Integration in the 1960s hollowed out black institutions by drawing talent and audiences away

Evidence

These institutions once housed the brain trust of black America, and despite the conservative politics that often informed how they were run, the schools afforded black students and intellectuals the safe space to confront the enormous challenges facing black America. But HBCUs now face the fate of black newspapers. Once the names of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender and the Black Associated Press had national standing. African Americans throughout the country turned to newspapers and newswires like these for information about black America and about the black world at large. These papers enabled an imagined community—a sense of connection with other black people across the country who faced similar trials and tribulations. But the black freedom struggle of the 1960s sealed the fate of these news outlets. Their influence waned as doors once closed opened and black reporters migrated to mainstream print media and black readers followed them. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 370

Categorization

• XREF: Recalls Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ concept and parallels the dilemma of integration eroding separate institutions that Ishmael Reed and others have chronicled. — connects to: Black institutions that once sustained black communities are now declining — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still…, 346; Black institutional decline compounds the failure of traditional leadership — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still…, 500; Black middle-class advancement sharpened cultural divisions within black society — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 224
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Black institutions that once sustained black communities are now declining — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still…, 346; Black institutional decline compounds the failure of traditional leadership — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still…, 500; Black middle-class advancement sharpened cultural divisions within black society — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 224