Farrakhan’s Middle Class Revival Comes to Howard

A young dissertation student at the University of Chicago, I first came to Howard to teach composition in the Department of English. From 1978 to 1983, I taught four writing courses a semester for five difficult years. The campus on Georgia Avenue, which I still visit in Washington, D.C., became for me, as it does for many, an important crossroads in the black diaspora’s life of the mind. Among the professoriate of color, one talks of Howard and its faculty as easily in Dakar, Chapel Hill, or Ann Arbor as one does at the Library of Congress. “Everyone,” meaning every significant black intellectual, “passes through here once or twice,” whispered my fellow composition teacher, the poet Calvin Forbes, as we listened in chapel to an emigre Haitian professor question Toni Cade Bambara on African ethnic religions. “For this,” Calvin continued, “is a special place for the likes of us.” The school, its teachers, certain students, and their institutional life therefore inevitably blend into a collective experience in the minds of African- American writers and thinkers. When I came to Washington, D.C., in early February to research this article for Dissent, it was clear that the Milli...