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My Alma Mater Shouldn't Honor Bush

By Jonathan Hutto Sr.
Black College Wire

Why would Howard University want to honor President Bush, whose agenda is not only anti African/African American, but anti-labor, anti-woman, anti-environment and anti-human rights?

The university’s Board of Trustees has approved him as a suitable candidate for commencement speaker or recipient of an honorary degree, although no final decision has been made.

During the 1998-99 school year, I was undergraduate trustee of Howard. The graduate trustee, Randy Short, and I worked to ensure that the immediate interests of the undergraduate and graduate students were not underestimated, undervalued or marginalized when the Board of Trustees met and made final decisions that affected the university community.

We successfully lobbied for Kwame Ture and James Farmer to receive honorary degrees.

Ture was one of the key leaders and voices of the Black Power Movement in America, raising the "Black Power" cry all over the U.S. and the world. His work ranged from the fight for voting rights in Mississippi to the fight against imperialism and colonialism in Africa and throughout the so-called Third World.

Farmer was the architect and visionary of the Freedom Rides in 1961 that tested the legality of interstate bus travel for blacks and brought the attention of the world to the harsh racism, torture and death that blacks and civil rights workers faced in the South.

Upon hearing that the trustees were considering Bush, I thought:

Is this the same George Bush who in the midst of a 2000 Republican primary battle in South Carolina appealed to the most openly racist university in America, Bob Jones University, in his quest for votes and to solidify his support for the Confederate flag? [Bush refused to take sides in the battle over whether to remove it from the South Carolina Capitol.] The same George Bush, who as governor of Texas, led the nation in state-sanctioned lynchings and limited the appeals of those convicted? The majority of those legally lynched were African American males.

Bush has maintained a closed-door policy with civil rights organizations since his tenure as president. He showed the nation and world his utter disregard of black life by executing Gary Graham (Shaka Sankofa), a juvenile offender, on the testimony of one shady eyewitness. During the presidential campaign, Bush said he was not in favor of affirmative action but "affirmative access." He opposed the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, and refused to send Secretary of State Colin Powell to represent the interests of the administration. Bush was selected (not elected) president of the United States by the Supreme Court, despite the fact that the majority of Americans (90 percent of African Americans) did not vote for him; thousands had their votes discarded or were intimidated and turned away at the polls.

Bush's ideological foundation started with his father. Then-Rep. George Bush Sr. voted against the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was inspired by the 1963 March on Washington. He also opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was inspired by the "Bloody Sunday" march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a recent Howard honorary degree recipient, was one of the principal leaders of that march. George H.W. Bush served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency at a time when the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was in full swing, nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990. His campaign featured "Willie Horton" ads to drum up an angry white backlash in order to ensure Bush’s election victory in 1988. Bush represents everything that I know my alma mater to be opposed to and fighting against.

The Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson Sr. was right at the Democratic National Convention of 2000 when he warned America to "Stay out of the Bushes"!

Frederick Douglass, one of the principal founders of Howard University and the longest serving trustee in the University's history (25 years) once said: "Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress".

This is a fight and struggle for the soul of Howard and indeed the soul of Black America.

Let us lock arms and join hands as a united world and fight back against the Bush agenda.

Jonathan Hutto Sr. of Washington, D.C., is an alumnus of Howard University, former student body president (1997-98) and undergraduate trustee (1998-99). He is a representative with the National African American Student Association and can be reached at