NEWS & LETTERS, August - September 2009
Black/Red View
'Academic lynchings' at Harvard
by John Alan
Editor's note: As John Alan is ill, we are reprinting his column from December 1974 which brings to mind the recent arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates in his own home.
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At the 59th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, Dr. Ewart Guinier, chairman of Harvard University's Afro-American Studies Department, accused Harvard of "academic lynching of Black students."
Dr. Guinier's blast against this venerable institution stems from his experiences with President Derek Bok and Dean Henry Rosovsky. Dr. Guinier said: "President Bok and his underlings have not the slightest compunction about perverting truth and twisting reason and sequestering behavior, in order to maintain the oppression of Black people...[and] in fact, the treatment Blacks receive at Harvard today parallels their treatment in American life...[It] is no more elevated than that of the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, the current occupant of the White House, or the local police force."
CAMBRIDGE AND SOUTH BOSTON
Whether Dr. Guinier intended it or not, he has reduced the distance from South Boston and Cambridge to absolutely nothing. In South Boston, certain white people, given the moral sanction of President Gerald Ford, would prevent Black children from receiving "quality education" by threats of physical annihilation. Just outside of Boston, Harvard University seeks, by intellectual absolutism, to deny any intellectual understanding of the role of Black people in U.S. history and culture.
Harvard is not the only university engaged in the retrogressive act of curtailing and disciplining their Black Studies departments, in the name of academic efficiency and scholarship.
If an analogy could be drawn of this situation, it would be akin to what happened during the Reconstruction period. At that time, the Black Revolution was left incomplete and the reactionary planter class was able to reassert its powers.
BLACK REVOLT OF THE 1960s
The tragic result was that racism hung like a pall over Black Americans for generations, until in the 1960s the masses of Blacks were able to break triumphantly through on the issue of civil rights. The historical dynamics of this mass movement changed the very status of Black intellectuals by compelling the big white universities to set up Black Studies departments and to hire Black professors to teach the true role of Black people in U.S. history.
Once again we face a period of reaction. This time it is the Nixon-Ford "reconstruction" that would roll back the gains which the mass Black revolts achieved. The extensiveness of this racism caused elements of the "new Left" to consider that the near lynching of a Black man in South Boston during a school integration protest, was "really a protest against big government"!
Our only hope is for the emergence of a new Black mass movement, not from where it began in the 1960s, but from a new beginning, one that will forge a unity of Blacks, workers, women, oppressed minorities, intellectuals, students and all others who are necessary to end capitalism in the U.S. and build toward a society that recognizes no one is free, until all are free!
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