Captain of the Capstone

In a University of Paris classroom an American Negro attending a meeting of religious leaders sat reading and rereading a cable that had just come from the U.S. The year was 1926, and for Mordecai Johnson, 36, the news that he had been elected president of Howard University in Washington, D.C. should have been cause for celebration. But, recalls Johnson, it was not: "My happiness on my trip was destroyed."

A Baptist minister with two bachelor's degrees (Morehouse College, the University of Chicago), an M.A. from Harvard and a divinity degree from the Rochester Theological Seminary, Johnson was already familiar with Howard's predicament. Though known as "the capstone of Negro education," it was scarcely a third-rate institution. Only two of its eight schools were accredited. The plant was run down; its annual appropriation from the Government was heading into ever-mounting opposition from Southern Congressmen. Running Howard would have been a tough task for any man, but it seemed especially so for the one who was to be its first Negro president.

A Moral Obligation. Today, after 30 years of Mordecai Johnson, Howard is the nation's leading Negro campus. Nearly half of all U.S. Negro doctors and dentists are Howard men. as are a fourth of the Negro lawyers. But the university's influence is not limited to the U.S. alone. Among American colleges and universities, it ranks third in the percentage of foreign students enrolled.

When Johnson took over, the university had few things to boast about. It had a flourishing medical school, and its faculty included such teachers as Philosopher Alain Locke, the first and only Negro Rhodes scholar. But it had little money, and when Mordecai Johnson appeared before Congress to ask for more, one Representative bluntly warned him: "Young man, we may as well come to an understanding. We have no obligation to consider the needs of Howard." Johnson took his case to the Department of the Interior, persuaded Assistant Secretary Edward Finney that the Government had a "moral obligation." In 1928 President Coolidge finally signed a bill making the university's annual federal grant (now $3,000,000) permanent.

Phi Beta Kappa & a Nobelman. A proud and portly man with a flair for oratory and a willingness to travel 25,000 miles a year to plead Howard's cause, Johnson has seen his budget swell from less than $956,000 to $5,658,500. His enrollment has climbed from 2,155 to 4,800; his faculty has nearly tripled to 442. He built a new library and a power plant, buildings for the School of Engineering and Architecture, the College of Dentistry and the College of Pharmacy. Five women's dormitories have gone up, as well as one for men, and three recitation halls. Johnson established full-fledged schools of graduate study and social work, gradually got all ten of his schools accredited. In 1953 Phi Beta Kappa at last gave permission for a Howard chapter. This week Tau Beta Pi, oldest engineering honor society in the U.S., will become the 14th honor society to do the same.

As Howard has grown in size, it has also grown in stature. Among Howard's top faculty appointments: Nobel Prizewinner Ralph Bunche. Federal Judge William Hastie, Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, Surgeon Charles Drew, who pioneered in the blood-bank field. Chemist Percy Julian has given medicine a whole new source of inexpensive cortisone. Historian John Hope Franklin has made such a name for himself that he is the first Negro ever to head a department at Brooklyn College (TIME. Feb. 27).

A Long Way to Go. Of all Howard's accomplishments, those of the law school are in a way the most important. Both training and practice ground of Negro civil rights, the school has been indispensable to the long battle against discrimination. Howard alumni won for the Ne gro the right to be served in white Michigan restaurants, and to picket employers who refuse to hire Negroes. Former Dean Charles Houston, who took up the case of Lloyd Gaines v. the University of Missouri, in 1938 won the first major Supreme Court decision against segregation in public education. In 1954, after a set of historic lawsuits, argued before the court by Howard-trained Attorney Thurgood Marshall, segregation in the public schools was declared unconstitutional.

In spite of these victories, President Johnson knows as well as any man that Howard still has a long way to go. The Negro public school in the South is still so inferior that many of his students come ill prepared for college work. Nevertheless, Johnson feels that he must take in as many of these students as he can. "We cannot be completely selective," says he. "Therefore we are still adolescent in quality. We need 20 more years to mature intellectually as a university."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.