April 5, 2018--My Martin Luther King Story

Fifty yeas ago last night I was a junior faculty member at Queens College in New York City and one of my classes scheduled for that evening was an interdisciplinary seminar in literature and the arts for a carefully selected group of community leaders, mainly adults from the black ghetto of Jamaica, Queens. This meant that all 25 of the students in the class were African American.

We were well into a discussion about Jonathan Swift when a late-arriving student, Alan Jenkins, burst into the classroom.

Struggling to catch his breath, he finally gasped, "He's been shot," as if we knew who the "he" was. Sensing this, he added, "Martin. Martin Luther King. In Memphis."

"Is he . . . ?"

"I don't know. I was driving here and on the radio heard the report about the shooting. But not about his condition."

By then many of the students were quietly sobbing.  From their experience they knew the news would turn out to be devastating. It would not be that he was "just" shot. They had lived too long with violence in their lives to not immediately sense the truth.

A number of the students held hands and, kneeling, prayed. Others, clinging to each other, softly began to sing, including psalms and the civil rights anthem, "We Shall Overcome."

Grieving, supporting myself on the lectern, feeling estranged, denying what was occurring, I tried to convince myself that if I behaved "normally," got us back to Swift, reality itself would revert to where it had been only minutes before when we had talked together, dispassionately, about Gulliver.  

Then slowly it occurred to me I was the only white person in the room. I am not sure from where that feeling originated. It was not quite from feeling danger, but something close to that. Some primal recidivism close to tribalism, some self-protective reflex wired in my DNA. 

"Do you think you might drive me home?" Whispering was the most academically promising of my students, Nellie McKay.

By then Alan had come back from listening to the radio in his car. He trembled as he told us that it was over. King was dead. Shot down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The news, he said, was now turning to reports from inner cities across the country. Dozens were already in flames, stores and houses were set on fire by rampaging street gangs crazed with rage and fear.

"I'm afraid," Nellie said, "And about you . . . I don't think it's safe for you . . . to be driving home alone . . . the only . . . person in the area."

She meant white person. She asked me to drive her home not so much because of her fear but because she was concerned about me. White people out and about, well after dark, on the evening Martin Luther King was assassinated, would, she felt, not be safe. Being in the car with me would give me a margin of safety. She knew from inner-city uprisings during the previous few years that some white car and truck drivers had been ripped from their vehicles, beaten and even killed, as the riots spiraled out of control.

Opting to think less about myself I tried to concentrate on how I might provide safety for her--she commuted to the college by local buses. 

By then all the other students in ones and twos had departed. Nellie and I were the only ones remaining and we walked to the parking lot, clinging to each other.

In my car, a conspicuously yellow Opal, we headed south, needing to drive through segregated Jamaica, out toward where she lived in an integrated neighborhood near the bay.

Buildings were on fire all along the way. As I slowed to stop for a red light Nellie told me to ignore it, to keep moving, as it would be unsafe if we stopped.

To distract me from the news crackling on the radio she told me about her dreams--for her teenage son, it meat helping him get though his adolescence intact. By that she meant alive, out of the clutches and demands of violent street gangs. He was very bright, she said, but was already showing signs of succumbing to the allure of street life.

"I'm thinking of sending him to live with my mother, in Mississippi. Believe it or not, it's safer there. Even with Jim Crow."

"And what about you? You're a terrific student. Especially of literature. Are you thinking . . . ? We heard gunshots and saw a car a block ahead of us burst into flames and explode when the fire reached the gas tank.

"Turn that way," Nellie instructed me. "Quickly. Down there," she pointed to a one-way street where we would have to drive into oncoming traffic. "I know it's a one-way against us but it takes us to what I'm sure will be a safer route."

I followed her directions and at the end of one block we came to a cross street of abandoned houses and undeveloped lots where there were no signs of life or disorder. I began to breath more normally. 

"I am thinking about graduate school," Nellie said, resuming her story as if nothing unusual was happening, "Perhaps even working on a PhD. I know I'm a little old for that, but it's my dream. To be like you. A college professor." She smiled.

"We're getting close," she continued. "You are welcome to stay with me. But I know you live in Brooklyn and are married. Your wife will be worried about you."

I almost told her our marriage was on the rocks and that I would prefer to stay with her. But those emotions, if we survived, were perhaps for another day. 

At her house I got out to open her car door and, on the sidewalk, sobbing, we embraced for what felt like not enough time. As if we would not see each other again. That we were saying goodbye forever.

"We'll be all right," she said. "America will recover and be all right. You will be all right. And so will I."

With that she ran to the steps that led to her house and disappeared behind her aluminum front door.

I got home safely and the following week classes resumed. We all knew we were living in a changed America. Two months later Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Swift and Jane Austen lost some of their importance.

Nellie's son did well, eventually becoming a social worker, and after Queens College, Nellie pursued her dream. She was admitted to graduate school at Harvard where she eventually earned her doctorate. After Harvard, Nellie began a distinguished career as a professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin.

I reencountered her when she approached the Ford Foundation, seeking a grant to support her work. I was happy to be able to assist. 

Nellie McKay, at only 76, died in 2006.

October 3, 2104--Gloria Steinem's Legacy

Gloria Steinem turned 80 recently (everyone says still looks no more than 65). Partly in acknowledgment of that and also because she was and continues to be a major figure in the history of the Women's Liberation Movement, Rutgers University's Institute for Women's Leadership raised money from a variety of sources to endow a chair, a professorship in her name. It will be in the fields of media, culture, and feminist studies.

Everyone in attendance when the chair was announced (this did not include Ms. Steinem) felt it was not only well deserved but important.

As the director of the Institute, Alison Bernstein said, as Steinem turned 80, "what struck me profoundly was that there needed to be a legacy. When you do a chair you basically are saying this is a curriculum that needs permanence, it isn't going to go away." (My italics)

I worked for and with Dr. Bernstein during her and my days at the Ford Foundation. From her I inherited the women's studies portfolio of grants and an initiative that sought to see mainstream into the undergraduate curriculum some of what scholarship had learned during the preceding few decades about women's history and their many contributions to culture and the larger society.

Mainstreaming suggested that some of the earlier battles to support women's studies research had been won--women's studies programs and courses were by the 1990s widespread in academia and it was time, Ford and leaders in the field felt, to move from separate-and-more-or-less equal status to a permanent place in the undergraduate program.

In other words, in contradiction to what Alison Bernstein said last week at Rutgers, there isn't a pressing need now to endow a chair in women's studies as an expression of legacy or to assure permanence. Permanence's goal should be just what that old Ford initiative was about--to become part of the core curriculum, to move in from the margins. Not to continue to construct separate-but-equal realities.

Honor Gloria Steinem for certain--fund scholarships in her name for women and men, offer her honorary degrees, name classrooms for her, feature her work in special programs that chart the history of late 20th century feminism, but resist the temptation to make permanent separate streams of academic research and instruction.

The work still remaining to be completed to foster women's equality is to press the fight for equal pay, challenge corporations to continue to promote more women to the executive suite, and elect more women to Congress and, perhaps soon, to the White House.

But little of this agenda is appropriate for the university. It is up to women and men in all facets of life to join in actions designed to breach these final barriers.

April 9, 2013--Mariam Chamberlain

An accomplished colleague, mentor, friend, Mariam Chamberlain, at 94, died last week.

Our first meeting is still fresh in my mind.

I came to the Ford Foundation as its third program officer responsible for women's studies grant-making. She was the first. Between us, Alison Bernstein served brilliantly.

When I was appointed, I though of it as either a cosmic mistake or at least ironic--a man is to be responsible for women's studies grant-making? Must be a mistake, I thought. The foundation leadership will straighten it out within a week or two. In the meantime, it seemed wise to lay low. This was back in 1991 and things such as women's and ethnic studies were appropriately fraught with identity striving and politics. The striving I could identify and deal with, but the politics? About that I was not so sure.

So when Dr. Chamberlain showed up unannounced at my office during my first few days of lying low, I was wary but happy to see her. She was a living legend. If she wasn't there to excoriate me for my arrogant acceptance of the women's studies assignment, maybe she would tell me that she was an emissary from the Ford senior leadership to tell me it had all been an error and was asked to help extract me from a complicated situation. She would assure me, I hoped, that everything would be all right and I would soon be able to focus my work on community colleges and the reform of public education. Things I knew about and was prepared to work hard at to make a difference. That was why I came to Ford in the first place, giving up a secure position at NYU to do so.

But, no, she was there to offer an historical overview of the field of women's studies and Ford's remarkable role in funding many aspects of its early manifestations. How, before her time at Ford, the field existed largely underground and under-regarded. It existed, was tolerated on a few campuses as a marginal part of universities' offerings, with staff and faculty offices literally and metaphorically in the basement.

Research itself about women's roles in history and culture was almost nonexistent, but now--and here is where she saw me coming into the picture--it was time for the powerful research of the previous decades, all that had to that point been incorporated in individual women's studies courses, this needed to be--she used this word--"mainstreamed." Hard-wired right into the regular curriculum.

So the basic course in the history of the Civil War should be expanded to incorporate what the research about women's roles she and Alison and Ford had supported over the decades had discovered. Courses in American literature should not just include a book or two by women writers, but rather a "gender perspective" should be applied to everything studied--from Hawthorne to Bellow.

And, she briefed me, it was time to invite men into the process. For example, the organization she had co-founded, the National  Council for Research On Women (NCROW) from its beginning had only female members and its board had been and was exclusively female. It was time, she felt, that men should be welcomed as members and invited to serve on its board.

"So," I asked, "why didn't you, why didn't Alison, why don't either or both of you make this case? Wouldn't that be more effective than having me go over there and . . .?"

"I understand,"Mariam reached out toward me. "I know it won't be easy for you.  But I hope you agree that this is the right thing to attempt to achieve." I nodded. I always have been an integrationist. "And, I am sure, you would also agree that this would be a difficult thing for us to do. If you need to, you can say that since the Ford Foundation believes in equity in all situations, it is time for a version of gender equity now when it comes to women's studies. And that the field, thanks to hundreds of women and some men, and of course the Ford Foundation, is strong enough to be more inclusive. First, as feminists as well as scholars, we needed to do a better job of including women of color--in the early days the field was almost exclusively made up of white women--and we needed to get comfortable with gay and ethnic studies.  We are doing better at this. Much better. But it is time to take the next step."

"I suppose that's right," I said with some nervousness since I knew where this was headed.

"And I'll do what I can to help."

I believed her. She did, though my time working at this was complicated, very complicated. But NCROW and equivalent organizations and institutions took steps to integrate.

While this was proceeding, I saw Mariam along the way at various meetings and events. She didn't need to ask how things were going. From her network, which included everyone, she knew and she knew how I was doing.

After about two years of this, one morning she was again at my office door. She said that she knew I was busy but had one word for me. Literally one word--"You're a mensch."

If that in any way was true, it was because of her. She is, was unique. A great force in a deceptively frail body. All of us, especially those who are her hundreds of lifelong colleagues, will never forget her and will always be eager to acknowledge that she changed our lives.