KEEPING ON KEEPING ON

I have often observed that when and where one is born, over which one has no control whatsoever, determines the politics of the world in which one lives more than anything that one does or says or hopes or fears. All any of us can do is to fight for what we believe in during the brief few years that we are alive. I uttered my first public protest 71 years ago as a young Harvard sophomore – it was a letter to the student newspaper calling on Harvard’s president to resign because he had stated that he would not hire a communist on the faculty (although, to give him his due, he said he would not fire one if he discovered him or her already on the faculty.)  Well, it is 71 years later and things are not looking good in the US of A.  I was never inclined to go gentle into that good night anyway, but I had hoped to approach the exit at a time more full of hope.

 

Among many of those to whom I gravitated on the left, there seemed to be a belief that effective political protest is somewhat like brain surgery, a complex delicate operation in which the slightest mistake can lead to disaster. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that effective political protest is much more like a landslide, in which huge trees, boulders, and great gobs of dirt roll down the hillside accompanied by vast numbers of twigs, leaves, pebbles, and bits of soil. Our attention might be drawn to a huge boulder crashing by, but without all that insignificant detritus accompanying it, the boulder is just an isolated incident, not part of an event that reshapes the mountain so that it is never the same again.

 

Let me give you a personal example from more than 60 years ago. In February 1960, a group of students from two black colleges – North Carolina A & T and Bennett College – launched a sit-in in the Woolworth’s store in Greensboro that played a large role in energizing the newly emerging civil rights movement in the United States. One of the Bennett College women who took part in that protest was a tiny dynamo of a woman named Esther Terry, who came from the rural North Carolina town of Wise near the Virginia border. Thirty-two years later, that woman, by then the chair of the W. E. B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, invited me to join the department and in doing so changed my life.

 

Back in 1960, I was a young instructor at Harvard. At that time there was a Woolworth’s half a block outside of Harvard Square, and a group of us spent some time picketing it in sympathy with the Greensboro sit-in.  In the civil rights movement, Esther was a sizable boulder or tree in the landslide that changed America. I and my fellow picketers were pebbles or leaves or bits of dirt, if that. But – and this is the point of this story – we were rolling down the right side of the hill and therefore we, with all of the other pebbles and leaves and twigs and great boulders and big uprooted trees were part of a landslide.

 

That is really all we can do. Oh, it is easy enough to pontificate about the world and if you are going to pontificate at all you might as well pontificate big. But when it comes to actually changing the world, most of us are pebbles hoping that we end up tumbling down the right side of the hill.

 

If the truth be told, I have grown weary of pontificating so I will continue to do the little things I can – donating bits of money, making a few local calls for the North Carolina Democratic Party, being sure to get out and vote .  Meanwhile, I will prepare once again to teach because that is what I have always loved to do and happily I still have the opportunity to do so.