I pointed out the degrees on the résumé that suggested otherwise, and the tension between us soared. When I confronted my superior and demanded to know what about the candidate from Grambling made him not a chemist, he grumbled something under his breath, and reluctantly sent both candidates for an interview with the chief chemist.
Simple racism, I thought. On reflection, though, I understood that I was wrong. It was racism, but not simple racism. My white co-worker had simply never encountered a black chemist before. Or a black engineer. Or a black doctor. I realized that we hired people not so much on their résumés, but rather on our preconceived notions of what the successful candidate should be like. And where was my boss going to get the notion that a chemist should be black?
Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books? Where are the future white personnel managers going to get their ideas of people of color? Where are the future white loan officers and future white politicians going to get their knowledge of people of color? Where are black children going to get a sense of who they are and what they can be?
And what are the books that are being published about blacks? Joe Morton, the actor who starred in “The Brother From Another Planet,” has said that all but a few motion pictures being made about blacks are about blacks as victims. In them, we are always struggling to overcome either slavery or racism. Book publishing is little better. Black history is usually depicted as folklore about slavery, and then a fast-forward to the civil rights movement. Then I’m told that black children, and boys in particular, don’t read. Small wonder.
There is work to be done.
Reading for Revolution
*
STOKELY CARMICHAEL [KWAME TURE]
I spent hours in the library enduring the taunts of the neighbor kids about being “a bookworm.” With Olympian impartiality, I read everything and anything.
“Ready for Revolution” is how Stokely Carmichael habitually answered his telephone. Born in Trinidad in 1941, Carmichael grew up in New York City, where he attended the elite Bronx High School of Science. Graduating from Howard University (where one of his young professors was Toni Morrison), he rose to prominence as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as an activist in the civil rights movement, and an advocate for global Pan-Africanism. In 1969, he moved to Guinea in West Africa with his wife, singer Miriam Makeba, where he served as an aide to Guinea’s president Ahmed Sékou Touré, and became a student of exiled Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah. In honor of his mentors, he took the name Kwame Ture. He died in Guinea in 1998.
In this passage from his autobiography, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture], we learn about the parents who nurtured his quest for knowledge and the voracious reading habits that set him off on an educational path that in 1967 led him to infuse into the diasporic consciousness the inspiring philosophy and bold rallying cry of “Black Power.”
One] thing that distanced me somewhat from much of the petty outlawry of the neighborhood guys was that I loved to read and my parents encouraged this. These were two extremely intelligent and resourceful people, but without much formal education. They were literate enough, but hardly literary. So while they were convinced of the crucial importance of reading and encouraged me in it, they could not offer much guidance about what to read. My mother would buy all kinds of books that seemed to her “educational.” She certainly bought a lot of encyclopedias, seduced no doubt by the salesmen’s line about “giving your children every educational advantage.” I also spent hours in the library enduring the taunts of the neighbor kids about being “a bookworm.” With Olympian impartiality, I read everything and anything.
In addition, there was the threat of punishment. My mom was the first line, the cutting edge of family discipline—my father being held in reserve for really serious offenses—and she was particularly vigilant and strict with me, the son. But as long as I stayed at or near the top of my class, she would cut me some slack. So I contrived to stay there and pretty much did. Whatever I knew would please Mother, that I tried my best to do. Anything I knew would displease her, that I’d try to avoid. For this, she has earned my undying gratitude because, without her firm restraining presence, undoubtedly I’d have ended up in jail like so many of my neighborhood buddies. Thank you, May Charles, thank you, thank you. (In Africa, when you mean to thank someone seriously, you have to do it thrice.) …
Bronx Science: Young Manhood
In any culture, the growth during the period from adolescence to young adulthood is of major formative importance. As American culture is organized, this growth period corresponds almost exactly to the four years of high school, which are crucial in determining not only the adult personality but one’s future.
That would certainly be my experience at the Bronx High School of Science, where in the fall of ’56 I was an entering freshman. At Science, I would face a number of interesting challenges—intellectual, social, cultural, political—all of which would play a significant role in my development.
Within our family, the news of my selection to Science had been greeted with quiet satisfaction, entirely as if it were no less than had been expected of me. My parents knew that Science was an “elite” school, carefully selecting and preparing the city’s brightest students for college. This fit neatly with a plan being developed by my father, who in his heart had never really left his beloved Trinidad.
My father’s dream was entirely consistent with his values: a family plan for both parents, me, and whichever of my four sisters wanted to sign up. The son would study medicine while the daughters would become nurses. While we children were completing our medical education, my parents would return to Trinidad, where my father would begin construction of the Carmichael family medical clinic, which he would personally design and build in preparation for the children’s return to serve the community.
I guess for my father this would represent something of a triumphant homecoming: the family united and bringing back useful and necessary skills to his beloved community. Something of real and lasting value to justify his hard work in what was to him a long, cold exile. So, from that perspective, my admission to the elite Science school was right on time, clearly the first step. The extent to which we children had enthusiastically endorsed the plan can be seen in that, today, two of my sisters, Nagib and Judy, are nurses.
Bronx Science was an education in more ways than the school might have intended. I had known that the students were drawn from all five boroughs of polyglot New York and were said to be “very, very smart.” So I expected high intelligence and academic rigor. But I hadn’t expected—actually I hadn’t given it much thought—the range of classes and cultures I found in the students there, once I got to know them.
Some were very affluent, the children of wealthy Park Avenue professionals and corporate executives. But the majority were just middle-class kids of college-educated parents, WASP, Jewish, Irish, Italian, and a few Africans born in America. Of some two thousand students at Science, about fifty or sixty were Africans from America. Some students were working class, or like me, first-generation immigrants from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, or Latin America. That first day, the only kid I knew in the freshman class was Lefty Faronti, who was working-class Italian from my Bronx neighborhood.
——
The first challenge was academic. The one thing we all had in common was the knowledge that we were all supposed to be very smart. Naturally, I was eager to see how I would match up against New York’s smartest. From the first day I could see that I was not the only freshman nervously sizing up the competition, eager for a chance to show off his smarts. And in truth, competition would be the rule at Science. It didn’t take me long to understand that these whites were not necessarily any smarter than me, but that they simply—many of them—had intellectual backgrounds that I lacked.
On the first day, in one
of the first classes, the first question we were asked was about our summer reading. How many books and which authors? Boy, was I glad, because I’d read a lot of books. My hand just shot up. Luckily for me, the teacher went in alphabetical order, because I was in for a shock.
I read a lot, voraciously but not at all selectively. My parents had not finished high school or studied in this country, but they knew I should read and insisted on it. But they didn’t know what I should read. As I’ve said, my mom brought home tons of books, any books she concluded were “good,” i.e., “educational.” I read everything and anything, from Reader’s Digest to the Hardy Boys and Horatio Alger–type uplifting books.
But these kids in the class had (or claimed to have) read authors about whom I’d never heard—Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and even names that didn’t sound American. Later I would discover that they were in fact Russian and French. For instance, if memory serves, a boy sitting immediately behind me claimed to be reading Capital by Karl Marx. Long before they got to me, my hand was down for I was scribbling furiously, writing down all these unknown writers whom I would read as quickly as possible, for I resolved I had to know whatever my classmates knew. I ended up with quite a reading list that first day.
Obviously these kids’ parents, like mine, encouraged their reading. Except that their parents, unlike mine, knew where and how to direct their children’s reading. But if academic intelligence is, as I do believe, largely a matter of cultural background, I was soon to discover that I too had an advantage over most of my peers. From the regular intelligence tests that they used to give us, I came to understand that these students were no smarter than I.
I have no idea what these tests are like today. But when I was in high school, they consisted of three parts: vocabulary, reading comprehension, and math. And whenever we would take these tests, I’d whup the class. I mean, I’d whup ’em hands down. It’s hard to say who was the more surprised, me or them. These were disciplined students with strong intellectual backgrounds who were very competitive. Yet, I was beating them?
By about my junior year I figured out the source of my advantage: my uncle Lew.
Within the family, the authority on things academic was Uncle Lew, my mother’s uncle. Dr. Lewellyn Silcote was a physician educated at City College and Meharry Medical College in Nashville. Whenever he came to visit, we discussed my education and my prospects. Remember the only three avenues to economic independence thought available to African men then? Well, whenever we’d talk, I’d say, “I’m thinking about being a doctor like you.” Uncle Lew would say, “In that case, study Latin. A lot of medical and anatomical terminology is based on Latin.”
“What if I’m a lawyer?”
“Same thing. Just about all legal terms are in Latin.”
“And if I decide to be a preacher?”
“There too, Latin again.”
So I studied Latin and continued to do so all the time at Science. I studied Latin for four years. I read Cicero in Latin. I read Caesar in Latin. And of course Latin has a vast vocabulary. More important, this is the vocabulary from which much of the English vocabulary has evolved. Most of my peers at Science were studying French, which, relative to Latin and English, has a much smaller vocabulary.
So even were I a C student in Latin while you were an A student in French, if we took a vocabulary test, I should whup you, hands down. And since reading comprehension is based on vocabulary and recognition of usage and syntax, my wide if unselective reading was useful there. So I always dominated those two sections while also holding my own in math since it was logical and most times you could check your answers… .
The Science experience over the next four years could not fail to have a profound effect on me in many, many ways.
Academically it was rigorous, completely a product of the Western Enlightenment: reason and the scientific method. The curriculum and approach were heavily focused on Western rationalism, scientific materialism, the physical sciences, and the scientific method, all of which I found logical and thus intellectually satisfying. This empiricism was as suited to the medical studies I then projected as to the study of social history and revolutionary theory and practice. Now the political would touch on the academic… .
One of the great political and cultural resources for me at this time was Michaux’s famous African Bookstore on 125th Street, which I would visit every chance I got. Mr. Michaux saw that I liked to read about our people and took an interest in me. One day I asked Mr. Michaux about Padmore. He showed me a copy of Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism and explained that Padmore was a great Pan-Africanist thinker who was an adviser or mentor to Kwame Nkrumah. I was fascinated. I did not have the money at the time to buy the book but I skimmed through it eagerly. Later I would study Padmore and become one of his greatest supporters. Even today I always refer to Padmore as a seminal Pan-Africanist and encourage all Pan-Africanists to study and learn from him.
Later I learned with interest that Padmore was born in Trinidad—he died in Africa—and that his original family name was Seymour Nurse. Nurse is a prominent name in the African community in Trinidad. I also learned that during his boyhood in Belmont (close to where my father had built his house), one of his playmates was young Cyril James.
Whenever C. L. R. James’s name came up among the white leftists I knew in high school, he was more or less pigeonholed as a “Trotskyite,” hence a revisionist and apostate from the “correct” line. But to the speakers on 125th Street, C. L. R. James was an African revolutionary thinker. Later when I came to read his Black Jacobins, I was thrilled—moved and inspired. That book is a powerful historical classic on the revolutionary struggle against slavery in Haiti, which especially emphasizes the revolutionary roles, spirit, and character of Haiti’s African masses in that struggle. I was just overwhelmed. I loved it. I strongly recommend this great book to young Africans interested in their peoples’ legacy of struggle.
Still later I would discover another of Harlem’s great treasures, the Schomburg Collection. When Malcolm X began to become a presence in Harlem as the dynamic young minister who was organizing Mohammed’s Mosque #7, a story began to circulate that established the young minster’s character.
According to the story, Malcolm was driving along and saw a group of young brothers shooting craps on a sidewalk. He stopped the car and approached the game. He either seized or put his foot on the dice. Of course, the players started to get into they bad bags. Malcolm froze them with that look he had. My young brothers, you know what this building is? he asked. Yeah, I thought so. You don’t know, do you? This is the Schomburg Collection. It’s got damn near everything ever written by or about black people. And what you doing? Instead of being inside learning about yourself, your people, and our history, you out here in darkness shooting dice. That’s what’s wrong with us, why Mr. Muhammad says, “If you want to hide something from the black man, put it in a library.”
Now, I was not among those crapshooters. But the story impressed on me the importance of the Schomburg and I began to spend many a profitable hour there… .
Early in my senior year the Young Communists at Science organized a bus for a demonstration against the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington. I was on the bus. I am not sure whether I was the sole African on that bus, but if I wasn’t we sure were not many. This would not have been unusual in left political actions at Science, so I never gave it a thought.
The demonstration was in progress (I think at the White House, but it could have been the Capitol—official Washington, anyway) when our bus pulled up. We streamed off and approached the picket line, which was of impressive size given the oppressive political climate in the country at the time. As we approached the pickets, I saw something that would profoundly affect the direction of my life.
A section of the line was black. The marchers were not only all African, but they were all about my age. Man, I jes’ rushed over.
�
��Hey, y’all. Who are you guys with? The Young Socialists? The Communists?”
“No, man. We’re NAG,” said a brother who introduced himself later as John Moody.
“Yeah? And what’s NAG, my man?”
“That’s the Nonviolent Action Group from Howard University. Whyn’t you join us?”
I jumped on the line and the brothers and sisters told me about Howard and NAG. That they were affiliated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). That they had been campaigning in Virginia and Maryland and in D.C., the nation’s capital. They struck me as smart, serious, political, sassy—and they were black.
All the way back to New York I was intensely excited. I was surprised at how excited I’d become to discover young Africans who were committed activists. But I was pretty certain that I’d solved the college question.
Everything I later found out about Howard confirmed the fit: Howard was a historic black school founded during Reconstruction to educate the children of “the freedmen.” It was named for its first president, General Oliver Otis Howard, a Union general and abolitionist. More to the point, its medical school was said to have produced a majority of the doctors in the African community here and abroad.
In my mind, the choice of college had been a done deal from the conversations on that picket line at the White House. When we’d left, I’d said, “I’ll see you in September.” And while I would apply to and enroll at Howard University, it was NAG I was really joining.
But at first my parents weren’t sure.
According to my mother, “During his last year in high school, Stokely started talking about Howard University. His father and I figured, because everyone said he was so smart, that he should go to Harvard. But every time we said ‘Harvard,’ he said ‘Howard.’ It was ‘Harvard.’ ‘No, Howard.’ Until finally we put the case to my uncle Lew, the psychiatrist, who was the family authority on all things educational.”
Dr. Silcote’s advice carried the day. He said that beyond a certain point the student was more important than the school. A serious student could get an excellent education at either place, as good an education at Howard as at Harvard. Besides which, he said, the friends you make in college tend to be friends for life. So Howard it was to be. Besides, it sure was a lot more affordable.
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