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iT HE SPIRIT iT HE SPIRIT a iya DEF 4 A BLACK EN r LiF Sol iDING IN AMERICA F | Randall Robinson A PLUME BOOK PLUME Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Previously published in a Dutton edition. First Plume Printing, February, 1999 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 Copyright © Randall Robinson, 1998 All rights reserved f REGISTERED TRADEMARK-MARCA REGISTRADA The Library of Congress has catalogued the Dutton edition as follows: Robinson, Randall. Defending the spirit: a Black life in America / Randall Robinson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-525-94402-8 (hc) ISBN 0-452-27968-2 (pbk) 1. Robinson, Randall. 2. Afro-Americans-Biography. 3. Afro-American political activists-Bography. 4. Political activists-United States- Biography. 5. TransAfrica Forum (Organization). 6. United States-Foreign relations-Africa. 7. Africa-Foreign relations-United States. 8. United StatesForeign relations- Caribbean Area. 9. Caribbean Area-Foreign relations-United States. 10. United States-Race relations. I. Title. E185.97.R665A3 1998 973'.0496073'0092-dc21 [B] 97-34052 CIP Printed In the United States of America Set in Cheltenham Book Original hardcover design by Leonard Telesca Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN PUTNAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014. Contents Foreword xiii PART ONE: Behind the Race Wall i PART Two: Bridges to Seriousness 43 PART THREE: Toward Washington 81 PART FOUR: Moving Against Apartheid 125 PART FIVE: Of Triumph and Tragedy 165 PART SLx: Haiti Redeemed 191 PART SEVEN: Of Tyranny and Accommodation 223 PART EIGHT: Plantation Redux 261 Sources 287 Index 292 Bridge6 to Seriou6nem * 63 us. The few foundations that made such grants were cool to our inquiries. One foundation official told me bluntly that "black Americans do not adjust well to Africa." The implication was that white Americans did. Harvard Law School's young white fellowship counselor advised: "If you're going to Africa you'd better be married or you'll find yourself very lonely." When I asked him, "Do you give the same advice to single whites going to Sweden or France or England?" he appeared flummoxed. Traditional grantors were more than indifferent to our plans to work and study in Africa. Their resistance was only thinly disguised. The Sanderses and I took our dilemma to Walter Leonard, the black dean. Perhaps I should pause here to explain the difference between "a" black dean and "the" black dean. "A" black dean is a dean who handles all of the responsibilities that deans customarily handle. "A" black dean is a dean who only happens to be black. Twenty-five years ago, almost all major institution black deans were "the" and not "a." Being a "the" meant that you had been brought to an institution to "interpret": that is, to interpret the attitude of the school administration to black students and their attitudes to the administration. For instance, when the administration set up, without consultation or the feeblest demonstration of need, a tutorial program for entering black students, we told Walter Leonard, "the" black dean, to tell the administration, "Thanks, but no thanks." Now, told of our balked desire to go to Africa, Dean Leonard on our behalf complained vigorously to the law school administration, the Department of State, and the general foundation community. Within weeks the Ford Foundation created the Middle East and Africa Field Research Program for AfroAmericans. After graduating, the Sanderses would be off to Nigeria and I, for six months, to Tanzania. :'Are you political?" The acid-test question was put to me by a year activist black student only weeks after I had discovthe bagel. es." I had not the faintest idea what he was talking about. 64 * DEFENDING THE SPIRIT There are not many fears greater than the fear of appearing stupid. One must at the very least look thoughtful at the brow. And so I said, "Yes. I'm political. What's up?" In the sixties, one could be fairly described as "political" if one had, with a modicum of comprehension, fathomed complex political writings like Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and developed from such readings a "view." I was clearly not "political." I had never heard of Frantz Fanon and had a view on little beyond the feral meanness of racism, which, before arriving in Massachusetts, I thought naively was largely a disease of the American South. Oh, I had done some reading. But more about Kant than Kush. Much about Copernicus. Nothing about Cabral. Braithwaite's A Kind of Homecoming was poignant and informational but hardly analytical. Now I began to read beyond my law course assignments. Fanon, the black psychiatrist from Martinique who trenchantly described the tragic psychic consequences of European colonialism for Africans, I plowed through with more determination than comprehension. C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins told of an epic Haitian slave revolt about which I'd never even heard. W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk had not been assigned reading for me at any level in segregated Richmond, not even at Virginia Union, a black liberal arts college. Why? An impressive English literature professor had told our class of forty blacks in college that "the mark of a well-educated person is a mastery of Shakespeare and the Bible." This went unchallenged. He had blithely overlooked the literary output of three-fourths of the world's people, including that of his own fourth. What had he been thinking? What had I been thinking? (A white professor at Virginia Union, one Dr. Anderson, told our class that it was a documented fact that Africans had longer arms than Europeans. He despised us. He despised himself and our school as well for providing him academic refuge.) I wrote to a newly discovered organization inNew York, the American Committee on Africa, for information on the anticolo' nial wars flaring in Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Angola against Portugal and its five-hundred-year-old African colonial empire. They sent reams. Black people in Africa had been f Bridge6 to Seriou6ne6m m 65 eight years contesting Portugal militarily for independence and freedom. The United States was supporting Portugal. Gulf Oil, pumping thousands of barrels per day out of Angola, was providing Portugal, Europe's poorest country, with forty-eight percent of its war budget. Harvard University held the largest block of Gulf Oil stock of any American university. I was incredulous. Could I have been, for twenty-six years, that incurious? Could all these things actually be going on in the world (long have gone on, for that matter) without my knowing a thing about them? Could there be a connection between my South and Africa's anguish? Why was this news to me? I had been an avid news consumer. Why hadn't any of this been in newspapers or on television? I was beginning to develop a mistrust of information about all things I could not see or feel. I was beginning to develop a thirst for other sources of information as well. What do we really know about anything, anyway? Who deploys the information products that we get to select for consumption? Could there be some centuries-old Sons of Europe secret society of wizened and powerful grandees who decide what we can know and not know? Naaaah. But . ? Please indulge me. The point here warrants some belaboring. How do we get to know things? Or more accurately, how do we get to believe we know things? From newspapers, magazines, books, television, movies, teachers. Who decides what to include or exclude? Which countries, cultures, religions, and peoples do we focus on or ignore, exalt or vilify? Just how and by whom are the thousands of such daily decisions made? Dr. Albert Schweitzer was lionized throughout Europe and North America as a selfless humanitarian because of his half century of medical service to the people of Gabon. Groping for common ground with a Gabonese classmate at Virginia Union, I asked one day before Dr. McGuinn began his lecture, "Tell me, now that the great man Albert Schweitzer has been dead for some years, has he been well remembered?" The classmate laughed. "In all the years Schweitzer spent running his hospital in my country, he always felt innately supe- 66 * DEFENDING THE SPIRIT rior to the Africans he treated, as did the other French who were there to colonize us." To my embarrassment, he continued, "Not one African was ever employed in a position of responsibility in that hospital. The place was so filthy with goats and dogs walking the halls dropping excrement that the villagers used to discipline their children by telling them they'd be sent to Schweitzer's hospital if they didn't mind their parents.