I regret that my rushed and short tempered response to your reading, may have discouraged you from pursuing the challenge my poem possess for readers like yourself. The challenge is to overcome preconceived notions of blackness.
Readers like you, live with a different perspective on the subject of "Blackness," which I believe is rooted in a racist interpretation of a Greek linguistic tradition. Necro. Your instinct however was to alter the poem to be more easily digested, rather than doing the work-out required for understanding-- to prove the poem wrong. But you didn't, you fell into it's trap, and assumed the poet must have made a grammatical error, for his inferior education. But alas, the poem justifies its unusual presentation, revealing with it the racist's lazy thought process. And refusal to lookup unfamiliar terms, ie, Necro (Nee- See- Ro).
Your misinterpretation of the text, is proof of the poem's assertions of the racist's linguistic ignorance. I E the tradition of Blackness being associated first with negativity, and then later transformed to oppress people of color-- who in most instances are not literally black, but literarily and legislatively black.
The poem attempts to laude the historically black college system for cultivating awareness of the historical distinction between Blackness and racism, by tracing its etymology.