What I Learned from Teaching Black Literature

In the late 1960s, protests at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley helped usher in ethnic studies and a mandate for more Black faculty members. But before the void got filled, a white Jewish professor stepped in to teach a course in Black Literature.

In 1970, as a young, new ABD (all but dissertation) English professor at San Francisco State, I was asked by the department’s then chair and vice chair to teach a course in Black literature. It was the year following the nationally spotlighted—and often characterized in the press as “militant”—Black student-led strike at the school. Not being Black, I was nervous about how a class of mainly Black students would receive me. In the present day, it would be unlikely for someone white and Jewish to be teaching a course on Black writers to Black students, but even then, more than a half century ago, it was radioactive—especially so soon after the strike, which had included a range of non-negotiable student demands, a major one being that only Black faculty teach Black studies courses.

The problem for the English department, as for every major department throughout the university, was that there were no Black faculty members.

Jean Toomer (ca. 1920s)

My soon-to-be-completed dissertation was on Jean Toomer, the not yet widely known Harlem Renaissance author of Cane, a rich, lyrical multigenre work on Black life. When I was hired by SF State, I was not only well schooled in the work of Toomer and other Harlem Renaissance writers, I had also written about earlier and later figures in Black American literature. Yet I had assumed I would be teaching these writers in more expansive canonical courses of American literature. I could not dispel the fear I felt as I stepped into the classroom for the first time to teach a Black literature survey course.

 My concerns were heightened, as I walked toward the lectern, not only by a sea of nearly all Black faces, but by one, a large, imposing Black man with a hostile stare, seated in the front row, his arms folded tautly across his chest. 

First edition cover of “Cane” (1923)

I nervously introduced myself, gave routine information on my office hours and course requirements and then proceeded to speak of my scholarly work. I briefed the class on my research on Cane, which included a short sketch of Toomer’s personal struggles with his mixed racial identity, all the while wondering if other students might also be glaring at me.

Believing the best defense to be a good explanation anchored in honesty, I launched into telling the class that I had no claim to any personal understanding of what was then called the Black experience or what it meant to be Black. I acknowledged that I was an outsider, which, I noted, could also be an important critical perspective. I added that I was a scholar and that I believed—no, I knew—I had much to offer students interested in studying Black writers.

To cover the nervousness I felt, I soon moved to a kind of self-sell mode. But I also spoke from the heart, emphasizing my respect and enthusiasm for many Black authors, passionately speaking of the beauty of Toomer’s Cane and how important I believed that work was, first published in 1923 with only 500 copies sold. I spoke, too, of Frederick Douglass and other earlier mostly unsung figures of Black American literature—Phyllis Wheatley and Josiah Henson, who both had been slaves, and Jupiter Hammon, born a slave and often called the founder of African American literature, as well as important (but ignored by canon deciders) authors such as Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson. I took a quick furtive look and saw that the body language of the student in the front had changed. Now he appeared relaxed, his arms no longer tightly wound across his chest. The glare of anger was gone. Just as I took note of this, he swiveled around and suddenly, audibly and authoritatively said to the entire class, “This white boy knows his shit!”

I would soon discover that the student, I’ll call him Jim, had been one of the leaders of the strike from the year before. He was older than the other students in the class but clearly had their respect and had conferred a verbal seal of respect on me.

I would also learn that he had been a house painter and had grown up in Watts, in South Los Angeles, where 34 people died in 1965 in what was commonly referred to back then as rioting. He would proudly tell me, later, how he had been part of that mass response to an incident involving a young Black man pulled over by a white California Highway Patrol officer on suspicion of drunk driving. It escalated when the man, Marquette Frye, resisted arrest. Frye’s mother and brother got involved and the resulting melee lasted six days.

As I came to know Jim, I would soon realize that he always spoke his mind, never minced words, and brimmed with vitality and a deep and abiding passion for literature, especially Black literature.

 Jim would become not only my supporter but my friend, soon referring to me as “brother Michael.” As a teacher, I was fortunate to have won his approval. He turned out to be voluble about the texts we read and discussed in class, and what he had to say was useful, often brilliant. His enthusiasm for the literature I assigned was infectious.

 Jim knew a great deal about Black authors, and it helped my capital with him and others in the class that my work on Toomer had gained recognition in The Black Scholar, an international journal published out of nearby Sausalito and run by the Black faculty strike leader, sociologist Nathan Hare, who San Francisco State had hired in 1968 as the first person in the United States to head a Black Studies program. Jim learned that I knew Hare and his Black Scholar co-founder Bob Chrisman, with whom I eventually would co-teach a class. He expressed admiration about my being a scholar, as if just the word itself carried special gravitas. He was flamboyant and charismatic, full of what the great British poet William Blake once described as the eternal delight of energy. He also taught me a lot.

The students in the class were mainly undergrads, most from the working class, taking the course for credit and working on a degree. A number aspired to be writers, and a few had already been published. Some, like Jim, had also been involved in the strike.

Another student talked a lot to me about how, as he put it, “We need to catch up with you Jews. You built strong lobbying power, community organizations and agencies and you even have your own state. Plus, the Germans pay you reparations.”

The British novelist L.P. Hartley wrote, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” They speak differently there too. For instance, the word Negro. A definitive scholarly work on Black literature, published in 1965, was The Negro Novel in America, by Columbia University’s Robert Bone, a white professor. I published articles in an Indiana State University journal called Negro American Literature Forum. It was a time of changing signifiers and the sudden, near-complete elimination of the word Negro, which was being universally replaced with Black and African American. My course was titled Black American literature.

It was a far different San Francisco in 1970—with the late Senator Dianne Feinstein sitting on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and a barely visible homeless problem. The Summer of Love was over, but the city was still a mecca for would-be artists and bohemians. Gays, flocking to the city’s Castro Street, had not yet gained political power (Harvey Milk, then still a Republican, would become California’s first openly gay elected official in 1977). Though Willie Brown served as a state legislator, the Black San Francisco mayors of later years, such as Brown himself and London Breed, or even a Chinese American mayor such as Ed Lee, were inconceivable. Carol Doda still danced nude on Broadway and Herb Caen’s columns were read every day. The growing numbers of those who were then called yuppies, and the young and affluent “tech makers” who eventually followed them, would drive up housing costs in ways not dreamed of and, along with urban redevelopment, would drive out artists and bohemians and the once vibrant Black population of the Fillmore district.

This was also a time that allowed for and even encouraged friendships between professors and students. I don’t mean the slippery ethical slope of #MeToo or what bordered on inappropriate, though all of that was not uncommon. I was in my early twenties. I dressed like my students, ate with them at times, and went more often by “Michael” than “Professor.” Several of my Black students, in addition to Jim, would indeed become my friends, including a young Oakland poet, Reginald Lockett, who spoke in rapid clipped sentences, called himself the Afro Spaceman and idolized Sun Ra, Ishmael Reed and Gil Scott-Heron. Reg had published poems in Black Fire, an anthology of what was then described as Black militant poetry. I would not have anticipated a friendship between us given that his work expressed strong anti-white sentiment. Yet Reg began asking me to read and critique his poetry. Other students followed.

Ed Bullins, 1971. Photo by Jerry Mosey

Jim would eventually publish a volume of poems with a small press. Reg had already made a mark, as had Ed Bullins, who was at San Francisco State pursuing a master’s degree but had already established himself as an award-winning Black Arts playwright and a leading figure in the Harlem Lafayette All-Black theatre. He held the official position of culture minister in the Black Panthers.

I wanted to build trust and encourage those seeking my feedback. That was sometimes challenging, especially as a Jew, at a time when the Black Arts movement was ascendant and Amiri Baraka was its chief spokesman.

A poet, essayist and playwright, and the Black darling of the beat movement when he still used his birth name LeRoi Jones, Baraka was the key figure in what came to be known as the Black aesthetic. He went from beat poetry to poetry and drama fused with Black separatism and hatred of white people, finally declaring himself an internationalist and a Marxist-Leninist. He was once married to a Jewish woman named Hettie Cohen, and I had no idea if his antisemitism was related to that, but he had written poems filled with raw Jew-hatred. (Even late in his life, in 2002, when he was a Marxist-Leninist, he stirred up a major hornet’s nest as New Jersey’s poet laureate by reading a poem, at a Stanhope poetry festival, that blamed Israel for complicity in the 9/11 attacks.)

Many of my students, especially Jim, held Baraka in high regard, and I wondered if they were drawn to the demonization of whites and hatred of Jews infused in his writing and the writing of other Black Arts writers. I wanted to understand the Black Arts Movement, with its emphasis on separatism, nationalism, “get ofay” (Pig Latin for foe) whites and deep animus directed at Jews.

When inveighing against white people, Jim would also occasionally make negative remarks about “ghetto Jew” shop owners and “ghetto Jew” landlords, and I bristled at these, so he stopped. He made an exception of me, proclaiming me “different than other Jews.” He brushed it off when I told him this reminded me of a fellow graduate student in Ohio, a self-proclaimed white hillbilly but a serious student of history, who, while standing on a chair, bellowed in a drunken rush of words that “all Jews are Satan’s sperm minus Krasny.”  (This scene came to mind again more recently when, after venomously denouncing all Jews, Ye, née Kanye West, suddenly said he felt differently about Jonah Hill.)

I found all of this offensive, but as Jim’s teacher, friend, and mentor, I believed I could educate him. In many ways, in spite of his prejudices, Jim would educate me.

After the first few sessions of my Black literature course, Jim and Reg and soon a bevy of young Black men from the class began to hang around my office after each class, as well as during my office hours. Hanging out included lively ongoing discussions about literature, politics, music—especially jazz—pop culture, sports and life. Many of the seeds of my later becoming a public radio talk host were planted in those wide-ranging lively verbal feasts, which often were humorous as well as boisterous, even, on occasion, raucous. It felt good to me that amity, fellowship and joy could prevail despite occasional complaints from nearby office holders.  

It continued to trouble me that I was seen by a few as a different kind of Jew. Couldn’t they see that making me an exception against a generally held prejudice was prejudiced?

Less successfully, I invited my Black Lit class to come to the house my wife and I were renting. It caused our landlord and his wife, who lived close by and had been gracious and warm to us up to that point, to stop speaking to us. The cold shoulder wasn’t due to any harm to the house or our noise level, which was lower than the decibels in my office. It was flat-out racism.

I continue to reflect, even now, on some of my Black students’ views. A few held small-minded views of Jews. Most, even those only casually informed on foreign affairs, were anti-Israel. I would challenge or counter, when appropriate, in the highly energetic office discussions, views I felt needed to be challenged, but I also felt we were learning from each other.

 One student, who became both a friend and protégé, was Buriel Clay, who, like Ed Bullins, would later distinguish himself as a playwright. Clay was a smooth and sweet young man with a wide gap tooth smile and an open friendliness. After early success, he was killed way too young, at age 34, in 1978 by a drunk driver while sitting in a parked car with a young woman.

He once asked me, with what I felt at the time was sincere curiosity, why all Jews hated all Arabs. I told him that I and thousands of other Jews did not feel that way. He also wanted to know why Jews were responsible for the slave trade. That indictment, I told him, was largely exaggerated, as spelled out by Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates, among others.

One day I alluded in class to the once-famous proletarian novel, Jews Without Money, by the communist writer Michael Gold, and Clay started to laugh and said, “Come on, man. There aren’t really any Jews without money.” My flip response was, “You’re looking at one.” But another student chimed in with, “The Jews have a big piece of the pie,” and Clay quickly added, dramatically, “A mighty big piece of that pie!”

While I still think of such views as small-minded, a silver lining to me was that I knew the students, especially friends like Jim and Clay, were open with me and did not conceal their prejudices behind screens of BS or fear of pissing me off with fake platitudes. I gave honest responses without rancor or acting tendentious. But it continued to trouble me that I was seen by a few as a different kind of Jew. Couldn’t they see that making me an exception against a generally held prejudice was prejudiced? Jim also excepted certain other Jews from his negative views, including Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, the two brave young Jewish men, ages 24 and 20, respectively, murdered by the Klan in Mississippi in 1964 along with James Cheney, 21, a Black man, all martyrs for their courageous efforts to register Black voters.

Jim inveighed against Israel as a colonialist and apartheid state. “And why,” he would insist to me, “do we keep hearing so much about the Holocaust when way more of my people died coming over here in slave ships?” My response was simply to say to him that suffering shouldn’t be a matter of competing numbers. Somehow, we never let these discussions boil over into rancor or enmity. If I became truly indignant with Jim he would back off and speak of his love for me.

The topic that made for the most intense discussions, both in the classroom and in my office, was racism. Here, too, I was surprised by an attitude that was widespread—one that is also familiar today. The argument went something like this: White people held all power. Racism came from power. Ergo, Blacks, devoid of power, could not be racist.

Most of my students felt Blacks could not be racist, and they were not swayed by my description of an incident I had witnessed on the campus early in the semester. The seminal SNCC Black power advocate Stokely Carmichael came to San Francisco State and delivered a speech, with his usual impressive oratorical powers, on Pan-Africanism and the inevitability of Black liberation. Before he began, he insisted that all white students sitting in the front rows of the auditorium “give up your seats to the brothers and sisters sitting behind you.” Many white students quickly and eagerly complied. Carmichael, early in the civil rights struggles, had called on Blacks to extricate themselves from biracial alliance. White people, he argued, especially Caucasian Jews, were taking decision-making autonomy from Blacks, who had to be shapers of their own destinies.

Beyond the hopes and demands in the 1970s for greater racial diversity, affirmative action and reparations, there was an under-the-radar nascent notion, which later would be labeled “woke,” that Jim and other Black students of mine held and later best-selling authors such as historian Ibram X. Kendi and white sociologist Robin DiAngelo drew on. This view held not only that Blacks could not be racist, even those with wealth and power, but that whites, regardless of class, background, personal beliefs, friendships, words, deeds or activism, were tainted by white privilege and institutional systemic racism. The taint, as Columbia University linguistics professor and New York Times columnist John McWhorter (often mislabeled a conservative) eventually pointed out, was like original sin.

***

Jim and I crossed swords on many issues, and of course I, as his professor and a Caucasian, was presumably in the power position. But he led me to several important Black authors, urging me, early on, to read Harold Cruise, whose landmark book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual elucidated a great deal for me as a young scholar. From that book, I first learned about the major ideological split—whose effects are ongoing—in the writings and speeches of Booker T. Washington versus W.E.B. DuBois.

Booker T. Washington by Francis Benjamin Johnston, c. 1895.

In his famous 1895 Atlanta Exposition speech, Washington, author of Up from Slavery and founder of Tuskegee University, spoke to the idea that Blacks needed to work their way up the economic ladder via common labor and trade jobs to autonomy and social acceptance.

 Washington’s ideas were anchored in the American work ethic and vocational training for Blacks, as opposed to Blacks agitating for social and political equality. His ideas made him welcome to American power brokers, even giving him an opportunity to meet President Theodore Roosevelt for dinner at the White House and a walk in the Rose Garden.

Jim liked to compare Washington to the cunning trickster Br’er Rabbit in the African American oral tales adapted by Joel Chandler Harris. DuBois, on the other hand, was a radical, acommunist and a pan-Africanist, who put his faith in what he called “the talented tenth,” educated and accomplished African Americans he believed could lift up the Black masses. Washington saw integration as of far less short-term value than steady, remunerative work.

Jim also helped me to better understand the other major 20th-century Black intellectual division: the one between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.  

 Malcolm, as Jim always called him, was central to the rage and fierce core of the Black Arts Movement. He was a different kind of radical from DuBois and a different kind of separatist than Washington. Until he made his hajj to Mecca and came to believe Blacks and whites could pray together as Muslims, he was a devoted follower of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Black Muslims, a group which branded itself the Nation of Islam. Always deferentially referred to by Malcolm X and his many followers, including Muhammad Ali, as “the honorable Elijah Muhammad,” Elijah Muhammad preached Black independence, a philosophy based on Islam, economic autonomy and hard, diligent work a la Booker T. Washington. It was an ideology as well as a theology, rooted in the belief that whites were literal devils.

This was no Booker T. Washington brand of race separation, likened by Washington to the separate fingers of the hand. It was a militant form of separatism combined with a work ethic and economic autonomy based on a philosophy rooted in demonization of the white race, which included Jews.

Before Amiri Baraka became a Marxist-Leninist, he, too, was deeply tied to the demonization of white people, as Malcolm X and his leader Elijah Muhammad had been. These men viewed all whites as the devil’s spawn. I asked Jim and my other students, was this not racism? Was it not the same kind I heard my drunk classmate bellowing about the Jews?

One of my Black students, a thoughtful, soft-spoken young man named Ron, explained his view of such attitudes one day in class. They were, he said, “overreaction to years of cruelty, barbarism and dehumanization based solely on skin color.” He solemnly added, “It was bound to go to violent extremes.”

Ron would go on to a notable career in journalism, covering and then writing about the so-called Zebra murders, shootings of random white people in the streets of San Francisco by four Black Muslim gunmen, which began in the fall of 1973 and lasted until the spring of 1974. They would murder at least 15 people and wound eight during a reign of terror. One of the wounded victims was then-Assemblyman Art Agnos, who went on in 1988 to be elected mayor of San Francisco.

The year before Stokely Carmichael’s speech on campus, while I was still a grad student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, an incident took place with Amiri Baraka, who had been invited there to speak. Before his speech, Baraka insisted only Black students be allowed to attend his talk, a demand thwarted by the Associated Students organization that had invited him. They told him they couldn’t pay his honorarium unless any student who wanted to attend could do so. After a fiery Black nationalist separatist speech, not yet linked to Marx or Lenin, an earnest young white woman in the audience asked Baraka, during the Q&A, what she could do to help the fight for greater racial equality.

Back in 1964, Baraka (still LeRoi Jones) had written a shocking and electrifying play, Dutchman, which featured a seductive white woman character named Lula who kills a Black man and threatens to kill any Black man who dares to reveal a measure of Black masculine strength, including against the sexual power of white women. Still, it was a shock when Baraka answered the young white woman in the UW audience by telling her she could help by dying a slow and agonizing death.

Black hatred of whites was hardly new with Baraka or the Black Muslims. Long before Brown v. Board of Education legally overturned the separate but equal doctrine enshrined in Plessy v. Ferguson, there was a separatist Pan-African movement founded and led by its President-General Marcus Garvey, called The Universal Negro Improvement Association. A Jamaican-born advocate of Black separatism, whom Jim admired for his leadership and nationalism, Garvey was against W.E.B. DuBois and other advocates of racial integration, even making political alliances with Ku Klux Klan members and white race supremacists, to work together toward separation of Blacks and whites. Like Baraka, Garvey was a Jew-hater and blamed the Jews for his 1923 conviction of mail fraud.

Given the nightmare of history Black Americans have had to endure, it is not difficult to understand how love of one’s race could, as my student Ron said, tie itself to hatred or the desire to strike back, even randomly, at the dominant race, to scapegoat or target it, even indiscriminately, like the Seven Days group in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. That was a good part of what enabled Malcolm X, in his time, to stir animus and fear in a lot of white America. Many whites realized that Blacks, having suffered, might wish to lash out. 

Just as some Jews, especially after the Holocaust, were drawn increasingly to tribal separatism and chauvinism, as well as to a wider distrust and anger against Germans and Gentiles, many Blacks in 1970 were in a similar phase. At least several of my Black students fell into this category, along with Jim, who clearly remained a leader.

King’s ethos of non-violence and civil disobedience was, of course, the Gandhian antithesis. Though many Blacks feel King, were he alive today, would be in opposition to Israel and on the side of the Palestinians, I think he more likely would have abhorred and deplored the violence of both sides. He remained, until his death by an assassin’s bullets, a strong supporter and ally of Israel and an implacable foe to every form of antisemitism.

King not only dedicated himself to integration and racial equality, he had many supporters, allies and close friends who were Jews. Abraham Joshua Heschel is the Jewish friend and ally of King’s most mentioned, but there were also lawyer friends and supporters like Stanley Levison, one of his closest advisors, and Jack Greenberg, counsel to the NAACP and Atlanta rabbi and King close friend Jacob Rothschild.

*** 

Another Black student of mine, who would also become my friend, was Jesse, an Oakland-based, Louisiana-born army veteran. A former shipyard worker in Vallejo, California, north of San Francisco, Jesse had been one of the famed “original 21ers,” a Black group of workers there who filed a federal discrimination suit in the 1960s against race prejudice and pay inequity, at considerable personal and occupational risk. He was, in temperament, a foil for Jim. He spoke softly, in a gentlemanly manner, and he talked a lot to me about how, as he put it, “We need to catch up with you Jews. You built strong lobbying power, community organizations and agencies and you even have your own state. Plus, the Germans pay you reparations.”

A budding Black scholar, Jesse believed in King’s tactics and philosophy. One day in class, while we were discussing discrimination based on color, Jesse pointedly remarked that Egypt’s dark, Sudanese-born leader Anwar Sadat, who became Egypt’s president in 1970, would not have been served in the Jim Crow South. “Doesn’t that show how stupid race separation laws were and still are, as in South Africa?” Jesse said with a bitter laugh, adding, “Sadat is head of Egypt. But they wouldn’t have served him at a lunch counter in the South before Rosa Parks and Dr. King and hundreds of other brave Black souls changed all of that.”

Jesse and Jim would playfully kid about coloring, Jim telling Jesse he was “high yellow” and Jesse telling Jim he was “black as ebony night.” Like Martin Luther King Jr. and unlike Stokely Carmichael and followers of Malcolm X, Jesse believed the Black/ Jewish alliance had been a worthwhile and productive one for Blacks and needed to be protected and to proceed.

Despite words of mutual respect and a few books that set forth arguments on how the two Black male leaders were more aligned than apart, the split between Dr. King and Malcolm X, like the one between Washington and DuBois, was real. Peaceful protest versus violence as self-defense. Civil disobedience versus by any means necessary. Turn the other cheek and “we shall overcome” versus “the ballot or the bullet.” Jim was intense in valorizing Malcolm X, saying he respected King, but then he would derogate King’s “passivity.” Jim enjoyed provoking, and he spoke with a lightning intensity, in contrast to soft-spoken Jesse.

King’s philosophy, including his emphasis on content of character and belief in Black/white peaceful protest to achieve social and political equality for Blacks, was, by 1970, increasingly being challenged—and in many ways overwhelmed—by Malcolm X and Black Arts militancy. A number of my students, like Jim, were arguing that whites needed to cede power to Blacks or have it taken from them. As there had been at Madison before I came to SF State, there was ongoing talk of revolution.

When I related to my class how white students had willingly given up their seats to Blacks when Stokely Carmichael said they should, one of the few white students in the class spoke up and said giving up a seat was no big deal and that he “would gladly do anything for the Black cause and Black people.” Jim aggressively asked him, “Would you kill your mother and your father for Black people?” The white student said, “I would,” and Jim responded, “Then you are one dumb ofay. I sure wouldn’t trust your ass on my side.”

Words like “ofay” and “paddy” were staples of the Black vernacular then, as were, “whitey” and “honky,” a word which even made it into regular use on television in The Jeffersons and Sanford and Son. I never heard any of those words from Jim before that moment with the white student, or saw them in any of his poems, but “ofay” had appeared in speeches and writing before Baraka and Malcolm X, even before Marcus Garvey.

Yet a new, more extreme racial separatist philosophy for Blacks was burgeoning and having its effect on Jim and other Black students, eclipsing King’s ideals of civil disobedience and passive resistance, rooted in the writings of Baraka and the writings and speeches of Malcolm X and literature of writers in the Black Arts Movement. It was anchored as well in what a pair of Black San Francisco psychiatrists—Price Cobbs and William Grier—called “Black rage,” the title of their 1968 best-selling book, published following the assassinations of both King and Malcolm X. 

The main idea in Black Rage was that rage was all-pervasive in Blacks because racism was all-pervasive in whites, who did not see Blacks as human. The idea was an outgrowth of W.E.B. DuBois’s concept of dual consciousness, tied to Blacks being judged on their skin color rather than their humanity or individual identity.

According to Grier and Cobbs, rage was an internal ontological reality for Blacks. I was wary of such a nearly all-embracing thesis.  But it was a view Jim also reiterated—of Black American lives being inseparable from collective trauma. Black rage, according to the authors, was also a viable legal criminal defense. Jim agreed with this too. When I asked him if he believed all, or even most Blacks, felt Black rage, his unequivocal response was, “It sure as hell is true for me and most if not all of the brothers where I come from.”

Malcolm X was the embodiment of Black rage to those who feared and hated him as well as those who admired and loved him, with testimony, much of it posthumous, from many who knew him best about what a kind, temperate and graciously soulful man he could be. But the idea of rage’s legitimacy and ubiquity in Blacks was spreading then like a wildfire—a good deal of it, looking back, predictable for that time period. It was central, I began to understand, to the male-dominated Black Arts Movement of the time. And it clearly had been fallow, but evident, in works by a host of male Black writers, for example in the early work of Richard Wright, whose Uncle Tom’s Children was published in 1938. The title of that seminal collection of fiction heralds an end—violent, if necessary—to Uncle Tom-like behavior for Black men.

There is rage in James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, though both were put in a silo by many in the Black Arts Movement who saw them as insufficiently enraged and not militant or revolutionary enough. To Jim, and many other Black men, Black rage was tied to manhood, which in Black American male writing meant fighting bigotry and racist dehumanization, standing up to the racial violence of whites and bringing change, in Malcolm X’s momentous and Machiavellian-sounding words, “by any means necessary.” Much of this is embodied in the Jamaican-American Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay’s famous poem, “If We Must Die,” which first appeared in 1919 after what came to be called the Red Summer—widespread anti-Black mob attacks and lynchings.

Manhood meant standing up to white oppression and white supremacy and, eventually, white police (though, by the 1960s, nearly all police of any color were called pigs by Black power advocates and their white allies). Manhood also was aligned with Black Power and came to mean Black men  having the agency to confront white power and, if necessary, give up their lives for honor, dignity and freedom. It was no wonder the great Black actor Ossie Davis eulogized Malcolm X at the funeral for the gunned-down leader in Faith Temple Church as “our manhood, our living Black manhood.”

Zora Neale Hurston

Nearly all the Black writers I had assigned back then were men. The few Black women, aside from novelists Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston and the famous playwright Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun), were poets—Phyllis Wheatley, Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, whose first collection was published in 1969. But monumental changes were on the way.

The Black women in my classes mostly were focused on aiding Black men who were incarcerated, as Angela Davis had tried to do for George Jackson and the Soledad brothers.

There was emphasis on putting Black men first by ensuring that white women were not, as they officially would be in 1971, placed in equal slots with Black men for affirmative action. Jim agreed with Linda LaRue, a Black woman writer who published an article that year in The Black Scholar belittling the women’s liberation movement and arguing that it had little relevance to the struggles facing Black women, especially poor Black women.

Lorraine Hansberry

White women, as LaRue saw it, were co-opting the Black Liberation Movement with claims seeking to make their oppression and dehumanization comparable to Black people’s. This would change as more Black women became strong feminists and began to be widely read and heard from. But several of the Black women in my class felt the women’s liberation movement was parroting the Black liberation movement, ripping it off, and mainly was about white women at the expense of Black men, who needed jobs to support their families. Reactions were strong. How could white suburban women dare compare their lack of empowerment to a people who had endured slavery or to Black men who were lynched and burned alive? Jim baldly stated this attitude in class one day when he nearly shouted, “Liberation? Yes! For brothers!”

In Ralph Ellison’s opening “Battle Royal” of his novel Invisible Man, young Black boys are degraded and compelled to fight each other bloody and endure dreadful hazing and racist epithets for the entertainment of the city’s powerful white men. They even grovel to retrieve from the floor fake advertising coins which give off electric shocks, like birds jostling for grubs. In the same narrative, a blonde naked white woman, with an American flag tattooed on her belly, dances for the men’s pleasure and to sexually excite the young Black boys. Some of the town “big shots” touch her, sinking “beefy fingers” into “her soft flesh.” Both the boys and the “magnificent blonde” are dehumanized and feel terror towards the white males. I used this famous section in Ellison to argue with Jim to be more empathetic to women and to see how dehumanization affects many, including white women. To my pedagogue self’s delight he said, “I get it.”

The view that Black women had to play a subaltern role to Black men in the fight for equality would, of course, not only change for many Black women, it would change radically, as Black women writers as diverse as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange made their marks and wrote searingly of physical and emotional abuse by some Black men. In 1970, Black women writers had just begun to be recognized, following a too-long period of low interest and lack of access to publishers, with rare exceptions like Larsen and Hurston. Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, about the horrific sexual abuse of a young Black girl by her Black stepfather, was published in 1968, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the poignant, harrowing story of young Pecola Breedlove, who was raped by her father, appeared in 1970.

*** 

The lexicon back then didn’t include “cultural appropriation,” but Jim would speak in class or in my office, with his characteristic intensity, about what he disparagingly called white culture thievery. He had a running encyclopedic laundry list of musical artists who, as he saw it, stole from Blacks, going all the way back to Stephen Foster, through George Gershwin, up to and including major white jazz and rock-and-roll artists. He loved educating his fellow students on the great Black jazz artists and the heroes of pre-Jackie Robinson Negro baseball—greats like Josh Gibson and Oscar Charleston—as well as holding forth on such topics as the lesser-known works of W.E.B. DuBois and Langston Hughes or the poetry of his friend and idol, the poet Michael Harper. Jim also put forth the thesis that not only was Elizabeth Barrett Browning part Black, as some scholars argued, but Robert Browning “was definitely a brother.” He claimed he could prove it.

Somehow, he managed to wrangle an invitation to present the “Browning was Black” thesis to the genteel all-white older ladies of The Robert Browning Society, a performance I was sorry to have missed, especially after Jim told me, “I shocked the blue blood right out of them. They refused to believe the dude who wrote ‘Childe Roland’ was a blood. I didn’t tell them that Coleridge was too.”

To Jim’s delight, I got hold of and screened for the class a popular 1968 documentary film titled Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed. It detailed, along with the unheralded and important roles of Blacks in America, the heavy debt artists like Picasso and Modigliani owed to African art. (Speaking of changing times, the film’s narrator was the then-beloved icon and later accused sex criminal Bill Cosby.)

Like a number of African American writers and Black Arts intellectuals, Jim believed white power needed to be upended and was literally killing Blacks. The idea of a conspiracy by white people to murder Blacks can be seen in works from Baraka’s Dutchman to a contemporary film like Jordan Peele’s Get Out. This, for me, came too close to paranoia, but it was clearly fueled by the number of Black men killed. FBI Head J. Edgar Hoover viewed Martin Luther King Jr. as a devil incarnate and, we now know, sought to destroy him. Jim often seemed to me to be overreaching in his accounts of having been followed by FBI operatives who, he claimed, tapped his phone when he was a student leader of the SF State student-led strike. But when revelations emerged in 1971 about Cointelpro, the FBI’s counterintelligence program directed at perceived domestic enemies, I couldn’t help wondering whether all or most of it was true.

Sandra enthusiastically and laughingly said, “Come on. Who wants to hear Professor K say that evil, lowdown word? Raise your hands!” To my astonishment, every hand went up.

The year before I began teaching at SF State, Fred Hampton, a Black Panther party leader in Chicago who had been identified by Hoover’s FBI as a radical threat, was shot and killed in his bed in a raid by Chicago police. Another young Black Panther, Mark Clark, also was gunned down in that assassination, which documents later revealed was coordinated with Hoover’s FBI and a tactical Cook County unit. There was then and remains a wide-ranging conspiracy theory among some Blacks about white power. Jim often spoke of it, beginning with slavery and viewing whites as tactically managing to keep Blacks disempowered and subjugated, killed or in other kinds of chains, what he liked to describe, quoting Blake, as “mind-forged manacles.”

Jim spoke of white power policymakers trying to poison water pipes in areas of highly dense Black populations. I found this improbable then. But even before we became aware of the lead-contaminated water crisis in Flint Michigan in 2014 linked to environmental racism, the dangers of harmful pollutants in neighborhoods housing predominantly people of color had begun to emerge. Eventually, what one of the white students in the class referred to me privately as “Jim’s ravings about water poisoning” began to appear more prescient. That said, neglect and failure to invest in solutions to environmental hazards do not necessarily constitute deliberately trying to poison water pipes, even though the human health effects can be tragic. The term “environmental racism” would not even be coined until over a decade later, in 1982, when Dr. Ben Chavis used it to bring attention to hazardous waste in a North Carolina landfill.

There was far less sensitivity back then to language, nothing like today’s often cited extremes. But I winced when I heard the white student, whom Jim had challenged in class in an argument about Richard Wright (“How many times have you read Native Son?” Jim demanded), use the word “ravings.” Not long before, Black novelist, poet and MacArthur genius awardee Ishmael Reed had publicly denouced the director of the SF State Poetry Center over posters, put up across the SFSU campus, advertising a poetry reading of Reed’s with the headline: “Ishmael Reed lives and raves in Oakland.” Reed said “raves” made him sound like “a crazy N—–.”

On the other hand, the ugly “N word,” which would one day be mostly verboten even when designated by a single letter, was then used freely. Jim used it as often as the comedian Richard Pryor, who later would renounce using it following a trip to Africa.  It wasn’t just bigots—white radicals, leftists, and several liberal and progressive types seemed comfortable using it to sound hip or Black or to describe or highlight oppressive or inhumane mistreatment, as though their political views gave them license. An influential essay by Jerry Farber on the demeaning way students were treated,  titled (and I will use dashes) “The Student as ——,” first appeared in 1967 in the Los Angeles Free Press and moved through the underground, eventually to be widely read above ground, mainly on college campuses. The word was nevertheless still somewhat radioactive. (Not like today when, aside from the use of some variant forms in Black culture and hip-hop,  it is avoided regardless of the context: Clay Risen, The New York Times reporter who wrote my student Ed Bullins’ obituary in November 2021, eliminated, or his editors did, all mention of one of Ed’s best-known breakthrough plays, The Electronic ——.)

I felt a self-imposed avoidance of the word at all costs, though it appeared frequently in texts I taught by Black writers and in many other titles. It was, much to my deep discomfort and aversion, a staple word in the teaching that I and others did of canonical American literary works. Twain’s —— Jim, in Huckleberry Finn, was given that execrable name by Twain, who was opposed to slavery and generally sympathetic to Black people. Southern authors such as William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor used it freely. So did Hemingway. (To this day, I cannot understand the racist gratuitousness of Hemingway’s Lieutenant Frederick Henry saying in A Farewell to Arms,” “Othello was a ——.”)

In class, I avoided the word, skipping over it or barely whispering it in a hush, even when I was reading straight from a text. Early in the semester, a young Black woman in the class named Sandra suddenly said to me, with a laugh, “Are you afraid of that word, Professor K?” My response was to say it was an ugly word, hateful, hurtful, demeaning and too tied to pain. Sandra laughed again and said, “That’s all true. But why don’t you just say it? It’s okay if you do.” Other students, including Jim and Jesse, quickly voiced agreement, urging me to “just say it,” and Sandra enthusiastically and laughingly said, “Come on. Who wants to hear Professor K say that evil, lowdown word? Raise your hands!” To my astonishment, every hand went up. I said I was being compelled by unanimity and the democratic process and uttered the word, as if I were swallowing poison. The result was raucous laughter and loud applause. It was an infectiously funny moment that could not occur in a classroom today, at least not without consequences.

Soon after the incident with Sandra, I returned the students’ first graded written assignment. I took pride in being a fair grader, but when I assigned a “C” to one of my more reticent Black students, a grade I frankly felt was kind, other Black students informed me that the student had branded me as racist. How else, according to him, could such a grade be explained?

Jim, Reggie, Jesse and Clay and some of my other students got word of this and, I was told, defended me. The student, who Clay disparagingly called “a Black nebbish,” was reminiscent to me of a few Jews I had grown up with who blamed criticism or any personal slight or failure on antisemitism. I told Clay that nebbish was a Yiddish word. His response: “So noted. You folks get credit.”

The student to whom I gave the “C” complained directly to the English Department chair, Caroline Shrodes. Though nothing came of it, and I went out of my way to speak personally about it to the student and offer him the opportunity to rewrite the essay, Jim somehow assumed my job was on the line. When I actually came up for routine retention review, Jim confronted Caroline in the hall with a petition he had written supporting and praising me, signed by every Black student in the class (other than the student who got the “C,” who by then had gone missing without taking the rewrite option). Jim denounced Caroline for trying to “get rid of my brother Michael.” This served, as one of my colleagues who witnessed the scene reported to a few of us with wicked laughter, “to frighten the living hell out of Caroline.” It also spoke again, to me, of Jim’s passionate mix of loyalty and paranoia. To Caroline it was somehow evidence of what she assumed must have been the result of my machinations in directing Jim. The truth was that no one directed Jim. No one ever would.

Reg died of a heart attack in 2008 at the age of 60 after a life as a poet and a career as a college teacher. Jesse, the shipyard worker whose “Original 21ers” had filed and won a groundbreaking federal racial discrimination lawsuit, would go on to become both a notable Black historian and a successful businessman.

Jim received a full graduate fellowship to Stanford. It was not a good fit for him and he dropped out and died a few years after of brain cancer. When he was in the hospital suffering from a malignant brain tumor, he called me to express fear of being scheduled to have a white neurosurgeon operate on him. He said, “Michael—you know I cannot let a white dude stick his hands and tools in my head. I cannot!” To this day, I wrestle with memories of him, my rejection of his prejudices alongside appreciation of his energy, loyalty and aggressive brilliance. What remains above all in my memory is his passion for literature, as well as the vigorous classroom and office discussions and the joy of teaching and learning.

Teaching Black literature to Black students was a high point of my academic career. It was nonetheless clear to me then that the need was for more professors of color. I went on to team-teach a course in “Race and Literature” and enlisted the editor of The Black Scholar, my friend and a non-faculty member, Robert Chrisman. After that and my acquiring tenure, I served on hiring committees prioritizing the hiring of colleagues of color and taught Black authors and writers of color in courses of canonical American Literature, to students of all colors, for more than half a century.

Michael Krasny, circa 1969

Michael Krasny is an award-winning journalist, retired public radio host of KQED’s Forum and the author of several books, including Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means.