"I can’t allow you to leave here in that condition"

Morehouse College, Alton Hornsby, Jr., and the inadequacy of “just voting”

This column is a part of the “Free Mind of Jones’ Race and Voting Series”

“The Naval Academy means nothing here, Mr. Jones. You’re a Man of Morehouse now . . . Many schools like the one you’re coming from fought tooth and nail to keep our people out. Now they let a few of us in but intellectually twist many students so badly that they’re basically useless to our people. I can’t allow you to leave here in that condition.”

New “Men of Morehouse” college initiation ceremony, 2024. Photo by Kennedy Brathwaite.

“You just have to get out and vote!” they say to Black folk, young and old. That admonition is not incorrect, but it is woefully incomplete. Here’s a bit of clarification.

A few weeks before Election 2024, a small group of Black scholarship students at the University of Louisville held a panel on voting. One of the early questions from student moderators was, “Why is voting important?” I thought to myself, “That’s an easy one. Surely, at a minimum, these collegians already know the history of the Black vote and efforts to deny or suppress it.”

I was wrong. They didn’t.  

The ensuing exchange took me back over 30 years to my undergraduate days when I was summoned to the office of History Department chair Dr. Alton Hornsby, Jr. after I transferred to Morehouse College from the U.S. Naval Academy. Hornsby informed me that I needed to take a battery of history courses at Morehouse because he wasn’t going to accept the ones I completed at Navy.

I was indignant. Why would he do this? The Naval Academy wasn’t some backwoods school nobody had heard of! My history courses were legitimate! I wasn’t even a history major! Why did a political science major like me need to take more history?

Hornsby calmly said, “The Naval Academy means nothing here, Mr. Jones. You’re a Man of Morehouse now. No matter your major, you need a solid foundation in history. I’m pretty sure about what the Naval Academy taught you and didn’t teach you. I’ll review the syllabi, but I’ll wager there was very little about Africa or the African diaspora. Many schools like the one you’re coming from fought tooth and nail to keep our people out. Now they let a few of us in but intellectually twist many students so badly that they’re basically useless to our people. I can’t allow you to leave here in that condition.”

Dr. Alton Hornsby, Jr.

I was angry but Hornsby, also a Morehouse Man (Class of 1961), was dead right. I needed better history. Because of him I went on to receive a sophisticated education on Africa, before and after European colonization. I deeply engaged American slavery, white supremacy, institutional racism and stratification, segregation, and much more. I was also familiarized with the many Black social, political, and educational movements and strategies to push back against them all. With those classes and others, I left Morehouse intellectually armed. I needed it, because, as a newly minted Morehouse Man, I went on to the University of Kentucky for graduate school . . . and felt like I marched back in time.

Morehouse Men sing “Dear Old Morehouse” during graduation ceremony.

In 1949, Lyman T. Johnson was the first Black to integrate UK and had to fight like a dog to do it. I arrived there 43 years later as a Lyman T. Johnson Graduate Fellow. Four years later I became only the second African American to receive a Ph.D. in political science from the school.

UK wasn’t anything even close to Morehouse and I had a Ruby Bridges type educational experience in good old Lexington, Kentucky. I never had a political science class taught by a Black full-time professor, because there were none. Two were hired as I prepared to graduate. Only one lasted. Thirty years later, UK’s political science department no longer has only one, lonely Black professor. It now has a grand total of . . . TWO Black women! There are no Black men. In the minds of Kentuckians wedded to 19th and early 20th century sensibilities, that’s probably progress.

Lyman T. Johnson

I had the privilege of meeting Lyman T. Johnson several times before he died. It even turned out that his grandson, Imar Hutchins, was my classmate at Morehouse. Kismet. Johnson often said “you have to fight to keep the cart from rolling back down the hill” when speaking of racial progress. Unfortunately, that cart is speeding down that hill at breakneck pace in Kentucky these days, one of the places leading the way in the anti-Black, anti-diversity movement in education and more. The racists there are winning and it’s showing in their children, both Black and white.

Read: Why Joe Gerth failed my test on Black people (and you probably will, too)

Back in the present I sat before the aforementioned group of Woodford R. Porter Scholars – a scholarship historically reserved for Black students in an effort to increase their representation at the University of Louisville. Sadly, these scholarships no longer exclusively target Black kids. Like slavery and segregation once were, defenders of this new reality say, “it’s the law.” 

Years ago, Porter scholar advisor Dr. Tomarra Adams observed that UofL’s “Mitch McConnell Scholars” must major or minor in political science because they were required to know about politics. Like Alton Hornby, Jr., she posited that a group of young Black scholars should be required to know something about Black people. She navigated university bureaucracy and mandated that every Porter take at least two Black Studies classes. They didn’t have to major or minor, just take two classes about themselves. Unfortunately, a later Porter advisor, another Black woman, removed the requirement after Adams left UofL. It has never been reinstituted.

Upon questioning, the current group of young Black students before me were found woefully lacking. In a session about voting, they had no knowledge of the history of Black struggle to acquire and maintain the franchise. They did not know when Black men or Black women were granted the vote. They had never heard of voting crusaders like Medgar Evers and others. They stared blankly when the statement was made, “Vice-President Kamala Harris is a serviceable candidate considering the choices, but it’s probably unfair to compare her to women like Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Fannie Lou Hamer, or Shirley Chisholm” because almost none of them knew who Wells-Barnett, Hamer, or Chisholm were.

It wasn’t pretty.

Dr. Alton Hornsby, Jr. died in 2017. The things he demanded I learn at Morehouse (and I have taught all my career) are now considered “racist” and “divisive concepts” by many politicians, pundits, and administrators who seek to maintain white supremacy in American education. I remembered his words all those years ago, “I can’t allow you to leave here in that condition.” Now I was on the other side of it. I was Hornsby, sitting before students who knew little to nothing about the history of Black people or the Black vote. But it is not within my power to stop them from “leaving in that condition.” I sat there feeling miserable and defeated.

So yes, by all means, vote! But maybe, just maybe, it might be worthwhile to demand education that teaches our children about the history of the Black vote and much more.          

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Dr. Ricky L. Jones is the Baldwin-King Scholar-in-Residence at the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute and Professor of Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville. Follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn,Threads, and X.