Dr. Carter G. Woodson valued information and knowledge and would certainly laud the release of I’ll Find a Way or Make One: A Tribute to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, an authoritative survey written by journalist Juan Williams and Dwayne Ashley, president of the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund. The book blends personal reflection, historical examination, photographs and plenty of detailed information covering all 108 historically black colleges and universities. In many cases, the birth and growth of these institutions revealed a level of unprecedented cooperation between whites and blacks, often in places where social segregation was enforced at the point of a gun. Historically black schools have also had white and foreign faculty, fostered a climate of support for the arts (with the exception in some places of jazz), and developed ambitious, innovative types who neither accepted nor followed conventional thinking in their endeavors. From the great thinker and activist W.E.
B. Dubois and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to television and film moguls Oprah Winfrey and Spike Lee, these students have been a vital force in American society. But Williams and Ashley also feel that while black colleges and universities will always have a special place and tradition, adjustments must be made and transitions recognized.
