By The Editors

It is the greatest regularly-scheduled publication devoted to black Americans’ concerns ever published.

We’re referring, of course, to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, the quarterly compendium of news, statistics, and opinion on the experience of blacks in higher education founded seventeen years ago by the late Theodore Lamont Cross.

We realize in making such an assertion that we’ve thrown down a gauntlet, so to speak, given the contributions to the black freedom struggle of, say, The Crisis, under the editorship of W.E.B. Du Bois, and John H. Johnson’s Ebony Magazine from the 1940s to the early 1970s, and of such lesser-known publications as Freedomways, The Journal of Negro Education and The Journal of Negro History.

That’s a debate that could be waged to all our profit.

It’s even more important to wage it now that the first issue of the JBHE published since Cross’ sudden death in early March has appeared – and its editors have announced that it will be the Journal’s last print issue. Although it will continue as a weekly newsletter, The JBHE Weekly Bulletin, and with online postings at JBHE.com, the run of its classic, 8 x 11 magazine format of 130-or so pages densely packed with information is at an end.

In the issue Robert Bruce Slater, the Journal’s first and only managing editor, reminded those of us who have been its loyal subscribers of the depth of Cross’ involvement as a skilled editor and author of numerous penetrating essays. He concluded by saying that “The publication would just not be the same without the contribution of Ted Cross.”

Indeed, true to the high standards which characterized the Journal from the first, this issue, in reprinting a selection of the articles Cross himself penned over the years, has underscored the breadth of his contribution to the advancement of blacks in higher education – and in the larger American society – since the 1960s. They are as fresh and vital today as when they first appeared. Ted Cross was more than a highly successful entrepreneur. He was one of the major thinkers on issues of race and social justice of our time. For both those reasons, Ted Cross, as Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson put it, “inspires more tributes than feathers on a wing.”

Even so, there was always much more to the Journal than Cross’ own work, as the tributes printed in the issue from a wide variety of scholars and others bear eloquent witness to: Manning Marable, of Columbia, wrote that it has provided “the critical analysis that is absolutely essential in our struggle for African-American education.” Nell Irvin Painter, of Princeton, said that “Issue by issue, [the Journal] laid out the wealth of scholarship in the field of black studies, particularly that by black authors. And by profiling our rich historical tradition, he resisted the temptation to view black scholars as some sort of recent invention.” Glenn Loury, of Brown University, proclaimed it “simply the finest periodical of its kind being published today.”

As we’ve said, we would praise it even more boldly, for these major reasons:

First, Cross rightly understood that blacks acquiring higher educational credentials, particularly from elite colleges and universities, was the very foundation of their right to compete for status and resources of the post-technological American and global society. Thus, examining the progress of racial integration was a matter of the greatest importance.

Second, he understood that gathering comprehensive statistics was crucial to verifying what progress had – and had not — been made.

Finally, he was able to take advantage of the heightened racial sensitivity and greater tolerance of American society, and use both the greater ease in gathering data and the mass public’s greater access to information the digital era provides as a tool to pressure higher education for continued change.

As Lee D. Baker, dean of academic affairs at Duke University, writes in this final print issue of the Journal, its “relentless pursuit of educational statistics documenting how far blacks have come, but how far we must go, has been an invaluable resource for all in the academy. This puts your publication head and shoulders above all others.”