CHAPTER FIVE: 1968, CONVERSATIONS ABOUT RACE
Part 2
The degree to which the argument in the Black community had run away from Martin Luther King towards Stokely Carmichael was further demonstrated in the Autumn of 1968, when the Afro-American Studies Institute at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio opened a hall of residence for Black students only.
Antioch College was keeping faith with its history in being among the first American institutions of higher education to start a Black Studies program and the very first to open an exclusively Black dormitory,
The College opened its doors in 1853 and from the first accepted Black students. This was a radical act for the time, the decade before the Civil War. Only two other institutions of higher learning in America were integrated at that point. It was also radical given Antioch’s location in southwestern Ohio, a little bit of Mississippi seventy miles north of the Ohio River.
The village of Yellow Springs had always stood apart from the extremely conservative surrounding communities. It was settled in the early 19th century by followers of Robert Owen, utopian Socialist, when southwestern Ohio was still a frontier area. Dissenting Christians and abolitionists made their way to the town, set up businesses and eventually the College. In the decade leading up to the Civil War, Yellow Springs was a way station on the underground railroad.
The College’s first president was Horace Mann, America’s foremost educator at the time. He gave Antioch its motto, not in Latin or Greek as was the tradition, but in plain American English:
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
That’s a social activist’s creed and it came to define the place.
A century later, as race once again dominated American life, Antioch students put themselves on to the front line of civil rights activism and the institution tried to take a lead by bringing more African Americans into the rarefied world of elite private higher education.
In the early 1960s students began picketing Yellow Spring’s lone barber, Lewis Gegner, because he refused to cut African-Americans’ hair. Students demanded Gegner integrate his shop and the protests became national news. The New York Times covered the story. Philip Roth alludes to the barber shop picket in Portnoy’s Complaint. Roth’s title character, Alexander Portnoy, attends Antioch College.
As the Civil Rights era got underway after World War 2 the College had raised funds to offer scholarships specifically to African-American students. Coretta Scott King was among the recipients. In the mid-60s the College decided to try something more ambitious. With an initial grant from The Rockefeller Foundation, Antioch decided to dramatically increase its Black enrollment through scholarships.
The scholarships would not be given to students via the traditional criteria: high SAT scores and high school grade point average. The program’s designers felt that Black students with excellent academic qualifications would get scholarships anyway, what Antioch was looking for were students who showed promise but who came from communities and family backgrounds where they had not been in an environment to fulfill that promise. They scoured communities like Mantua, North Philly, Harlem and South Side Chicago looking for potential recruits.
The Antioch Program for Interracial Education rapidly increased the College’s Black enrollment. In 1965, the program’s first year, 11 students were accepted. Three years later 95 students were on the program. If that seems like a small number remember that Antioch is a small college. In 1968 the enrollment was a little over 2000 undergraduates. In addition, half the student body was away from campus in any given academic quarter. There were never more than a 1000 on campus at a time.
The College’s most innovative idea was the Co-Op program. Students took real world jobs as part of their education. The idea was to challenge the Ivory Tower ideas that are part and parcel of undergraduate education with a nearly simultaneous immersion in the world of work. The student body was divided in half with one group away on co-op while the other was on campus attending class, at the end of an academic quarter the two divisions would swap around.
The overnight introduction of people recruited from inner cities specifically for their promise, not what they had already achieved, was a noble idea but no one thought to prepare the students for the new set of circumstances they were about to encounter. Not just college life, which requires all first year students to make huge adjustments, but leaving neighborhoods where everyone was Black and leaving the big city behind for a rural environment.
Yellow Springs in 1968 was the paradigm of the American small town. Heading south on US Hwy 68 from I-70, you drove through cornfields, crossed a set of railroad tracks and came to a stop light. Then there was a main street about 200-yards long with two-storey brick buildings housing shops for basics, and a laundromat, pharmacy, movie theatre and a tavern. Then a stretch of big wooden frame houses set back from the road by large well-kept lawns, then another stoplight and back into the cornfields.
Alienation piled on alienation on the program’s recruits. They were very young people who by the very act of enrolling in an elite private institution alienated themselves from their socio-economic backgrounds. They were alienated from their fellow students by new ideas of self-segregation as a way of remaining authentically Black.
A five year report published in 1969, documenting the Interracial Program’s history for Antioch’s administrators, describes the alienation in detail.1
In the beginning the students aspired to fit in, but as they became more aware of their blackness strong feelings of black pride, black unity and black survival developed, and they worked earnestly on curriculum and housing reform to prevent manipulation by a white middle class institution.
It relates testimony from the students
They grew almost paranoid in their statements that Antioch brought them here to recruit them for the white middle class and to alienate them from their people. What they were saying was that they were afraid of being seduced by the comforts of the middle class and were afraid that they would be distracted from the goal they came with—that of helping others like themselves.
One student in a communications class told his professor he wanted to learn how to “deal” with whites, not how to “communicate” with them.
The report notes how white students were disappointed that many Black students refused to have much to do with them. It speaks of “short changed children of the suburbs” who had never had contact with blacks “Whether their ideals could survive the reality is part of the risk.”
Language became a place for the students to differentiate themselves.
That wasn’t entirely true. The lesser N-word had been pretty much ridiculed out of use by 1968. Malcolm X and others killed it off by modifying the lesser N-word with the term “so-called.” The disdain for “so-called Negroes” had percolated through the African-American community pretty quickly. Black had become accepted inside the community and out.
The controversy surrounding the creation of Unity House was a reminder that no old order has ever been killed off by changing a name or a word.
As for the greater N-word, long since dropped from use in integrated society, in 1968 it was a badge of honor, used by young African Americans to denote a person’s authenticity and fidelity to the Black community.
The argument about Unity House’s foundation and the establishment of a Blacks only Afro-American Studies Institute once again made Antioch national news. Psychologist Kenneth B. Clark was one of America’s foremost public intellectuals. He was also Black. In addition, he was on the Antioch Board of Trustees.
In 1968, he gave the Commencement address at the College and used it to assess the motivation of students who had been involved in “revolts” that had taken place around the country, most famously at Columbia:2
Yet within months after Unity House was set up, he resigned from the Antioch Board because of it.
Clark also wrote of the physical intimidation of Black students who disagreed with the prevailing Black nationalist dogma behind the creation of Unity House.
That was an Intra-mural Conversation About Race.
The same week Unity House opened I flew to Dayton from Philadelphia with a contingent of about six other freshman to begin studying at Antioch. An upperclassman had been sent to meet us and we piled into his ancient GM car, a Chevy Impala or Olds, big enough for four in the back seat, three up front and a variety of valises and other boxes in the trunk which was roped shut since there was too much luggage to close it.
We took back roads since the overloaded heap couldn’t do the minimum speed on Interstate 70. We quickly passed through suburbs and into farm land.
It really was an isolated place, Yellow Springs. Emerging from the cornfields and passing through the town’s first stoplight I felt like Dorothy waking up in Oz, only in reverse. I had lived in gaudy cities or close proximity all my life but this was like waking up in Kansas. A fifteen minute walk in any direction and you would be in the middle of nowhere.
And with no urban or even sizeable town distractions, everyone was focused on the tiny college community of which they were a part. Undergraduates are always a bit more self-absorbed than the general population but at Antioch, late adolescent navel gazing was elevated to epicurean heights. Each moment of experience was chewed over like a morsel of some new and exotic food, then conversationally dissected to death. And since we were living through/creating the greatest cultural paradigm shift since the First World War there was a lot to chew on.
In an undergraduate community so small and isolated, with few options for a freshman to explore off-campus, peer groups form quickly and peer pressure becomes overwhelming. There was tremendous pressure on all African-American students to move into Unity House. Not every one did. The lesser N-word, as an insult, was deployed against those who didn’t.
Don Deloney was one of the Black first-year students who chose not to move in and he was in my preceptoral group. Incoming freshmen were formed into “preceptoral” groups based on which dorm they were assigned to live in.
We became friends pretty quickly for the usual reasons you make friends early in college life. Don was a pretty easy-going guy and an athlete and we bonded over sports conversation. Sports was not a big topic of discussion among the rest of our preceptoral group. He had been a football and basketball star in high school in Flint, Michigan. We were the only ones who actually cared about who won the Michigan-Ohio State football game.
A warm Indian summer afternoon, a few weeks after the quarter began. Doors open to catch some cross ventilation. Don invites me across the corridor to his room.
Can I play you something? I wouldn’t play this for the others but I think you can handle it.
He slips a record out of its jacket. Speeches of Malcolm X. Cues up “Ballots or Bullets?”
It begins,
The question tonight, as I understand it, is "The Negro Revolt, and Where Do We Go From Here? or, What Next?" In my little humble way of understanding it, it points toward either the ballot or the bullet.
The speech had been given at churches in Cleveland and later Detroit during the spring of the previous presidential election year, 1964. It was the moment when the first of Lyndon Johnson’s great Civil Rights bills was working its way through the Congressional legislative process. Malcolm X was not impressed by the filibusters, the long-hours of kowtowing to segregationist Senators from the South for a vote on an issue of rights—human rights—not civil rights. He asked his listeners to embrace a new way of thinking and provided a political, economic, and social analysis of the condition of the Black community in 1964.
What is segregation, he asks?
A segregated district or community is a community in which people live, but outsiders control the politics and the economy of that community. They never refer to the white section as a segregated community. It's the all-Negro section that's a segregated community. Why? The white man controls his own school, his own bank, his own economy, his own politics, his own everything, his own community; but he also controls yours. When you're under someone else's control, you're segregated.
We ourselves have to lift the level of our community to a higher level, make our own society beautiful so that we will be satisfied in our own circles and won't be running around here trying to knock our way into a social circle where we're not wanted.
Throughout the speech Malcolm punctuates each section with the refrain, Ballots or Bullets?
It's time now for you and me to become more politically mature and realize what the ballot is for; what we're supposed to get when we cast a ballot; and that if we don't cast a ballot, it's going to end up in a situation where we're going to have to cast a bullet. It's either a ballot or a bullet.
He speaks of Black Nationalism as the only way forward and reminds people of their constitutional right to own weapons. He warns the wider society that younger blacks are no longer content to wait for the rights they are guaranteed by birth. Returning again to the speech’s refrain:
If you never see me another time in your life, if I die in the morning, I'll die saying one thing: the ballot or the bullet, the ballot or the bullet.
Ten months later Malcolm would be dead. Assassinated at a public meeting in Harlem.
The Speech ended, the record player arm lifted up. Don walked over and took the disc off the machine and replaced it in its sleeve. Looked at me to see what impression it made.
The sustained power of Malcolm X’s voice, sinuous, rhythmic and yet matter of fact, fuelled by a sustained, controlled rage had rendered me speechless.
And that was a conversation about race.
Every day in that first fall quarter of college the conversation about race went on. Some of the conversations were internal: reading “Blues People” by Le Roi Jones who had only just changed his name to Amiri Baraka. I had already seen the film of his play Dutchman and now read the companion one-act Jones had written, The Toilet. I raced through the Autobiography of Malcolm X which had just come out in paperback.
There was a screening of Birth of a Nation and I went with the Taylor brothers, Wesley and James, from North Philly—who had not yet committed to moving into Unity House. I learned that one man’s historical artefact of the beginnings of cinema is another man’s historical artefact of racist propaganda.
That was a particularly memorable conversation about race.
Early evening. It must have been second or third week of the quarter because I was at my desk, still making an effort to study. A battering knock on the door jolted me from my book. Another violent knock. Race five paces across my tiny room and pull open the door before it gets splintered open.
It was Henry with an M14, standard issue infantry weapon in Vietnam, preparring to ram the butt against my door again.
Hey, have you seen Lee? I’m looking for my woman.
I hadn’t seen Lee.
Henry was not a student. He had recently been let out of the Ohio state penitentiary and had stopped off in Yellow Springs shortly after getting out where he’d been taken in by Lee, a new friend, a student several years ahead of me.
I invited him in and he sat on my bed, the gun posed theatrically on his hip. It was a bit odd but we chatted amiably, for a few minutes, smoked a cigarette. Outside the window, a Unity House guy went running by, also carrying an automatic weapon and a bandolier of ammunition, which made me wonder if Henry wasn’t really looking for Lee but trying to avoid a shootout. Perhaps everyone was tooling up. Rumor of a big drug bust by the Greene County sheriffs had been ciculating for a while, along with paranoia that the FBI was coming to shut Unity House down.
Or maybe it was just posturing. Mao’s Little Red Book was popular reading among the Black revolutionaries on campus who took one epigram especially to heart:
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun
The door to my room had remaind open through our conversation and Lee had now joined us. She coaxed Henry away and left me to get on with studying.
A few days later I bumped into Lee and she apologized for the interruption and then said Henry liked me and she invited me over to dinner on Friday night. My friend lived in a basement apartment off-campus and when I arrived the table was layed and the air was already redolent with the smell of marijuana and menthol.
There was another fellow there, a friend of Henry’s, also named Henry and also just out of prison. We got high and ate chili and drank the kind of cheap wine that contains a headache in every glass—Ripple, Gallo. It was going along like the standard student dinner party when the other Henry suddenly stood up, pulled out a .38 pistol pointed it at me and said, “Who is this White motherfucker?”
I have no idea what I said to set him off. I could just have been being me, a four-eyed, verbally over-confident kid rabbiting on about a subject, any subject, completely oblivious to the other people at the table. Or I could just have been the nearest White man, one who had crossed an invisible border in his inner world, and he just wanted me dead or gone. This was an explosion of Black male rage out of nothing. Uncontrolled, incoherent rage just looking for a target and there I was.
We were all standing up now and Henry was standing about two feet away and had his gun pointed into my gut. Lee and her Henry talked him down and as the other Henry slowly lowered the pistol, she pulled me aside and said, I’m sorry about this. I think you should probably leave.
I didn’t argue the point.
That was a profound conversation about race.
And at the same time my conversation about race over dinner at Lee’s was going on, Haskell Wexler was in the editing room cutting together Medium Cool which is the only piece of dramatic narrative art containing a scene which comes close to capturing the mine field of every day conversations between Blacks and Whites in 1968. It is also about news media interactions with the Black community. (In the clip above go to 3:35)
Not every moment at Antioch was about race. In fact, most moments weren’t about race. For White students, the Vietnam War was the focus of most political discussions and sex, drugs and rock and roll occupied a lot of time. With conversations on the last two subjects in that triad at a very rarefied, dilettantish level. I didn’t play guitar but by the end of my third week had learned the entire product range of Martin acoustic and Gibson electric guitars and spent hours listening to experiential disquisitions about the different kinds of highs produced by marijuana from Michoacan and kif from Morocco.
Students went about normal undergraduate stuff. Sleeping through many classes, being inspired by brilliant teachers in others. And, it being 1968, discussing in all seriousness and with no sense of embarrassment, where and when the Revolution would happen.
Most of the time the Black students were just absent. Many socialized at Wilberforce University, a seven mile drive from Yellow Springs. Wilberforce, America’s first private Black university, had been founded three years after Antioch.
There was an element of self-sorting in the self-segregation. At a typical American college this usually happens around fraternity and sorority life. Jewish kids join a Jewish frat, jocks join the jock house. There would be an exclusive old money WASP frat for those of that social class. But Antioch being Antioch there was no Greek life; no fraternities or sororities. And in 1968, young African Americans, away from home for the first time and wanting to be among their own had the option of Unity House. However, the politics attached to the place made it impossible to see the dorm in such simple terms.
And there was real friction with the rest of the community.
The five year report into the Antioch Program for Interracial Education, written by sociologist Jewel Graham, a Black woman, noted that there was coercion of “negro” students who wanted to spend time in a more integrated setting to join the “in group” in Unity House. Some of the inner city recruits were not above intimidating white students by “preserving the street swagger and the in-group language of the ghetto.”
At the core of this tension was a struggle for authenticity and trust. How do minorities who have been segregated for centuries and suddenly have the door opened and an invitation extended to join the majority group in a society respond? Do they say, thanks, and change their culture, put aside their collective memory of physical violence, psychological abuse and enslavement, shake hands with the first white people they meet and step into the mainstream? What in American history would lead a black person to trust a white person in this way?
If the black students stepped away from their culture including its sense of separateness would they be less authentically Black? But without integrated contact how would someone like me be able to hear and understand Malcolm X? A lecture in a classroom could never have provided the intimate conditions in which Don shared with me something important to HIM, the words and ideas he was working through behind his easy-going, confident, captain of the football team demeanor.
A few weeks after Fall Quarter began, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, won gold and bronze medals at the Olympics in Mexico City and used their moment in the spotlight to continue African-American athlete's leading the conversation about race.
As in the outside world, sport at Antioch was a place where the race conversation took place. There were no intercollegiate teams at the College but there was a surprisingly lively intramural sports scene.
There was a flag football league. Unity House fielded a team. They chose for a team name the greater N-word. The word was chosen to discomfit white liberals.
Who you playing today?
No self-respecting white Antiochian would say, We’re playing the N*****s.
My team was probably the only integrated team of the seven or eight in the league. Don was our quarterback. Wesley and James played on the team as well.
When we met the N-words there was something more at stake than just the game. In retrospect, to keep with the racial-political undercurrent, we should have called our team the Integratefuls but we didn’t.
There was a fair amount of tension before the game began but in the event it wasn’t quite as violent as it might have been.
Unity House had the ball first, and being a wide and slow person I played on the line. I was opposite a guy named Hassan. He was an advanced martial artist whose skills had been demonstrated at a public performance organized by Unity House so when we lined up for the first play my expectation was of being crushed but instead he put a half-hearted elbow out and I raced past him.
The ball had been handed off to Les, a short guy with bowling ball thighs, bowling ball biceps and an impressive Afro sculpted like a cumulo-nimbus cloud which added about half a foot to his height. I lunged forward, got a hold of his flag and ripped it from the velcro on his belt. I couldn’t believe Hassan hadn’t planted me face first in the turf and I was more amazed to be standing with the flag in my hand. Les was not aware so he went rumbling on, careening and twisting fifteen yards past the line of scrimmage before his other flag was torn off.
As the ball was spotted up field. I called out in a voice an octave higher and several decibels softer than usual, “Excuse me,” and apologetically waved the flag I had taken from him. The ball was brought back to where I was standing.
The game was close for a while. The N-words were probably a touchdown ahead, when we drove down near their goal line and my number came up. Don had not passed to me yet, no one was paying attention to what I did and he called for me to drift to the right flag. “No one will notice you.”
Nobody did. I stood alone and Don threw a soft pass to me standing just inside the end zone.
The Unity House women had formed a cheerleading squad and as the ball headed toward me they started their cheer:
Ungowa/Black powa
We eat/White meat
The ball got closer.
Ungowa/black powa
We eat/white meat
As I had been taught at an early age, I watched the ball into my hands. And as I had not been taught the ball sailed right through them and fell incomplete.
More than half a century later I can still see that pass and hear the laughter from the cheerleaders as it sailed through my hands and see the chagrin on my teammates faces and I feel the embarrassment again.
We lost the game. A few weeks later Don and the Taylor brothers moved into Unity House. I don’t think it was because I dropped the ball.
And that was a conversation about Race.
While these intramural conversations were going on at Antioch, a new conversation about race was taking place in the country at large:
The election of 1968 marked the beginning of a new era in American politics. The Republican Party actively began courting Southern Democrats angered by Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights legislation. This was the same legislation whose passage Malcolm X was questioning in the Ballots or Bullets speech. Malcolm had been wrong, ultimately Johnson broke the Southern filibuster and the legislation was passed.
Johnson was aware that his action would cost Democrats their long domination of the South. In 1964, in that year of ballots or bullets, the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater moved the party towards common cause with White Southerners.
In the Autumn of 1968, Nixon and his team would go all in on a Southern Strategy to win the states of the Old Confederacy and their electoral college votes.
The former governor of Alabama, George Wallace running as an independent, carried five southern states. But the way forward for the Republican Party was clear and its courtship of the White supremacist vote became the bedrock of its future success.
Nixon’s Democratic opponent was Hubert Humphrey, arguably the most liberal politician ever nominated by the Democrats to run for President. It made no difference to us.
At Antioch in 1968, the politics of the Presidential campaign made little impact. In Ballots or Bullets Malcolm X had said:
A ballot is like a bullet. You don't throw your ballots until you see a target, and if that target is not within your reach, keep your ballot in your pocket.
None of our targets were in reach, the Vietnam war would continue regardless of who was President, Black Nationalist policies were on no party’s agenda.
And it was moot, anyway. The voting age was 21 in 1968. Most of the student body was not old enough to vote. And besides there was a revolution coming, wasn’t there?
And while we had conversations about race, overcomplicating the subject, spending hours trying to define the correct way to speak to each other, organizing rules for living in geographical proximity—integrated or self-segregated—without being overwhelmed by rage and resentment, in the wider world, Richard Nixon and his team were permanently changing the terms of racial debate.
We didn’t notice the forces of Reaction awakening.
From 1968 until today, the same dynamics are in play when Americans conduct their conversations about race.
On the reactionary side a very simple message, Us vs. Them.
On the other side, progressive allies engage in elaborate verbal rituals to determine what is permissible to say, spending hours redefining the meanings of words, tiptoeing around difficult questions, forgetting that in America simply being in one another’s presence—respectfully—as at the Reverend’s dinner table or in the cheap seats at a boxing match or playing flag football, is the conversation.
And that is part of the reason for America’s calamity.
(read on to Chapter Six)
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED033416.pdf
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sf2tmfIyplQC&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=antioch+%22Unity+house%22&source=bl&ots=c08nldsM58&sig=ACfU3U3DBzNx8JBEP7gGC22X8QzDxm-oKw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwib2taW-tLwAhXqAmMBHWPeA7wQ6AEwEnoECAoQAw#v=onepage&q=antioch%20%22Unity%20house%22&f=false
This is a profoundly moving article that resonates deeply with me. I was shocked by black-white student separatism at Northwestern in 1972. This essay confirms what I witnessed and tried to understand while writing a magazine feature on this topic in my senior year. Not a single professor including my advisor—the associate dean of the Medill School of Journalism was ready to address it. That is still the case today and it is a major reason why our politics and policies have failed, including DEI, which is being banned across the country.
In Antioch’s forward thinking, it’s surprising they initiated a ‘Black Only’ residence.