When I arrived at Johnson C. Smith University in 2007 as an Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs, Associate Professor of English and subsequently a chief of staff, it was as though my professional and personal identities were finally catching up to one another. A native of inner-city Few Gardens in Durham, North Carolina, 1995 graduate of Johnson C. Smith University, the boy who had once written “A Young Man Apart, A World Apart”-a title given by the editors in the Raleigh News and Observer on August 31, 1995-was now the man entrusted with forming other “young men (and women) apart” — students who carried the weight of broken neighborhoods and unspoken expectations, yet stood on the threshold of intellectual discovery.
At Smith, under the presidency of Dr. Dorothy Cowser Yancy, I experienced what it meant to serve at a historically Black college that was also religiously-affiliated with the Presbyterian Church. Dr. Yancy had created a culture of academic rigor coupled with an unapologetic affirmation of HBCU identity. In that environment, I felt license to pursue what had always been my deepest interest: the intersection of faith and learning as lived out in Black intellectual history.
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From Teacher to Scholar
2008 was also the year I published in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education: “The Role of Higher Education in the Religious Transformation of W.E.B. Du Bois.” It was a work of historical scholarship, but it was also personal. In tracing Du Bois’s journey from youthful piety to seasoned agnosticism, I was retracing my own questions: Can education erode faith, or can it refine it? Does exposure to the academy inevitably lead to skepticism, or might it cultivate a deeper belief?
My later book, W.E.B. Du Bois: Toward Agnosticism (1868–1934), would expand on this theme. But the 2008 article was my first formal articulation of a lifelong preoccupation: Du Bois as both exemplar and warning. He was the consummate scholar, the brilliant social critic, and yet a man who could not reconcile the church’s hypocrisy with its message. To study him was to be both inspired and haunted.
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The Yancy Model
Under Dr. Yancy’s leadership, I began to see what it looked like to embody a kind of Washingtonian pragmatism in higher education. She was a builder in her own right — fiercely strategic, deeply committed to student outcomes, unapologetically insistent that HBCUs deserved their place at the table of American higher learning. Yet make no mistake she was a first-rate scholar, the first African American woman to achieve tenure at Georgia Tech and a Du Boisian political scientist. I describe her as a philosophical-pragmatist-professor turned President whose brilliance and sagacity is not staged but represents the very best and brightest of organic Black intellectualism. (I chronicled her 14-year presidential history in 2008, The Yancy Years: The Age of Infrastructure, Technology and Restoration hailing from her rearing in Ball Play, Alabama and named her as my very first commencement speaker in summer 2014 when I had been named 7th President of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee University on April 28, 2014. The following spring it would be the First Lady of the United States of America, Michelle Obama.)
Watching her, I learned that administration is itself a kind of ministry. One can shape lives not only through lectures and essays but through budgets, policies, and institutional culture. Washington had understood this at Tuskegee; Yancy modeled it at Smith.
At the same time, my Du Bois work forced me to probe the underbelly of such pragmatism. Was Washington’s emphasis on labor and industrial training sufficient without a broader intellectual and spiritual vision? Was Du Bois right to critique its limitations?
The Yancy years, then, were a crucible. I was standing between Washington and Du Bois, between building and questioning, between pragmatism and critique — but always, I hoped, under the light of Scripture.
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Faith at the Crossroads
It was in this period that my Logia instincts began to take shape, even if they were not yet named as such. When I taught students the speeches of Washington or the essays of Du Bois, I often found myself turning, almost unconsciously, to biblical parallels:
• Washington’s Atlanta Compromise Address as a kind of Jeremiah call — urging the people to plant gardens and build houses in exile.
• Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk as an echo of the Psalmist’s lament — “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept.”
It became increasingly clear to me that the story of Black higher education could not be told apart from Scripture. Washington and Du Bois may not have fully agreed on the role of faith, but their struggles were framed within a culture where the Bible was always present, whether embraced or resisted.
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Apart No Longer
Looking back, I see the Yancy years as a decisive step in my own journey from being “a young man apart” to being a man who could interpret apartness for others. At Smith, I was no longer simply the boy trying to bridge worlds. I had become the professor, scholar, administrator culminating into a president who could show students how Washington built with his hands, how Du Bois wrestled with his mind, and how both men — knowingly or not — stood in relation to the God of Scripture.
If 1995 was my Genesis, then 2025 my Revelation— the moment I realized that higher education itself is a field of Calling, and that to stand at the intersection of faith and learning was not to choose between Washington and Du Bois but to walk with both of them into a wilderness still seeking its Promised Land.
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