William S. McFeely: White Teacher, Black Power
[William S. McFeely is an emeritus professor of the humanities at the University of Georgia and an associate of the Humanities Center at Harvard University. Among his books are Grant: A Biography (Norton, 1981), which won the Pulitzer Prize in biography, and Frederick Douglass (Norton, 1991), which won the Lincoln Prize.]
Martin Luther King Jr. Day has gotten me thinking about what teaching African-American history was like 40 years ago. King, recently vibrantly alive, was just becoming a figure to be memorialized in death. Coupled with vigorous protests over a war abroad, events at home over the past decade had tumbled down so quickly—Rosa Parks, Brown v. Board of Education, Freedom Marchers, Selma, the "I Have a Dream" speech—we barely had time to take them in. Still less did most Americans know the complexity of the African-American past.
The push for new courses, departments, and more black faculty grew rapidly once predominantly white colleges began recruiting black students in substantial numbers, and those students began to demand that we bring into the open hard historical facts like the details of Reconstruction. I had done my graduate work on the Freedmen's Bureau, the federal welfare project designed to aid freed slaves at the end of the Civil War. As a junior member of the faculty at Yale University and a member of a committee hammering out plans for a department of African-American studies, I was asked to teach a new lecture course.
I conceived of History 31, African-American History, as a narrative through time. It was all fairly straightforward—except for the fact that I am white. Although there were more white than black students in the class, the latter felt a proprietary interest. One alumnus, Henry Louis Gates Jr., now at Harvard University, said in an interview years later that "after every lecture some black militant with a big Afro—I had a two-foot Afro, too—would stand up and say, 'Yeah, yeah, I'll ask it nice: When are we going to get a black person here?' McFeely was unflappable. If somebody had said that to me, I would have been ticked off and I would have told them that they misunderstood the nature of learning and blah, blah, blah. But he was very, very patient. He said, 'Look. We need to get more people of color into universities such as Yale, but in the meantime, I'm doing the best that I can.'"...
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Martin Luther King Jr. Day has gotten me thinking about what teaching African-American history was like 40 years ago. King, recently vibrantly alive, was just becoming a figure to be memorialized in death. Coupled with vigorous protests over a war abroad, events at home over the past decade had tumbled down so quickly—Rosa Parks, Brown v. Board of Education, Freedom Marchers, Selma, the "I Have a Dream" speech—we barely had time to take them in. Still less did most Americans know the complexity of the African-American past.
The push for new courses, departments, and more black faculty grew rapidly once predominantly white colleges began recruiting black students in substantial numbers, and those students began to demand that we bring into the open hard historical facts like the details of Reconstruction. I had done my graduate work on the Freedmen's Bureau, the federal welfare project designed to aid freed slaves at the end of the Civil War. As a junior member of the faculty at Yale University and a member of a committee hammering out plans for a department of African-American studies, I was asked to teach a new lecture course.
I conceived of History 31, African-American History, as a narrative through time. It was all fairly straightforward—except for the fact that I am white. Although there were more white than black students in the class, the latter felt a proprietary interest. One alumnus, Henry Louis Gates Jr., now at Harvard University, said in an interview years later that "after every lecture some black militant with a big Afro—I had a two-foot Afro, too—would stand up and say, 'Yeah, yeah, I'll ask it nice: When are we going to get a black person here?' McFeely was unflappable. If somebody had said that to me, I would have been ticked off and I would have told them that they misunderstood the nature of learning and blah, blah, blah. But he was very, very patient. He said, 'Look. We need to get more people of color into universities such as Yale, but in the meantime, I'm doing the best that I can.'"...