Ch. 1 - Race and Place: A Sixties Story at a Southern Black University
Below is chapter 1 from Ken’s forthcoming book, How Did I Get Here? A Memoir of the Baby Boom Generation.
Standing on stage behind a lectern, age 24, I watched the auditorium fill with my new students. Two hundred and fifty freshmen. All Black.
I was ready to deliver my first lecture at North Carolina A&T State University. It was the Sixties: September 16, 1968. The course was world history. I felt young. And very white.
A bell rang, and I began: the subject matter and the syllabus, just as I’d seen my own professors do it. Why was ancient world history important? I explained.
They watched.
Uneasy, I digressed from my planned lecture on prehistory. I shifted to me, their new teacher: Chicago childhood, suburban teenager, undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and then graduate study at UC Berkeley, home of the Sixties student rebellion.
More silence.
I strayed again, to why I was there. But, no, I wasn’t sure about that. Instead, I drifted into a story about my first trip through the South, a childhood family driving vacation to Miami. We’d been refused service in a Georgia restaurant because my suntanned skin was so darkened we appeared interracial. And onward with the story: my skin became so dark, in fact, that after the trip my grandmother tried to scrub me lighter, back to white.
This brought a response: sarcastic groans and an audible “oh no.” Wrong story. I actually felt my stomach churn.
I heard many complaints in the weeks ahead. I spoke too fast when I lectured. My explanations were not clear. Voice was too soft. Writing on the blackboard was unintelligible. And just what did I want from students?
I worried: “Was the complaining about teaching or race?”
The silences ended. That was worse. Students arrived late, noisily shuffling by their seated classmates, exchanging greetings, after I’d begun lecturing, something I’d never seen in Madison or Berkeley auditoriums. Some left early, seats clanking, calling out byes to friends as I lectured. I pleaded for quiet and scolded for silence. But conversation hummed throughout my lectures.
I had a confrontation with one student who demanded to speak with me just as I began a lecture.
“Meet me after class.”
He resisted. I insisted.
I finally threatened to call campus security. He laughed before sauntering back to his seat. He sat up front, smoldering and snickering through my lecture on the ancient Egyptians.
* * *
I found myself at A&T because in 1968 I was questioning my future. A radical historian, in my second year of graduate school at UC Berkeley, I lived amidst spectacular change as I studied European capitalism and working-class movements. My own Berkeley student movement roared in the aftermath of the Free Speech Movement with daily demonstrations against the Vietnam War, race discrimination, and the campus administration. Hippies emerged in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood with a new counterculture of astonishing possibilities: sexual revolution, mind expanding drugs, psychedelic music, and communes.
I wondered why, in this revolutionary upheaval, I should become a scholar and teacher devoted to the past. I saw myself on the sidelines, watching the explosions of my generation as I quietly became a historian, missing my own historic moment, out of place.
I was avoiding the draft through a student deferment. My baby boom generation provided the manpower for fighting the war. But for me, becoming a soldier, fighting in America’s imperial war in Vietnam, was unimaginable. If called up I somehow would not go, but it was not a problem I wanted to face.
I could try a teaching job, which offered another type of deferment. I applied through a program that placed promising young scholars at struggling schools. I checked only the box for Black colleges.
Like other radicalized white students in the Sixties, I was inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. I had watched heroic civil disobedience for years on television, Black marchers facing snarling police dogs and pounding firehoses and jeering crowds of angry whites. I had seen Black southerners, with white allies from my own generation, risking lives to dismantle the Jim Crow system of racial segregation and demand full citizenship rights.
I supported this great social movement. I hankered to be in the struggle and make a difference. I thought I could do it at a Black school.
The tumultuous 1960s also was the bountiful 1960s. With one application form, that simple, I was accepted for a two-year teaching position at a Black college, North Carolina Agricultural and Technological State University. I located Greensboro on a map, in the North Carolina piedmont, the plateau region between the Atlantic Ocean and the Blue Ridge Mountains. This was new territory, the South, unexplored in my restless Sixties auto journeys back and forth across the country between Chicago and Berkeley.
I discovered that Greensboro was the location of the famous 1960 sit-in at a downtown Woolworth’s five-and-dime store. It was four students in coats and ties from the college, the “A&T Four,” who sat down to desegregate the “whites only” lunch counter. They had kicked off the Sixties by igniting a sit-in movement at lunch counters and public accommodations across North Carolina and the South. Hundreds of A&T students joined and a boycott followed in Greensboro. After several months, Woolworth’s abandoned its southern segregation policy.
By the time I considered teaching at A&T in 1968, violence pervaded the national struggles for racial justice. There had been years of ferocious repression in the South: mob attacks, police beatings, arson, bombings, and murders. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, which had played a major role in southern desegregation and voter registration drives, had shifted its focus to “Black Power,” ousted white members, and removed “Nonviolent” from its name. I followed the gun-toting Black Panther Party, next door to Berkeley, with young Black activists in black leather jackets who resisted the brutal Oakland police and developed a revolutionary anti-imperialist ideology.
When I was deciding about the teaching job in April 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated. After a decade of urban race riots, the King assassination triggered riots in cities nationwide, one of the largest in my hometown Chicago. On television, I saw my childhood West Side neighborhood burning.
This was the Sixties. Yes, I would go, I’d teach in North Carolina at A&T. I expected to find two great Sixties insurgencies at my new university: the Civil Rights Movement and the student movement. I was moving to the South. I’d find my place.
I left Berkeley in June 1968 with a master’s degree in modern European history and a carful of books by W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver. My summer projects beckoned me ahead: read about African Americans, and prepare to teach my coming students the history of the world.
* * *
It was a rocky start. I tried to interest my students in ancient Greece and Rome, ancient China and India and Japan, everything from Athenian democracy and Roman circuses to the Buddha, with no success.
My curiosity about the students saved me. I talked with them at every opportunity: A&T football games, the Nixon-Humphrey election, family origins, the Olympics fist-raising controversy, the Apollo space missions, academic interests and career aspirations. I wanted to know them and figure out how to teach them.
A month in, my lecture on the birth of Christianity was a breakthrough. I offered a secular account of Jesus Christ and his comrade disciples as communitarians, ascetics, and dissidents who challenged Roman authority in the first century province of Judea. I stopped the lecture for questions, my latest teaching innovation. My students, who I learned had grown up with the old and new testaments in their southern Black churches, grilled me about this strange notion of early Christianity as a rebellious social movement.
And then came the inevitable question: “What race was Christ?”
I had been preparing that lecture since the summer, without a thought to race. A Black Christ? I didn’t know. But that didn’t stop me from answering: “White.”
The auditorium exploded with groans and laughter, genuinely amused and entirely disagreeing. Why so friendly? By then they knew I was working hard to make this world history course interesting.
I thought about it. I recalled paintings of El Greco and Goya, with those bodies of an elongated Christ: ethereal, pale, and so white.
I admitted that I always had seen Christ depicted as white in European paintings, but I really didn’t know his race. I said I’d get back to them.
I returned the next class meeting with an answer, provided by an A&T colleague, an expert on early Christianity: scholars were uncertain of Christ’s race and skin color, but he probably was a Semite, a Jew of his time with brown skin. Possibly like me, I told my class, a mischievous provocation. I was, after all, “white,” but brown skinned and darker than some students.
They continued questioning me. The students were surprised to discover that I did not believe in the divinity of Christ, nor in an omnipotent god, or in god at all; I was an atheist. I was godless!
And then I was astonished to discover that everyone else in the auditorium believed in god, angels, the devil, and heaven and hell too. (Later that year, after many discussions with students about religion, I realized that some questioned the authority of Christianity and preachers and they doubted god’s existence, but they were not taking risks that day with reckless public declarations of disbelief.)
We had a final exchange at the bell when a student asked if he could pray for my soul. “Sure,” I responded, “I never take chances.” They burst into laughter.
I was launched. Teaching was fun. And here was a lesson: success teaching at A&T required my best preparation, but also honesty about the history and curiosity about my students.
After class, with discussion still buzzing all around, a student patiently waited for me with a question: “Are you Jewish?”
I paused, surprised again. How to answer? I didn’t know. There were complexities.
My grandparents were East European immigrants from the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe. My parents grew up in Jewish neighborhoods of West Side Chicago and I grew up in the largely Jewish suburb Skokie. I’d been raised in an observant Jewish home, went to Hebrew School, and had a bar mitzvah. But I had become non-observant in high school and politically rebellious at college. I never gave religion a thought as a Madison undergraduate or a Berkeley graduate student. I regarded myself as secular, without religion or ethnicity, a world citizen.
I dodged her question with an evasive answer: “My mother and father are Jewish.”
She nodded, taking it as a “Yes.” That seemed to explain to her our extraordinary class meeting on the birth of Christianity.
I wondered if she concluded I was culturally Jewish. Perhaps a liberal do-gooder. Or yet another Jew, ignorant of Christianity? Or a Christ-killer? Or among the survivors of slavery and persecution, like her people? Or a cousin to the ferocious Zionist founders of Israel? Or a member of the white merchant tribe who exploited Blacks? I’d read about plenty of antisemitism in American Black life.
I never knew. She walked away, satisfied.
But for many years to come, her question – was I Jewish? – haunted me.
* * *
I learned how to deliver my political messages through class lectures. That first year I used Greek city-state imperialism to criticize the American war in Vietnam. Starting with the origins of the Indian caste system, I compared American segregation since Reconstruction. I succeeded with a lecture titled “A White Man’s View of the Black Muslims,” launching from the 7th century origins of Islam, with applause at the end. The next year, teaching African American history and Asian history courses, every class was about these priorities, race and war.
I became a popular teacher, drawing large enrollments. I won a reputation for provocative classes and an interest in students. Class discussions about world history raged on after the bell: 16th century African societies and the slave trade, the ever more radical French Revolution, American slavery and the Civil War, capitalist industrialization and working-class life, Western imperialism and nationalist liberation struggles, Nazism and the Holocaust, the atomic bomb and the Cold War. My office hours filled. I had lunches and coffee meetings with students, where we discussed big historical issues and I learned about their lives.
I never connected with the Black faculty. These A&T colleagues in their 40s and 50s had lived through Jim Crow. I tried to imagine their experience with segregated drinking fountains and bathrooms, segregated restaurants and schools, sitting at the back of buses, discriminatory hiring, and the danger of challenging racial segregation. I wondered how they had obtained their higher educations, professor jobs, fine clothes, and suburban homes.
The Woolworth’s sit-in had been just eight years ago. I knew these professors had experienced civil rights battles in Greensboro, some in the mid-1960s, led by former A&T student Jesse Jackson. I read that hundreds of people had been jailed in these Greensboro struggles for desegregation of public accommodations, equitable public hiring policies, and public school integration. They were the generation that was ending segregation.
But I didn’t hear about it from any of the African American faculty. There was no discussion of the great Civil Rights Movement or local race issues, not at our faculty meetings or in my casual encounters. I didn’t have much contact with them. I received no dinner invitations or coffee invites, nor any inquiry about my academic interests.
I suspected it was my age, much closer to our students and their own children. But was it my race too? Politics? Berkeley graduate degree? Or was it the cocksure confidence of an insurgent generation that put them off? I was accustomed to professors at Madison and Berkeley being interested in me as a promising student. But in my entire time at A&T, African American faculty colleagues remained distant, a mystery.
I plunged into the world of my students as deeply as I could. I invited them to my apartment for special class meetings, dinners, and eventually dancing parties too. I was invited to their parties, dinners with parents, sports events, and also a black church service. But mostly, in my office on campus, I listened to their stories of rural childhoods, segregated schools, encounters with the white world, A&T dorm life, and ambitious career plans.
The surprises continued as I listened. That’s how I discovered the rumor. Over dinner with a student I learned more about my first semester as an A&T professor. A student story had spread about my ring. The story was still circulating.
The ring was a gift from my parents, with my initials: KK, for Kenneth Kann.
The rumor? That I was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
* * *
I found a wonderful attic apartment in a former ballroom atop an old subdivided mansion on a shady street near downtown. The mansion owner, who lived there, was impressed that I was a young professor at A&T. She didn’t mind my people were in Chicago or my previous residence was in Berkeley. She was fine with me having guests, including Black friends.
I began inviting friends, faculty and students, Black and white. Then I held a few mixed-race dinners. And I had some special class meetings at my apartment.
I ended the first year with a small Saturday night party. It was mixed races, mostly Black, students and faculty. I first checked with the landlady. She approved.
That first party was a success. I began the next academic year with another Saturday night party, bigger and noisier, students and faculty, Black and white again, and African and Asian too. About 40 people filled my ballroom apartment. There was music, dancing, drinking and smoking marijuana. We were at it late.
Huge success. Requests for another party.
A few months later, one Saturday afternoon, just after I’d posted the signs throughout the mansion for guests to find my attic apartment, I heard neighbors talking in the stairway: “He’s having another nigger party.”
That word. It jolted through my body.
I was shocked.
I realized I had transgressed, even with the landlady’s permission. I had blithely broken an implicit rule. Against Blacks in our building? Interracial socializing? Blacks and whites dancing together? I had offended these racist neighbors.
Then two students told me they were uncomfortable coming to my apartment for an afternoon class meeting. It was the white side of town, a white residential neighborhood, where they had to walk. They had to open the front door to enter the mansion. Then navigate through the building, up three flights of stairs to my apartment.
They knew. It was dangerous.
And now I knew. No more parties in my ballroom. No special class meetings at my apartment.
I didn’t stop inviting friends. But I became cautious. I’d meet Black visitors downstairs at the front door and escort them to my apartment. And later I’d walk them out to the sidewalk.
I just hoped nothing more would happen. And it didn’t. Not at my apartment.
* * *
For my second-year at A&T, I set an ambitious teaching goal: every class meeting would be an exciting intellectual experience for my students. Just as my best professors had repeatedly thrilled me, I wanted to be one of those inspiring teachers.
The plan went sideways in the first week of my new African American history course.
I had fought for that course as an optional alternative to freshman world history. I’d made passionate arguments at departmental meetings that our students wanted to learn their own history, that the racial crisis in our society demanded it. Other faculty – Black faculty – disagreed. They insisted our freshman needed a broad perspective on the world and western civilization.
The department chair sided with me. It would be A&T’s first African American history course. But no other faculty member would teach it. Undaunted, I volunteered. I knew nothing about this history. But, no problem, I would learn it over the summer.
Walking into the second meeting of that new African American history course, I saw trouble. There was Michael Thomas, a Black Muslim student with little tolerance for whites. Sitting next to him was Tendayi Matamba, A&T’s new Zimbabwean professor of African history.
Michael was perennially disgusted with how history was taught at A&T, and perhaps with me too. He had an ever-present briefcase that underscored his serious purpose.
I had met Michael the previous year, a student in my freshman world history course. After my lecture on the 7th century emergence of Islam and the contemporary Black Muslims, he had introduced himself as a Black Muslim. We began discussing history. It morphed into a Black Muslim post-mortem after each of my lectures.
I once asked Michael how he reconciled the Islamic respect for all humanity with the Black Muslim dislike of whites. Looking me straight in the face, Michael explained, “Whites are not human. They’re devils.”
Michael had informed me he was a member of the Fruit of Islam, the paramilitary wing of the Nation of Islam. He was irate in class when I doubted the feasibility of establishing an independent Black nation within the U.S., and he insisted I should not offer advice to Blacks about racial separation. I often wondered if Michael wanted to punch me. Or hug me. I thought he actually was intellectually stimulated by me, and he could not stay away.
But Michael made me uneasy with his struggles over how to treat me. I repeatedly told myself, “Do not flinch.”
Tendayi’s surprise appearance in my classroom, next to Michael, could only mean a challenge. I already had met Tendayi in a cautious exchange at a faculty meeting before fall semester classes began. He was in his early 30s, sleight and wiry, with a trim goatee and searching eyes behind gold wire-rimmed glasses. He looked to me like a revolutionary intellectual comfortable arguing in a Parisian cafe.
How, I wondered, had Tendayi and Michael discovered each other before the end of this first week of the new school year?
I was outraged that Tendayi appeared unannounced in my classroom, invited by Michael. I considered it a violation of collegial manners: a faculty member does not barge into another’s class. I guessed Tendayi had been recruited to dispute something I had said two days previous in the first course meeting. What was it?
I knew that a confrontation was fast approaching. This African American history course, which I had championed, was all about race. Faculty manners, I knew, must give way to this challenge, whatever it would be.
I faced my peril. I introduced Tendayi and invited him to address the class on the subject of his visit. Then, a relief to me, we went at it.
The issue was the definition of “civilization.” Michael had asked Tendayi to dispute a statement I had made about “specialization” as the criterion for a society to constitute a civilization. They contended my definition had favored the white West with its superior technology, and wrongly excluded African societies as uncivilized.
My plan had been the opposite: start this African American history course with a portrait of 16th century Africa on the eve of the Atlantic slave trade. I was ready to survey the complex societies and rich cultures that enslaved Africans brought to the Americas. I had intended to establish the existence of African civilizations, not deny it.
Tendayi and I debated the definition of civilization in front of my class. We went back and forth on division of labor, social stratification, surplus wealth and cultural development. Tendayi, joined by Michael and other militant nationalist students, wanted “civilization” to apply to a society that could master its natural environment so that it survived over an extended time period. I questioned what society would not be “civilized” by this definition.
This was not a friendly discussion. I had no student supporters, but I was exhilarated to hold my own with this African specialist in African history. I wanted to win. So did Tendayi, who had the advantage of actually knowing African history.
As we debated, a thought crept in: “Maybe he’s right.” But I didn’t let that stop me. More exchanges. He would not give way. I would not retreat. We argued on.
And then, I had a strategic thought: “I don’t care.” I suddenly did not want to prolong this dispute. I could not win as a minority white teacher, even if I had the better case, and I may have a wrong argument.
I backed off my definition of civilization. I conceded Tendayi could be right. Debate over.
The outcome? Attracted to my own nemesis, I proposed we devote extra classes to African history before we advanced to the Americas. Michael and his Black nationalist allies were eager for “the real African history,” an idyllic past of great civilizations that out-achieved the white West. For me it was more library books and frantic preparations to teach more African history.
At last we moved on to more comfortable historical ground for me: the Middle Passage, the horrific trans-Atlantic sailing journeys of millions of new slaves from Africa to the Americas. I thought I did well, finally launching our course with this absorbing story of a historical injustice we all could agree upon. Until a student reported criticism from an English professor about my teaching this bitter history. This professor thought it would arouse student anger.
So it went with African American history, my most difficult course over two years at A&T. Every class meeting presented uneasy controversy: slave revolts (more resistance than history reported?), Abraham Lincoln (another white racist?), Reconstruction (Black golden age?), Black participation in World War I (big mistake?), W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington (will anyone defend Washington?), the Black church (helpful or hindrance?), the Civil Rights Movement (is integration desirable?), the movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” (why would Sidney Poitier be interested in this white girl?), Black Panthers Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver (Who is he? And why did Professor Kann vote for him for president?).
There was a chill hanging over the course, I thought, a racial chill. We had deep discussions, passionate debates, student presentations, faculty guest speakers on the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement, wonderful readings of Black poets and novelists and sociologists and historians, blues and jazz recordings, recorded speeches of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Even the tests were successful with take-home essays. I drew on my entire bag of innovative teaching devices.
But I knew it was not enough. I thought the class meetings were too argumentative, too tense. I found myself trying to restrain students like Michael, keep them in check so everyone could participate without fear of attack. Preparing every class session, I worried about clashes ahead. After every meeting, I felt the residue of discomfort. I knew what it was: I was in racial disputes where I didn’t belong.
I quickly learned important lessons in my African American history class. First, “race” in America was my history too, the history of whites as well as Blacks, but I knew little about either. Next, I was not qualified to teach this course. And finally, I knew that my students needed a Black teacher, an authority in American history, someone who could explore these difficult topics and delve into the student clashes, not just contain them. When the course ended after four tortuous months, I felt only relief.
* * *
The Vietnam War was a test of another second-year teaching goal: encourage independent thinking. But there was a problem: my antiwar mission did not include tolerating other views.
I had volunteered to teach modern Asian history that second year. It would be a way to learn the history and resist the war as a professor. I gave myself another crash course preparation: traditional Asian societies, western imperialism, Japanese modernization, Chinese revolutions, and the Indian independence movement. And most important, I focused on the nationalist and socialist struggle for independence in 20th century Vietnam.
I was surprised by high student interest in the course. A contingent of student Vietnam War veterans enrolled. Young men subject to the draft, like me, also signed up. And I had students who wrote essays about the loss of brothers, cousins, uncles and friends in the war. Vietnam, I learned, was personal for my A&T students.
My own draft status changed that second year of teaching, when President Nixon instituted the national draft lottery. I drew a high number in December 1969. It meant I likely would not be drafted. But I continued my war resistance. I could not understand why anyone would support the war.
My opposition to the Vietnam War dated back to 1964, as a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin, where I joined the ranks of radicalized students who believed the war was wrong and unwinnable. At 20, I had lost all faith in the good intentions of our government; I saw only deceits and hypocrisies by our leaders. I demonstrated against President Johnson, Defense Secretary McNamara, and other holdovers from the Kennedy administration who led the war prosecution. Later, teaching in North Carolina, I protested against President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger as they widened the war in southeast Asia, intensified the bombing, and proclaimed they advocated peace. I drove from Greensboro to Washington D.C. for massive antiwar marches. I stood in silent vigils holding peace signs noontime in downtown Greensboro.
My Asian history class was about popular insurgencies of peasants and intellectuals, revolutionary guerilla warfare against imperialist occupations, and the socialist alternatives for Asian societies. I lectured on the justness of the historic Vietnamese struggle for liberation and self-determination, against French colonialism and now American imperialism.
I immediately encountered the student veterans. They were just a few years older than me, but a world apart. They had fought in the Vietnam War. Some were married. They were committed students, self-possessed and confident, with ambitious career plans. They were outspoken, with a simmering anger about the war.
I didn’t have a high opinion of American soldiers. Like other UC Berkeley war opponents I knew, I didn’t blame soldiers for the war or think of them as war criminals. But I detested our country’s military build-up and glorification of the military. And, even with my own A&T students who should have been deferred and instead were drafted out of my classes by racist southern draft boards, I could not understand how anyone ended up fighting that war. I thought, “Just refuse to go.”
I argued with my student veterans about the Vietnamese people. I thought the veterans had racist views. They considered the South Vietnamese lazy and parasitic, living off Americans. They resented the North Vietnamese as cunning, winning the war through sneaky hit-and-run tactics rather than a straight-forward clash between armies. I tried to change their views with lectures on indigenous resistance to foreign occupation and guerilla warfare.
The veterans had contempt for the American war effort, and here we had some agreement. They believed the war was poorly prosecuted by weak leaders, while the American people remained ignorant. They wanted an immediate end to the war. But they also advocated overwhelming American force to pulverize the Vietnamese opposition, and I would insist they recognize the massive destruction this casual idea would entail. If not that, then they wanted immediate withdrawal of American troops, which was fine by me.
They believed the war racially unjust, another point of agreement for me. They told me stories of racism in the military, about Black soldiers receiving the most dangerous assignments and suffering the highest casualties, about white soldiers ending friendships once off the battlefield. Back in the United States, they experienced more racism, not the respect they thought they deserved after fighting for the country. They considered the war no place for African Americans. Here I believed them.
But they despised the antiwar movement – my Berkeley and Madison comrades – and here we argued and argued. They saw white student war protesters dishonoring the bravery of soldiers. They thought the white student protesters were cowardly draft evaders, privileged by race and class from fighting for their country, but ignorant of the true nature of the war and the threat of Communism and the sacrifices of American soldiers. That privilege – actually, when I thought about it, my own white middle class privilege – infuriated the Black veterans.
I could not remain cool and neutral here. I defended my antiwar movement, the marchers and clergy and street fighters and flag-burners and draft dodgers and hippies-making-love-not-war, and growing numbers of veterans too. In my view, we were the democratic opposition to the wicked war, the conscience of the country, on the right side of history. I regarded the A&T veterans as potential antiwar allies. But I wanted to prevail in these debates in my classroom at any cost. One of my Asian history class meetings turned into a shouting match between the veterans and me.
The antiwar students urged me on. They wanted me to present the war more clearly from “the Black perspective.” They criticized me for speaking of the United States’ war prosecution as “we,” meaning we Americans. They believed Blacks had not participated in war decisions, but were mobilized disproportionately as soldiers. They thought the Vietnamese were people of color like them, and American Blacks were oppressed like the people of Vietnam. They did not want to be included in any “we” prosecuting the war.
A delegation of veterans came to see me to clarify their war position. They wanted me to hear their experiences, understand their views, and explain how I understood the war. They asked me to explain why white students evaded the draft, demonstrated against the war, applauded the enemy and hated our soldiers.
That was sobering. They wanted to talk, not shout. They had stories to tell, and they wanted to be heard. We continued the discussion that entire afternoon, in my office, at the cafeteria, and out on the lawn. After, we had many future exchanges about the war.
These A&T veterans were the first soldiers I had met. Not a single friend from high school, college, or graduate school fought in the war. I was interested in their war experience. I liked discussing their serious studies and ambitious plans for the future: advanced degrees, business careers, engineering and law. I continued to detest the war and the military, but I admired these student veterans.
I learned there was no use in my advocating socialism, for Vietnam or anywhere else. Most of my students, veterans and otherwise, believed Communism was an evil that had to be stopped. As a guest lecturer in another class, I once said I was a socialist war opponent. The teacher, an African friend, later told me a student asked why he invited a Communist speaker.
I changed my teaching approach during the Asian history course. I stopped talking about what I believed. Instead, as I had intended at the beginning of that second academic year, I tried to foster discussion and debate. I posed questions that included socialist alternatives, but not only that. Most important, I resumed encouraging students to develop their own well-supported views.
It was like my African American history course, where I had tried to protect moderate students from intimidation by militants in class debates. Here I had to protect students from my own overbearing beliefs and anti-war militancy.
In my second year at A&T, teaching Asian history, I learned again who I was: the teacher.
* * *
Where were the great Sixties insurgencies I had expected at A&T? The Black movement and the student movement?
In my first year at A&T, there were no civil rights demonstrations, no Vietnam War protests, no student political activities that I noticed.
At UC Berkeley, I had been accustomed to daily student rallies on the steps of Sproul Plaza, political organizations with informational tables and recruiting, handouts of leaflets and manifestos, constant demonstrations and political actions. The rest of the student world that I followed in 1968 and 1969 also was exploding: a million students had marched with workers in Paris not long ago; student militants had occupied buildings at Columbia and Harvard; and then, back in Berkeley, there was a new fight for some land called People’s Park.
I heard stories about A&T student clashes with police following the King assassination, four months before I arrived in 1968. But I was so preoccupied with teaching, and so attuned to student protest at Berkeley, that I paid little attention to A&T campus politics that first year. Several Black Power organizations were active on campus. Student activists briefly occupied the administration building protesting pop quizzes and incompetent teachers. There was massive student support for a two-day strike by cafeteria workers. Students elected Black Power radicals to lead their campus government. None of it registered with me.
Then, suddenly, A&T was in turmoil. It was the end of my first year of teaching, May 1969.
There was a disputed student election at a Black high school near A&T. A Black Power candidate for student president, who had been barred from the ballot by the school administration, won a landslide write-in electoral victory. He was not allowed to take office.
The high school students demonstrated for weeks, protesting the unfair election and then the takeover of the Black high school by the white central school administration. A&T students organized support for the high school students and joined their protests.
“Black Power” was a new slogan at the time. I thought it made sense for my students. I had heard their Black nationalism in my classes. There was not much support for Black separation, nor integration either, but they believed in Black identity, pride, and empowerment. My students expressed it culturally, through hair styles and clothes and language. “Black Power” meant Black control of their own organizations and political agendas, with no deference to whites. In North Carolina, in Greensboro, A&T students had no white political allies, and few, if any, contacts with sympathetic whites. Most were trying to make their way in a hostile white world through individual effort, race solidarity, and independence. “Black Power” said it all, with militancy.
A&T students picketed for several weeks at the high school. Police responded in riot gear with arrests. Then came student rock throwing at school windows and police cars, police firing tear gas, chasing students, and helicopter gassing the Black neighborhood where students retreated.
Following days of battles at the high school, A&T students stoned passing cars near the university. The police barricaded nearby streets. Students protested in crowds near the campus. The police fired tear gas to disperse them. Gunfire erupted at the A&T campus that evening, possibly started by young whites in passing cars, or the police, or A&T students. Students in the dorms were sniping. The police were firing.
I was stunned. My students, the young people I traded ideas with in classes every day, were armed and battling the police!
This was different from Berkeley student protest. I had been in the massive 1967 Stop the Draft Week demonstrations in Oakland. Thousands of us from the campus, all white as I recall, had shut down the Oakland draft board with bodies and barricades in the streets, songs and burning draft cards, bonfires and spraying graffiti. We had encountered rows of police in riot gear, all white, face to face with us, their hands twitching with long batons. But, with our strength in numbers it had the feel of an outlaw street festival that halted the mighty war machine for a few days. No gun battles. No race clashes.
Greensboro was different. Troops from the North Carolina National Guard, all white as I saw them, suddenly appeared in town in military vehicles. Local and state white officials issued tough law and order statements. There were wild rumors of violent plots by Black insurgents. The mayor declared a night curfew.
Students called to warn me against going to the campus the next day. There was more gunfire at A&T that night. A Black student, an ROTC member who planned on a military career, walking on campus with other students after curfew, uninvolved, was shot in the head and killed. Other students were wounded. Police were wounded. Rumors spread. My students were sure the police had killed that student.
The next morning, I saw newspaper pictures of angry A&T students in the streets. On the front page, there was one of my students, a leader, bare chested, handcuffed, and glaring at the camera. I stared…that fury.
The mayor declared a state of emergency. I saw downtown fill with hundreds more National Guard, young white men in uniforms wielding automatic weapons. I received calls from students with reports of more shooting skirmishes and overturned cars at the campus.
Cut off from the campus action, I was limited to newspaper and television reports. I didn’t detect a sign of protection for arrested students.
I had to do something. But what? “Bail out arrested students,” I decided. I visited a liberal white faculty colleague, a professor with roots in Greensboro. I asked that he pledge his house as bond for releasing jailed students. He politely heard out the loony scheme. He said Black community leaders would see after the students.
I stayed at home with nothing to do. I listened to news reports of continued clashes between students and police, including more gunfire exchanges at the campus.
The third morning I heard radio reports that the National Guard, using a tank and military personnel carriers, an airplane and a helicopter, had assaulted the campus. They blanketed the grounds with tear gas, shot up buildings, and cleared the residence halls. They removed hundreds of students and confiscated a few operable guns.
A student later told me, “It was like a war zone.” I heard angry charges of theft of student property when the Guard swept the residence halls. I learned the A&T administration, which had told students to remain in their dorm rooms, received no notice before the assault.
That morning, I knew I had to do something. But what?
I decided to visit police headquarters. I would inquire about the arrested students. I would arrange legal help by ACLU attorneys, who I’d met through local antiwar activities. And the police would know I was monitoring the welfare of my students.
Police headquarters was downtown in a big building I never had noticed. I mustered my courage. I was a young white radical, there to interrogate the police about the city’s race clash. I walked up to the front desk and asked for information about arrested A&T students.
I was sent to another office, and another, and another. At each, I was directed higher and deeper in the building.
I passed through narrow empty halls and entered warrens of busy offices. I was scared. I was going in too far.
Finally, I was referred to a detective, in the topmost darkest corner of the building, it seemed. I entered a cramped office. A plain-clothed man sat behind the desk, almost within reach.
I did not look at the man. I saw the desk, with large glossy pictures spread out. Pictures of me.
My eyes fixed on the pictures. My face was circled in red.
No need for introductions. They’d been watching me.
I’d been active in Greensboro antiwar demonstrations, vigils with peace signs displayed for passing motorists, and protests in front of the local draft board. I’d been at strategy meetings of local antiwar activists. The Greensboro police, I now realized, had been there with us.
I sat down. But this would be a short meeting.
“I’m here to help the gentlemen from A&T you’ve arrested.” I was indignant. “Where are you holding them? They have a right to legal representation.”
“We’re in contact with leaders of the Negro community. Who are you?”
“Their teacher.”
“I should jail you right now.”
He bolted up and wheeled around the desk. An angry bull in a white shirt and tie, red faced, was coming at me. Fast.
I stood up. I laughed, my most nervous laugh ever.
I spun around and hightailed it out the door. Quick, back through the maze of corridors and down the flights of stairs and past the front desk, as fast as possible without actually running. Or did I jog? God, I was relieved when I scurried out the front door.
That ended my role. No students sought my help; they had warned me to stay away for my own safety. The A&T administration did not solicit my advice, nor did I have any to offer. The police would not deal with me, except as a nuisance to be watched and intimidated.
Reading today about that 1969 “race riot” in Greensboro, I’ve learned how little I knew back then. I had no knowledge of the longstanding racial grievances at the high school. Nor was I aware of simmering racial issues in Greensboro since the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins: discrimination in schools and housing and employment, lack of Black political and civic representation, mistrust of the police. There had been large demonstrations and mass arrests over these issues in the mid 1960s, with A&T student Jesse Jackson among the leaders. I didn’t even know about efforts of local interracial organizations to calm the 1969 conflict, nor that these organizations existed. I knew nothing at the time, and had nothing to do.
I did learn from news reports that hundreds of students had been taken from the campus that morning and detained in “protective custody” at nearby prisons. Later that day they were released to A&T officials.
The A&T administration immediately shut down the university and ordered the campus vacated. Classes did not resume. Final exams were cancelled. No graduation ceremony. No goodbyes to students or faculty colleagues. I just submitted student grades. The school year simply ended.
Greensboro white officials blamed these events on “radicals” and “outsiders.” Anything to justify this military response to longstanding grievances of the Black community. Were they referring to Stokely Carmichael and SNCC, through a local presence I hadn’t heard about? No. Black Panthers? Not in Greensboro. I knew that these “radical outsiders” were none other than my arrested student leader and his militant community organization and the A&T students who had supported the high school cause.
And me? I wondered if these officials actually thought I was a radical outside agitator. Had my lectures on the war and race and social protest movements prompted my students to act? I was proud of my teaching that year. But I worried over my responsibility for student rebellion. And, worst, I continued to suspect that I was completely irrelevant to Greensboro’s racial battle.
* * *
When I returned to Greensboro in August 1969 for my second year at A&T, student government leaders asked to meet with me. They wanted my ideas about their political agenda for the coming academic year. I was flattered. And uneasy.
The student president was tall and formidable, punctuating his sentences with casual contempt for whoever he was talking about. He spoke about transforming the school. He did not explain how. But he was radical and ready for action.
I thought this new generation must be a terror for Black administrators and faculty. No deference here. The student president spoke about them with disdain, as people using academic careers for personal benefit, with no concern for students’ welfare. I was uncomfortable with this outright hostility to his elders. I thought it was too harsh a judgment on an older generation that had accomplished so much in the fight against Jim Crow. I found the student president scary after the spring uprising. I stayed away from him that second year.
I admired another student leader, the one whose picture I had seen on the newspaper front page. He was an organizer with a community organization that had worked effectively on the disputed high school election. He was thoughtful and strategic, as effective behind the scenes as he was in public. But I was wary of the rage I had seen in that front-page newspaper picture. I was careful with him.
I proposed they mobilize student opposition to the Vietnam War. At that time, a few months before the new national draft lottery in December 1969, I was protected by a teaching deferment. But I had students, entitled to education deferments, who were called up for military service by racist southern draft boards, an outrage. I was preparing to teach an Asian history course as an extended critique of the Vietnam war. I thought we had to stop that war.
They decided to stage a campus day of war protest through student workshops and an antiwar rally. Closer to the event, they came to see me for arguments against the war. I had vowed to avoid student politics after the race conflagration at the end of my first year at A&T. But here I helped. Anything to stop that war.
I remained in the background on the day of campus Vietnam War protest. I stayed out of other student political controversies that year: a cross burned into a campus lawn, a fiery speech by visiting Stokely Carmichael, volatile student protests over the rumored consolidation of A&T into the University of North Carolina. I only watched.
But I already had a reputation. Students reported that other faculty members – from that older Black generation I defended – referred to me as “an outside agitator from Berkeley.” They said I had come to stir up student riots. For years I had heard many authorities blame sinister outsiders for various protests, and I had wondered just who were these outsiders. This time I learned: it was me.
Then came a report of a stormy student-faculty meeting, where student leaders complained about well-intending white faculty at A&T. “A cracker is a cracker,” they insisted. The students made an exception for me, “Brother Kann,” an endorsement that made me feel both proud of my relationships with students and embarrassed for dedicated white colleagues. The response of some Black faculty members to this student praise for me was not reassuring: “Isn’t he Communist oriented?”
Indeed, I considered myself a socialist, but actually, at that time I was more of an anarchist sympathizer. That second year at A&T I avidly followed the extraordinary exploits of the Weather Underground. This was a revolutionary offspring from Students for a Democratic Society. I was amazed. These were my own people. They were white student movement activists I might have known as an undergraduate. Now they were revolutionaries.
They had gone underground, waging attacks to bring the war home and smash the U.S. government. I read with astonishment about their “Days of Rage” in Chicago, a rampage of breaking store windows downtown and fighting the police. Then they launched Molotov cocktail attacks at the home of a judge presiding over a Black Panther trial, a Columbia University building, and military recruiting booths. Next: the premature explosion of dynamite for a bomb at a Greenwich Village safe house, where three members died.
I did not realize it at the time, but I was following the implosion of my own New Left. This was the collapse of the Sixties student radical movement.
But, Molotov cocktails! That’s what caught my imagination. A home-grown do-it-yourself weapon. A glass bottle with a flammable liquid that could set its target on fire.
I scrutinized a famous David Levine cartoon diagram of the components of a Molotov Cocktail. It was on the front page of The New York Review of Books. I thought about Molotov cocktails: how to make them and how to use them on isolated government property targets. I could strike a blow against the Vietnam War. I would let the world know a radical was in Greensboro. Of course, as I well knew in some other compartment of my brain, I was no secret to the police.
This, finally, was my political position in Greensboro. I was a white radical without a movement or allies. I was on the remote margins of all Greensboro politics, Black and white, with only a futile political fantasy: to toss a Molotov cocktail.
My job was to teach history. Other than denunciations of the authorities and race discrimination in my lectures, there was nothing I could do at the end of my second teaching year at A&T, May 1970, when the Ohio National Guard fired on a group of white student antiwar protesters, killing four, at Kent State. There was no stir at A&T. Nor eleven days later at Jackson State, when the Mississippi police fired on protesting Black students, killing two. A&T students were angry, and I thought our campus temperature was rising dangerously, but nothing more happened.
Earlier that year, during one of my meetings with student activists, when I had urged campus actions against the Vietnam War, a student said to me, “You know, in the end, we will live here with the consequences. You’ll go back to your life in Berkeley.”
He knew my place.
* * *
I knew the A&T administration could not possibly want me back to teach a third year. I was, after all, an outside agitator, as charged: my real and rumored radical politics, my unusual friendships with students, and my repeated advocacy for Vietnam War protests.
But, still, I thought I was an outstanding teacher. I wanted recognition for it with an offer for a third year of teaching at A&T. So, I was disappointed in spring of the second year at a meeting with my department chair. He gave hearty thanks for my two years’ teaching service, and then ushered me out his office door with a handshake and well wishes for the future.
I had every intention to leave. I knew my home was elsewhere. It was somewhere in the future. I intended to return to UC Berkeley for my Ph.D. degree. I planned to become a professor at a university like Madison or Berkeley. I’d be a scholar who’d write academic treatises, lecture to hundreds of undergraduates, and teach specialized seminars for graduate students like me. I would live in a real city, or a university town, not sleepy Greensboro with its deep white racism under a veneer of southern civility.
And Black Greensboro? A&T? They never would become my home. I had learned some lessons, and not just that I shouldn’t teach African American history. Everything about me, except my brown skin, was white: language, humor, musical tastes, clothes, politics, and of course dancing. On campus I was often mistaken for a student: a Black co-ed once patted me on the butt, with a friendly “Hello baby,” expecting a Black face. There was student curiosity about me, and plenty of appreciation too. But I found interracial friendships difficult. Racial separation, suspicion, and puzzlement had to be overcome, theirs and mine. I never could ignore race in Greensboro. This was the life of my students. Race. But I rarely found ease and comfort. I was not at home in the Black South.
I had no history or community in the South, white or Black. I was a Yankee, a Chicagoan transplanted to California, an outsider, at best an outside agitator. At worst, a nobody.
* * *
As my student predicted, I returned to Berkeley.
Arriving in summer 1970, I expected more experience with Black people in California. After immersion in A&T for two years, with all my discoveries about race and all my satisfactions mixing in that southern Black university community, I could not imagine an end to my life across the race barrier. I expected new experiences in another Black community, like the Berkeley flatlands or the huge Black community in neighboring Oakland.
But, back in Berkeley I resumed my comfortable academic life with white graduate students and white faculty in a white academic enclave, where self-absorbed white left-wing politics continued, as if I never had left. I had no contact with Black community life or any Black institution. I developed no friendship with any Black person.
Instead, I learned another lesson about race in America: race separation is all powerful, even in enlightened Berkeley, simply by default. Nothing offered me the possibility of meeting Black people, not my schooling, housing, politics, or friends. I had to do something unusual to have contact with Black people. But I did nothing special to reach those communities or find those people, and nothing happened.
I long wondered what I had to show for my two years at A&T. Over the next few years I lost contact with all my Black students and colleagues. I didn’t follow Greensboro developments after the 1969 race riot, when the Greensboro white establishment and Black community leaders addressed some longstanding racial issues, including fostering school integration and increasing Black political representation in the city.
For long after A&T, my main conversational topic was having taught two years at a southern Black college, a big thing I had done, with many adventures and insights. It was a marker of who I was, this daring distant teaching journey into the Black South.
California friends said that I must have made a deep impression on my students as a smart dedicated historian from Berkeley. Some thought I had impact by example: a young white teacher who was interested in Black students, built a bridge across the racial gulf, and worked hard to be an effective teacher.
Perhaps. I did venture into the American racial divide, and I learned how to be a stimulating teacher for my A&T students. But like many dedicated teachers, I always suspected I gained more from my students than they from me.
I knew that my students left me with a great gift, a question. It was the very question that student had put to me after my breakthrough lecture in the first weeks of teaching, the lecture on early Christianity.
She had asked me if I was Jewish, and I had not been able to answer. That question stayed with me.
When I returned to UC Berkeley, I switched my Ph.D. program from European history to United States history, my own history as I had learned at A&T. And I began looking for a way to answer the question of my own identity, Jewish or not.
This was 1970, six years before Alex Haley published Roots. At A&T in 1969 I had heard Haley speak about his great quest to trace his own family history over generations: back to Africa, the Middle Passage, through slavery, and then emancipation. Haley’s saga electrified me then, because I recognized that same hunger in my A&T students for their history. They wanted to understand who they were as Americans descended from generations of slavery, segregation, and the long struggle for equality. They wanted to shape their future with this powerful knowledge of their origins, history, and identity.
That was the student appetite I had tried to feed with my African American history course at A&T. Now, back in Berkeley in the 1970s, I searched for my own ethnic identity and history.
I found how to explore it: a Jewish community in Petaluma, 40 miles north of San Francisco. This was a once famous group of Yiddish speaking immigrant socialists who settled on Petaluma chicken ranches back in the early decades of the twentieth century. I found that Jewish chicken ranching community still existed with immigrants in their 70s and 80s, American-born children in their 50s, and an assimilated third generation in their 20s and 30s, my baby boom generation.
This was where I could answer my question. In 1974 I first tape recorded the life story of one of those Petaluma immigrant chicken ranchers. He described seeing the historic mutiny of the Potemkin battleship as a child in his hometown Odessa during the 1905 Russian Revolution. That first interview opened a portal to an intersection of world history with my own cultural search. That thrilling interview began my nineteen years’ preoccupation with answering the question of my own ethnic identity and telling the story of that left wing Jewish chicken ranching community.
As I found my place, a place in history through those Jewish chicken ranchers, perhaps I became ready to teach that African American history course I had attempted at A&T. Now it would be broader, a course on American race and ethnicity, including the history of my Black students and the history of my Jewish people too, and our complicated shared experience in America.
But I no longer was a teacher. Over the years of my chicken rancher inquiries in the 1970s and 1980s, I gave up teaching for writing, and then I went on to law practice. Teaching never again was world-shaking for me, not like it had been at A&T in the late Sixties. I had terrific students at UC Berkeley in the 1970s. But at A&T I had the extraordinary experience of crossing race boundaries as a new young teacher, of being welcomed by my students as a white visitor in their southern Black world.
I was intoxicated for two years at A&T. I knew that I was doing the most important thing possible: teaching history to help my students understand who they were and where they were going. I found my place for two years as a visiting white friend in the long Black American struggle for race equality.
My surprise came many years later. I discovered that all the while at A&T in the Sixties, I had started my own journey to discover who I was and find my place.