THE RL Q+A: The Voices of Morehouse and Spelman

The zoologist wanted to try to prove that the subjects were biologically different than whites and they were both undressed in the photograph. By taking away their clothing, it was as if their dignity or their humanity was being stripped from them. If you look closely at the photograph, you see both of the subjects crying. But then when you fast forward, and you look at Thomas E. Askew’s images, the way that he’s intentionally dressing and staging the subjects, the women and men who belong to HBCUs, he’s given them back their dignity because of the way that their bodies are being fashioned with clothing. So, clothing says so much. Photography says so much. When we look at Frederick Douglass, his wife actually made his clothes. His wife—his girlfriend at the time who became his wife—helped him to become free because she made him a sailor’s uniform. No one could tell that he was a slave because he wasn’t dressed like one. He was dressed like a sailor. He was dressed like a free man. And when we see him in subjects, we don’t see a slave. We see a man with dignity. Frederick Douglass always adorned his body beautifully with clothing made by his wife. I love the way he would stare into the camera with his salt-and-pepper hair parted to the side, the waves cascading to the back. He would look into the camera and he would tell you that he’s a man, and he’s not a slave.”

I felt great to be a part of this legacy as a graduate of Morehouse College. I’m a part of its future because I teach students from Morehouse, Spelman, and Clark Atlanta University. I teach students from Howard University. These institutions are a flagship for what it is that historically Black colleges and universities have done for America writ large since their founding.”

“Growing into manhood at Morehouse was key for me. Although my mother and father continued to stay friends throughout my entire time, they divorced when I was 10. But everybody around me in my community and my home church and my environment, including my father, my great-grandfather, they had gone to Morehouse. And there were elements of Morehouse that said that there were things that I should get from Morehouse that would help refine me into a better man.

I took those same attributes and began to do what I could for young men that I met while here. The good thing about Morehouse is that we meet young men where they are. We meet them with their talents. We meet them with their struggles. We meet them with their triumphs, and we try to make them identify a way for us to mold the leader that’s inside them into what they think they should become. The beauty of Morehouse is actually trying to pull that which is confined inside them, whether it’s to be a leader, or a professor, or the consummate professional in whatever job they want to do. To try to help them find that light—the light is inside each one and our quest and our job is to help them find that light.

It’s a pleasure to talk about how iconic Morehouse was, even for a 17-year-old coming from Birmingham where the struggles of Birmingham were what the world knows that they were. The beauty of Birmingham, and the community that launched me to Morehouse, was that it always knew that I was destined to do something bigger and greater than what others could limit me to.

There was a book once I got from Sidney Poitier that he had written and I read. In it, there is a point that said, ‘Never let anybody define the value of your worth.’ And I learned that before I even knew the lesson. That I was coming to a place where I could, as the marketing material said when I was an incoming freshman, be somebody. Be a Morehouse man. That spoke volumes to me. Because I was destined to be somebody. You can become somebody anywhere, but can you become somebody with purpose? That’s what I found at Morehouse.”