the creation of a higher education system that is deeply unequal. Once known for wide accessibility to and excellence within its higher education system, the U.S. now has an educational system that sorts students in ways that have profound implications for later life chances. More work is required to achieve the vision of ensuring all Americans have the opportunity to use their creative potential to realize the many benefits of higher education and advance the well-being and progress of the nation.[20]
Many believe that government aid will help. Does financial aid eliminate the financial barriers to paying college costs? NO. The maximum U.S. government grant for 2016 was $5,700. The average cost of attending a public 4-year institution living on campus was over $24,000 per year (a gap of over $18,000) and over $47,000 at private institutions for students living on campus. Hence, students are forced to make up the gaps in loans, which is why the average amount of debt for a college degree recipient is above $30,000. And this gap is widening. Astonishingly, federal grants paid 67 percent of average college costs in 1975 but only 27 percent in 2015.[21]
As Frederick Douglass wrote, “To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature.”[22] And we are denying students a seat at the learning table because of socioeconomics. By only welcoming those at the learning table who have the ability to pay, it suggests in fact that our society does not believe higher education is a public good.
Talent is universal in both the United States and South Africa, but opportunity is not. Let me say that again: Talent is universal, but opportunity is not! Our countries share the dubious distinction of some of the world’s highest inequality. The Gini coefficient is the most commonly used measurement for inequality worldwide, and for SA it is very high, but for my state of Kentucky it is a not far behind, ranking my state among the highest in inequality in the U.S.[23] As a whole, U.S. income inequality is currently at its highest level since the government began tracking household income in 1967. The U.S. also has the greatest disparity among western industrialized nations.[24] One should not be surprised at inequitable access for tertiary education. Therefore, we must work to address the gaps in access to and graduation from university in both countries.[25]
Former President Jacob Zuma’s announcement in December that the SA government would subsidize poor and working-class students without loans is a right step.[26] Given that a Commission found that there was no capacity to provide tertiary education free of fees, this will be an interesting issue to watch.[27]
I come from an institution that has academic and financial eligibility requirements. That means an applicant must demonstrate high academic promise, but that same applicant must also demonstrate an inability to pay for high-quality tertiary education. For example, if you have high entrance exam scores and come from a family in which the mother is a doctor and the father is a banker, my institution will not admit you, because your family can afford other options for high-quality education.
I am therefore very much in favor of free education for the poor and underserved, for they are exclusively whom my institution serves. We do not charge tuition, and students pay very little for housing and meals because federal aid, freed from being applied to tuition costs, can be applied to housing and meals. And furthermore, we don’t just admit students, we hire each one, requiring every student to work at least 10 hours a week on campus. That work initiative was one thing that impressed Booker T. Washington about Berea and so connects us to Dube today. We also pay students for that work, giving them money but also experience for the world beyond Berea. We like to say we provide our students the best education money can’t buy! We consequently have the lowest debt of any graduates in the United States.[28]
I am less inclined for free education for all, given the gross inequality in general and access inequity in particular in my country.[29] I worry about free-for-all schemes, because it often becomes regressive.[30] I say regressive because it is often higher-wealth students who access them, perhaps because disadvantaged students do not feel a sense of belonging. Thus, these schemes end up reinforcing inequity. Remember that low-wealth students have challenges both in affordability and access; a free education offer tackles the affordability but often has done little about access, because students don’t have money for housing or meals. In my country, the poor can’t pay for education, and the wealthy do not want to. We must make therefore tertiary education affordable and accessible, especially to those who can’t pay, not those who don’t want to pay.
Berea’s education is one of the head, heart, and hands—still as relevant today as in the nineteenth century, and still in keeping with John Dube’s vision. Our students are challenged through academics (the head), through learning about inclusive Christianity (the heart), and through the dignity of all human labor, mental as well as manual (the hands). “In all these directions,” Dube wrote in 1900, “what the African person needs is a sound Education and training, not only by the literary meaning, but of the mind, heart and spirit, by a real education through the hand, the eye and the brain. It is my conviction that success in politics, industry and all forms of progress lies in education; it is a real development of all the human facilities. That is the reason I have devoted all my life to this work.”[31]
Let me also suggest that we need to think about being inclusive in all types of education. We need not invite only certain types of students or only certain types of studies at the welcome table. Our societies need skilled workers as well as those with advanced degrees. We need electricians and economists, we need plumbers and physicists, we need welders and writers. In my country, we have often struggled with this kind of awareness; a bachelor’s degree has been more valued and supported than a two-year, more vocational degree, or even an apprentice program. My college’s founder recognized this, starting not only a college, but a secondary school, a college-preparatory school, and more vocational programs in nursing, agriculture, education, and what once was called industrial arts. All students ought to be welcome at the table regardless of their curricular plans and paths. And John Dube knew this, as Prof. Kumalo notes: “For Dube, industrial education was not a substitute for intellectual knowledge. The two had to go together, for they were both important if Black people were to be fully independent. So the establishment of Ohlange was an act of protest by Dube against the government that controlled the kind of education that was offered to the African people.”[32]
I want to address one final concern about higher education, at least in my country: the increasing politicization of tertiary education from both sides of the political aisle. Conservatives say that it indoctrinates rather than educates. Progressives say that it’s much too expensive, too elitist, too removed from the real world, and too inept at preparing students for work. The most damning charge is quality. Only 6 percent of graduates have had a long-term capstone project, an internship, and deep involvement in extracurricular activities and organizations. Six percent. I’m shocked that only 14 percent of graduates nationwide have had at least one professor who made them excited about learning, a professor who cared about them as a person, and a mentor who encouraged goals and dreams.[33]
We must craft compelling rebuttals if we wish to have public investment and trust. We have to show that we are deeply engaged in and committed to the community beyond the campus boundaries. We need to message how we work to model a democratic learning and living community, one where engaged students have practice learning from their mistakes so they can replicate this community into the world. We must craft compelling messages based on our graduates’ meaningful and purposeful lives. We must highlight our graduates’ voices and those of our faculty and staff who are the agents of these transformations. And we must show that our students’ learning prepares them to enter the world prepared to strengthen democracy and enhance the quality of life for all people in society. When we do, we strengthen the notion of education as a public good.
Conclusion
Dube was a man of remarkable achievements. You know about these. But what he shares with the founder of my institution is the construction of an enduring vision. Our founder as a young man graduated from seminary and aspired to create the Gospels here on earth. When he looked around him, he decided that the best way to do that was to provide education to women as well as men, black folk as well as white, expressly at the same school. And he took as his school’s motto the verse from Acts, chapter 17: “God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth,” a verse Dube refers to when he asks, “Why then should there be any race feeling? Why should we not love one another and try to help each other?”[34] Ohlange’s meaning, to bring all ethnic groups together, is similar to the notion that God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth.
All this my institution’s founder aspired to in a time and place in which it was legal and common for one human to own another. Such a belief also put his life in danger. When he returned home to tell his father—a slave owner himself— about this vision, his father disinherited him. During the course of building Berea College, he was run out of town and beaten many times. And yet he, like Dube, persevered. In so doing he created a prophetic vision, like Dube’s, that is as relevant today as it was in 1855. Our founder, the Rev. John Fee, dreamed of a seat at the welcome table for black and white women and men. Learning and living together. And most of all, being seen, which I have learned from Zulu speakers is an essential element of human freedom. I suspect he and Dube would have gotten on well. Dube worked tirelessly for a seat for Africans at the welcome table. At the learning table. And one day at the voting table. And today I believe he might well be at the front lines, perhaps with Nokutela with her beautiful voice leading the chorus of the multitudes in singing I’m gonna sit at the welcome table. Think about it. Can you imagine? Their voices, of course, are sadly silent today, but their vision lives on. And the best thing we in this great room can do is work to perpetuate their vision. I’d like to think that today Dube is smiling down upon us.
So, it is incumbent upon all of us who stand on both of their shoulders to ensure that we add our voices to today’s chorus, ensuring that all those who have been denied a seat get one. Ensuring the kind of empowerment that compels you to bring your own chair to the table just in case you are not offered a seat. The great Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman in the U.S. Congress echoed this: ““If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” Working so that more and more are given seats ensures that conversations are richer, learning is deeper, investment in the country is more equitable, and that the future is brighter. Do all you possibly can, and then some, to enlarge the welcome table. It was once enlarged for you. Having a seat at the table, after all, is only meaningful when one uses one’s voice at that table – at that conversation. Such is the vision and the legacy of the man whose name is attached to this important lecture today. May it be so. A gube njalo. Bekuyintokozo enkulu ukuba nani.
[1] Steven Ozment, Magdalena and Balthasar: An Intimate Portrait of Life in 16th-Century Europe Revealed in the Letters of a Nuremberg Husband and Wife (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 161.
[2] Robert F. Kennedy, “Day of Affirmation Address at University of Cape Town,” June 6, 1966, available at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/rfkcapetown.htm, accessed June 28, 2018.
[3] Heather Hughes, The First President: A Life of John Dube, Founding President of the ANC (Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2011), 31.
[4] See Rebecca Ginsburg, At Home with Apartheid: The Hidden Landscapes of Domestic Service in Johannesburg (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011).
[5] bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 8.
[6] bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place (New York: Routledge, 2008), 183.
[7] Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933).
[8] Personal conversation, July 2, 2018.
[9] hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 2-4.
[10] Valerie Strauss, “What the ‘liberal’ in ‘liberal arts’ actually means,” Washington Post, April 2, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/02/what-the-liberal-in-liberal-arts-actually-means/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.29448ebe4bfc, accessed June 15, 2018.
[11] Dube quoted in Cherif Keita, Oberlin to Inanda. Documentary film on the life of the Rev. Dr. John Langalibalele Dube, and also quoted in R. Simangaliso Kumalo, Pastor and Politician: Essays on the Legacy of JL Dube, the First President of the African National Congress, foreword by Prince Dibeela (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2012), 77.
[12] Kumalo, Pastor and Politician, 79.
[13] Ibid, 18.
[14] Quoted in ibid, 30, and Hughes, First President, 72.
[15] hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 13.
[16] Ibid, 207.
[17] See United Nations, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, New York, 16 December 1966, available at https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=IV-3&chapter=4&clang=_en, Accessed June 18, 2018.
[18] See https://hsf.org.za/publications/hsf-briefs/the-right-to-basic-education.
[19] European Student Union, “Executive Committee Document BM64/Part7, Policy paper on public responsibility, governance and financing of higher education,” March 2013; see also Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, 2018 Indicators of Higher Education Equity in the United States: Historical Trend Report, 6-7, available at http://pellinstitute.org/downloads/publications-Indicators_of_Higher_Education_Equity_in_the_US_2018_Historical_Trend_Report.pdf, accessed June 10, 2018.
[20] Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, 2017 Indicators of Higher Education Equity in the United States: Historical Trend Report, 8, available at http://pellinstitute.org/downloads/publications-Indicators_of_Higher_Education_Equity_in_the_US_2017_Historical_Trend_Report.pdf, accessed June 5, 2018.
[21] Ibid, 41, 43, 112.
[22] Frederick Douglass. An Oration. The Manassas Industrial School (Manassas, Virginia, 1894), available at https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd.26011/, accessed May 25, 2018.
[23] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_coefficient.
[24] Ibid.
[25] See also Basani Baloyi and Gilad Isaacs, “South Africa’s ‘fees must fall’ protests are about more than tuition costs,” October 28, 2015, available at https://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/27/africa/fees-must-fall-student-protest-south-africa-explainer/index.html, accessed June 15, 2018.
[26] Ahmed Areff and Derrick Spies, “Zuma announces free higher education for poor and working class students,” December 16, 2017, available at https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/zuma-announces-free-higher-education-for-poor-and-working-class-students-20171216, accessed June 5, 2018.
[27] See “Release of the Report of Commission of Inquiry into the Feasibility of making High Education and Training Fee-free in South Africa,” November 13, 2017, available at http://www.presidency.gov.za/press-statements/release-report-commission-inquiry-feasibility-making-high-education-and-training, accessed June 5, 2018.
[28] For a history of integrated education at Oberlin, Berea, and Howard University, see Christi M. Smith, Reparation and Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Higher Education (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
[29] Patrício Langa, Gerald Wangenge-Ouma, Jens Jungblut, Nico Cloete, South Africa and the Illusion of Free Education, World Education, February 26, 2016, available at http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20160223145336908, accessed June 5, 2018.
[30] See Brendan O’Malley, “Free higher education is ‘regressive’ – World Bank,” University World News, June 5, 2015, available at http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20150605131029778, accessed June 10, 2018.
[31] John Dube, “Native Political and Industrial Organization in South Africa” (1900), quoted in Kumalo, Pastor and Politician, 78.
[32] Kumalo, Pastor and Politician, 77.
[33] “Why are Republicans Down on Higher Ed? August 16, 2017, available at https://news.gallup.com/poll/216278/why-republicans-down-higher.aspx?g_source=HIGHER_EDUCATION&g_medium=topic&g_campaign=tiles, accessed June 29, 2018; Julie Ray and Stephanie Kafka, “Life in College Matters for Life after College,” May 6, 2014, available at https://news.gallup.com/poll/168848/life-college-matters-life-college.aspx, accessed June 29, 2018.
[34] John Dube, “A Zulu Point of View on the Missionaries in Africa,” quoted in Kumalo, Pastor and Politician, 92.