I was an exchange student at Tuskegee Institute — 3,000 Black students and 8 whites — during the spring semester of 1968. When I returned to St. Olaf — 2,000 white students and 8 Blacks — in the fall, a friend asked me what I had learned.
When I answered that I wasn’t sure, he replied, “Then you wasted your time.”
That bothered me for a long time. The truth was that in some ways I had learned a lot. I had taken courses in American, Negro (as it was called then) and African History. I had heard Stokely Carmichael speak live about Black Power. I had read everything from Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington to The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
What I thought my friend meant, however, when he asked the question was something grander and more profound than the number of Africans who had “migrated” to the U.S. as slaves in the Middle Passage.
Instead of increased knowledge and expertise, what I later realized was I had brought back a lot of stories. Like this one:
I arrived on campus late at night, found a place to sleep and got up around 7, still wearing the clothes I had traveled in.
Students along the way were helpful in guiding me to the administration building, where I registered for classes. When finished I asked the lady who was helping me for directions to the bookstore.
Before she could get started with my “trip tick,” she spotted a student my age walking down the hall and asked if he would show me how to get to the bookstore.
Emmanuel Harris smiled and said sure.
When we arrived at my destination, I said, “Thank you,” and he replied, “No, no, I’ll stay with you.” He then took me to his dorm where he introduced me to his friends and then accompanied me to the dining hall for dinner.
We’ve remained friends for the last 57 years, and he and his wife Jerri drove up from Indianapolis for my wedding five years ago.
We visited the two empty-nesters last year and after doing a lot of reminiscing, I told him stories about the many Black folks I had interviewed in my part-time job with the Review.
I had to smile as I admitted to Mann and Jerri that I still hadn’t figured the race thing out, but I did share that at the end of interviews with Black men and women where I felt trust had been established, I would often ask, “Are you angry?”
They always answered, “Oh sure” or “Of course” or something else but always in the affirmative. When I would say, “But you don’t seem angry,” they would respond with, “I’m not angry at you, Tom,” and then they would tell me stories.
Stories about being pulled over for “driving while black” or how when they would approach a white woman on an Oak Park sidewalk, she would cross over the other side of the street or when entering an elevator a woman next to him would clutch her purse to her chest.
Mann and Jerri seemed pleased to learn that I had actually been listening to the stories that the two of them could have been telling. And then they told me that their adult children were not angry and how that bothered them. Their kids had grown up in a post-Civil Rights Act, integrated society.
Although Mann was a resident of North Carolina, he had not been permitted to attend the university there because of his race. That’s why he was a student at an HBC when I was there. His children had never experienced overt racism like he had.
You might say that the racism their children had experienced was of a misdemeanor seriousness while what Mann and Jerri had to deal with was more of a felony.
Let me tell you another story.
Bob Sherrell has been an Oak Park resident for decades and has in some ways, like Mann and Jerri, lived both the American dream and the dream of Dr. King. He experienced racism in a more vicious, personal way. Bob was in Selma, Alabama, in fact, on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965 with Dr. King, John Lewis and 600 other civil rights activists. The plan, the vision was to stage a peaceful protest march from Selma to Montgomery 50 miles away.
About halfway over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, just as the march was getting started, they were met by a wall of state troopers and sheriff’s deputies wearing gas masks who pushed the marchers back and hit them with batons in the midst of clouds of tear gas.
In 2015 Bob drove down to Selma for the 50th anniversary of that violent day, and he said that I could go with him. Bob and I and 40,000 other people gathered to remember. As far as I could see, most of those gathered that day had not been born in 1965. They and I wanted to hear the story in the place where the historical event happened.
As Bob and I started the long drive back to Chicago, he asked me how the day had affected me.
After listening to all of the ways I thought race relations in our country had changed, he put into words how the day had impacted him, saying, “Nothing has changed.”
Responding to the surprise he saw on my face, he explained, “Did you see how dilapidated the residential areas in Selma are? Nothing has changed, Tom.”
Objectively, both of us were right of course, but what my Black friend gave me the privilege of experiencing was his subjective reality, a reality that no Black history book could reveal with all of its data and abstract conclusions.
History books and anecdotal, personal stories are both windows into reality. I feel privileged and blessed to view Black history through both.