Martin Luther King Jr. Day has gotten me thinking about what teaching African-American history was like 40 years ago. King, recently vibrantly alive, was just becoming a figure to be memorialized in death. Coupled with vigorous protests over a war abroad, events at home over the past decade had tumbled down so quickly—Rosa Parks, Brown v. Board of Education, Freedom Marchers, Selma, the “I Have a Dream” speech—we barely had time to take them in. Still less did most Americans know the complexity of the African-American past.
The push for new courses, departments, and more black faculty grew rapidly once predominantly white colleges began recruiting black students in substantial numbers, and those students began to demand that we bring into the open hard historical facts like the details of Reconstruction. I had done my graduate work on the Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal welfare project designed to aid freed slaves at the end of the Civil War. As a junior member of the faculty at Yale University and a member of a committee hammering out plans for a department of African-American studies, I was asked to teach a new lecture course.
I conceived of History 31, African-American History, as a narrative through time. It was all fairly straightforward—except for the fact that I am white. Although there were more white than black students in the class, the latter felt a proprietary interest. One alumnus, Henry Louis Gates Jr., now at Harvard University, said in an interview years later that “after every lecture some black militant with a big Afro—I had a two-foot Afro, too—would stand up and say, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll ask it nice: When are we going to get a black person here?’ McFeely was unflappable. If somebody had said that to me, I would have been ticked off and I would have told them that they misunderstood the nature of learning and blah, blah, blah. But he was very, very patient. He said, ‘Look. We need to get more people of color into universities such as Yale, but in the meantime, I’m doing the best that I can.’”
The students’ demand was met; the next year John W. Blassingame became the first black member of the history department. I still hold that it is perfectly appropriate for someone white to be a scholar of African-American history, and I know that year’s teaching was the most exciting of my 37 years in the classroom.
The course ran on uneventfully until after spring break. But the spring of 1970 was unlike any other in New Haven, or at colleges across the country. Two issues consumed us: the unfinished, radicalized civil-rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement with which it crossed paths.
The rallying cry of Black Power demanded action in many aspects of society. Opposition to the Vietnam War was intensifying. Students in my class may have been deeply interested in racial issues, but nothing catalyzed the university as a whole more than the draft did. Every man was concerned about his Selective Service number, and many wondered whether they would be sent to fight a war that they ardently opposed.
With the revelation that the United States had been secretly bombing Cambodia, the antiwar movement reached a crisis point. Students organized a surprisingly effective strike, arguing that holding class was inappropriate at a time of national stress. Some faculty members canceled class; others staunchly went ahead. Still others of us held class but said we would not penalize nonattendance. The academic year was coming to a close, and graduation records might be affected.
Then came the nationwide call for a May Day demonstration on the New Haven green, in opposition to the (second) trial of Bobby Seale, a founder of the Black Panthers, who was accused of ordering the murder of an alleged FBI informant.
The Yale faculty discussed whether to take a position. To pretend that such outside issues should be ignored in favor of the usual faculty concerns would seem like indifference. There had been a murder, a fact seemingly forgotten as protesters claimed that no black man could get a fair trial in a white courtroom, but even the aristocratic, conservative president of Yale, Kingman Brewster Jr., voiced doubts.
Thousands of protesters were expected from around the country. Yale began to prepare. I watched hikers’ tents going up on college lawns and garbage cans filled with Familia, supplied by Yale, being hauled into place. The visitors had to be fed. To signal for calm, Brewster and his wife nearly wore their dog out casually strolling the streets around campus.
As darkness fell on the rally, suddenly there was an order to disperse. Angry defiance followed; tear gas began. Running toward campus, we saw garbage cans filled with water for stinging eyes. Going out again, I saw a big semicircle of armed National Guardsmen, looking young and scared. Because the college had not locked its gates, not many protesters had returned to confront them; they were not forced to act. (I have always thought Brewster’s choice to keep the gates unlocked, defying some alumni requests, saved us untold injuries.)
As things quieted down, on a mild May Tuesday, I set out for my regular class. A sparse sprinkling of students—all white, as I recall; most black students were supporting the strike—was already there. I began putting a rough outline of my lecture on the blackboard, together with statistics illustrating the day’s topic. Turning to face the class, I found myself looking down at three camouflage-clad men carrying automatic weapons. The spokesman—a black radical in town for the rally—said emphatically, “I’m closing this class down.”
Something in me felt defiant: My class, of all others, did not need closing down. With more presence of mind than confidence, I said that I didn’t think the statistics on the board made what we were going to talk about that morning irrelevant to events on campus. Decade by decade, the figures listed the number of black men lynched in the United States.
After a long, terrifying moment, the three men moved to the back of the room and stood there, guns in hand, throughout the class. When the endless hour was over, everyone dispersed. I wiped my perspiring face and asked one of my teaching assistants if I had made any sense. “No,” he replied, “but you got through it.”
As I look back, I believe courses in African-American history—and other fields—are as necessary as ever. Surely a Secession Ball, like the recent one in South Carolina, is enough to ensure that. Moreover, coverage in African-American studies has spread to the whole African diaspora. The nicely parochial centrality of Mississippi is challenged by the slums of Rio de Janeiro.
The country as a whole tends to think the fight for racial justice is behind us, thanks to the successes of the civil-rights movement. The passion for African-American studies is gone. Some departments are mighty research fixtures at our greatest universities. My impression is that nationwide, however, while the door is open, fewer and fewer white students enroll. I wonder whether a course taught in even the strongest of programs attracts students, both black and white, as socially committed as in the days of History 31. Martin Luther King Jr. would have hoped so.
