Frazier discusses social, cultural problems

When John Frazier tried to enroll at USM, black male enrollment was at an all-time low: zero.


The thin black man in his early twenties peered through his horn-rimmed glasses three times at the campus, as police and his godfather, civil rights martyr Medgar Evers, escorted him to successive registration attempts starting in 1963 and ending in the spring of 1964.


He was only the second black person to attempt enrollment at the college.


As onlookers lined up to view the novelty of a black man on campus, the University, called Mississippi Southern College at the time, gave him a fresh excuse with each enrollment attempt.


First, his grade point average was too low, then his application failed to bear the signature of an alumnus – he was even labeled a homosexual.

"Over a year of my life was gone, and I had to go on to college," Frazier said. He gave up hope for Mississippi Southern College and enrolled at Campbell College, a black school. But this started a long academic career that even included study at Harvard University.


Much has changed since Frazier's day of attempted integration – as of 2008, Mississippi's universities comprised more than 26,000 black students according to a report from the state's Institutions of Higher Learning board.

Frazier thinks much of this is attributable to a higher social awareness as a nation. With an increased realization of human suffering and a recognition of the greater societal problems for many the illiteracy of a few can cause, more doors have opened for American blacks.


"The country has said, ‘our ignorance is expensive, and we've got to stop it,'" Frazier said. "And that's a good thing.


"I'm not displeased at the growth," Frazier said. "I just don't think we've done enough of it."


But while racism is no longer officially sponsored by educational institutions, less than half as many black men attend and graduate colleges as do black women in Mississippi. This stretches across the nation, where the average trend is 2 to 1.

Frazier chalks this up to many factors, one being the use of national standards to evaluate academic success. Such standards may not align with the experience of the average black man – especially in the case of standardized achievement tests, wherein he says most questions draw from an upper- or middle-class life experience.


"If you frame and structure your questions and evaluative procedures on the basis, in my opinion, of fundamentally faulty starting points, then you get a faulty result," Frazier said.


He also noted a cycle in which black men are routinely "derailed from success" in America by various social norms, all coming together to form a difficult obstacle for the demographic.


He cited the common occurrence of high schools pushing black males toward sports, a field which produces very slim career success. He said high schools also "stack the academic deck" of young black males with social studies courses if the young black men perform poorly in math and science.


When these scholastic and cultural factors unite, Frazier said black males can often get frustrated and drop out of school, effectively ending their academic career.


But Frazier finds hope for those disregarded by America's scholastic system in the Internet.


"The internet has, in fact, reduced significantly all those barriers," he said. "You can go on the Internet and get a high school diploma. You can go on the Internet and learn just about anything you want to learn about anything right in your home."


He also holds hope in one of the college board's plans to combat low black male enrollment: the exposure of budding scholars to different cultures.


Frazier broke his verbose diction when he heard about this to say, "That's awesome."


He feels his own progressive worldview is owed in part to experiences with culturally diverse college professors – some from Pakistan, some white, some black and one German who experienced the Nazi Regime firsthand.

"I think the more human beings are able to learn about each other and their culture, the more problems we can solve."