Between White Class Valedictorian Joshua Packwood, CNN Political Anaylst Jamal Simmons, and former prison inmate Genarlow Wilson, my alma mater is getting all kinds of media attention. But this latest piece on the cover of the Los Angeles Times California section has some of my brothers extremely hot and bothered. After the jump, check it out.Michael Brewer, a senior at Morehouse College, was strolling purposefully around this storied campus on a hot spring day, his heavy frame dripping sweat, his hands clutching a small stack of fliers.
"No more hate," the fliers read, in a stylish typeface. "No more discrimination. No more." "What's up, brother?" Brewer said in a lilting, cheerful voice as he approached a fellow student in a dark business suit. "Take one of these, if you will."
The young man gave the flier a glance. It was promoting what was perhaps the most ambitious week of gay rights events in the history of Morehouse, the only historically black all-male school in America.
"What the hell is this?" he said under his breath. He laughed and threw it in the trash.
But Brewer had already moved, unfazed, into the lobby of Wheeler Hall, where he was taping up posters. The events had been his idea, and he knew they wouldn't go over well with everyone.
"Morehouse is like this enclave where Stonewall never happened," Brewer said, referring to the 1969 New York protest that galvanized the gay rights movement. "It just doesn't exist in this realm of reality."
Brewer, 22, didn't come to Morehouse with the intent of changing it. But he found that he had no choice. He had arrived here from Oklahoma City pretty comfortable with himself: outspoken, proudly smart and, at 5 foot 9 and 300 pounds, hard to miss.
Early on, he decided he wouldn't water down his gay identity.
And that, historically, has been a problematic strategy at Morehouse. The 141-year-old college has played a key role in defining black manhood in America. But with a past steeped in religion, tradition and machismo, it has struggled to determine how homosexuality fits within that definition.
The private school was founded shortly after the Civil War with the help of Baptists sympathetic to the plight of illiterate freedmen. Over the years, it became famous for turning out the vaunted "Morehouse man" -- a paragon of virtue and strength in a society that once institutionalized the destruction of the black nuclear family.
Traditionally, its students have been expected to follow a well-worn path: They were to choose ambitious wives, preferably from Spelman College next door, a historically black school for women. They were to become captains of industry, leaders of men, saviors of a race.
But now, more than ever, students like Brewer are forcing the school to confront a vexing question: Can the Morehouse man be gay? On a Thursday in late April, Brewer set up a folding table full of sign-up sheets in the Yard, the paved central square in the heart of Morehouse's compact, red-brick campus.
Down the street, the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel -- named for the school's most famous graduate -- was disgorging scores of students in suits who had been at a ceremony for top-performing seniors.
It was the kind of scene that has made generations of visiting black parents swoon with pride and possibility: a campus full of young, clean-cut black men, armed with book bags, talking about job prospects and big ideas.
Brewer was selling the idea of a day of silence for the victims of homophobia and asking his fellow students to sign up. He was wearing a T-shirt in the school's maroon and white colors. "Look, I'm sorry you're not a Morehouse man," it read. "I'm sorry you will never be a Morehouse man."
"Come on, Anderson brothers," he yelled to a couple of guys. "You're suited and booted. Look at you -- you're role models. Come sign up!"
After four years on the 3,000-student campus, Brewer seemed to know everyone who passed by -- the straight allies and the straights with hang-ups, the openly gay upperclassmen and the men on the down low, that is, straight to the world but open to gay affairs.
A trim ROTC member in a khaki uniform walked briskly by. "Renaldo, I'm looking for you to sign up, bruh!"
Continue