Book Reviews:
Life Journeys in Academia
http://diverseeducation.com/article/14449/
by Angela P. Dodson
November 30, 2010
College professors spend a lot of time preparing others for careers
but may have little time to pursue their own development or look back
on their own journeys. This selection of books is intended to offer a
chance to reflect on the long haul and to consider new options.
Sometimes academics take jobs as a short-term option, only to find
that it turns into a career. That first step becomes a lifelong
commitment to a field or a single school. That is what happened to
the author of this first book.
Race and the University: A Memoir, by George Henderson, $24.95,
University of Oklahoma Press, September 2010, ISBN-10: 0806141298,
ISBN-13: 978-0806141299, pp. 272.
Shortly after completing a Ph.D. at Wayne State University, Dr.
George Henderson, assistant superintendent for Detroit Public Schools
and an adjunct professor at three colleges, told his mentor he had
accepted a job as a full-time professor at the University of
Oklahoma. He was taken off guard by the reaction:
"You won't like it there. It's a small redneck school in a backward
state," said Dr. Leonard Moss, chairman of Wayne State's Department
of Anthropology and Sociology. "If you want to go to a suburban
school and live a nice, quiet life, let me find you a better place.
You shouldn't begin your career in a second-rate university in the
boondocks of Oklahoma. Besides, it's not a place where your social
values and professional abilities will be appreciated."
Moss was wrong about the last part, and in any case, Henderson was undeterred.
The year was 1967, and Henderson, born in Alabama and reared in East
Chicago, Ind., was soon to get his first taste of what going to
Norman, Okla., to be an associate professor of sociology and
education would mean for his family. The Hendersons were rebuffed
with lame excuses when they pursued their first, second and third
choice of housing. The family secured a barely suitable place with
potential after a White department chair accompanied Henderson's
wife, Barbara, to inspect a fourth property. The colleague, as he
disclosed decades later, led the sellers to assume that he was the
buyer who just brought his maid along to see how much work her boss's
home might require.
It was a mere foretaste of the kind of racial isolation and animus
that was common in the community and the university. On the one hand,
it was an era of hope as the university sought and some within the
academic body welcomed a new African-American colleague who would
be one of three Black faculty. The situation in the wider community,
on the other hand, was more dire than Moss predicted.
At home, the Hendersons put up with "obscene and threatening
telephone calls, garbage and a makeshift cross thrown on our front
yard, raw eggs splattered on our cars, and epithets yelled at us by
strangers in cars speeding past our house" not to mention
unwarranted stops by police asking why the professor was traveling in
his own neighborhood. The White-owned real estate firm that had the
guts to sell the home to Blacks was also harassed and eventually
driven out of business.
Even that was not as troubling to Henderson as the conditions the
Black students at the university endured. In addition to the blatant
hostilities and biases in the town, the young scholars quietly bore
the brunt of discriminatory practices on campus in dorm assignments,
athletics, grading, employment and other matters. Few in number, the
Black students were physically and emotionally isolated within a huge
university and had few places to turn for support. The students and
the community quickly made it known that they looked to Henderson to
help right the wrongs.
"We Negroes in Oklahoma City are counting on you to help the Negro
students at the University of Oklahoma ... to improve things for
themselves and their friends down there," a community leader told
Henderson after a speech Henderson gave to a statewide organization.
"And when you get some extra time, we have a few projects in Oklahoma
City and throughout the state that we want you to help us with too."
Henderson rose to the challenge. More important, the Black students
shed an almost universally passive silence to coalesce and empower
themselves, forming an Afro-American Student Union in 1967 that soon
drew up "demands" to present to the university president.
Eventually, with the help of a faculty adviser and Henderson, the
students won many battles and, of course, lost some. The strength of
his book is Henderson's detailed account of a tumultuous period in
the university's history a history that parallels that of other
majority-White institutions wrestling with integration and student
agitation in the late '60s and early '70s.
Along the way, Henderson let himself be talked out of leaving after
only two years and instead accepted an endowed professorship that
allowed him to work full-time on programs to improve race relations.
More than 40 years later, he is still at it, as a professor emeritus
at Oklahoma and through this book.
Especially enlightening is the recollection of how the Oklahoma
students, under his guidance, applied the philosophies of great
thinkers such as Saul Alinsky, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X and Mohandas
K. Ghandi, to their protest strategies. Henderson also often helped
support the students' demands with research and hard data, for
instance, using Black and White testers to prove housing
discrimination in town. The author is even-handed, giving university
administrators of the era the credit due for the role some played in
bringing about real change in the university. Henderson also allows a
few student leaders of the period to offer their recollections in
sidebars to the text.
The book is more than a memoir of one person, as the title suggests,
but is the story of how a united people can bring about change
through reasoned discourse with those willing to accept change.
.
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