VFW: Veterans of Foreign Wars
WPC: West Philadelphia Corporation
FOREWORD
GERALD HORNE
I was born in 1949 in a now defunct Jim Crow hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, the Homer G. Phillips Hospital. I did not find out until years later that the actual Homer G. Phillips was an activist black lawyer in St. Louis who was murdered in 1931 under circumstances that continue to remain murky.1
I grew up in the Mound City neighborhood known as Mill Creek Valley, the son of a teamster. Perhaps I should use the past tense since that neighborhood has long since been obliterated as a result of “urban renewal”—or “Negro removal”—a direct result not least of pressures exerted by Professor Stefan Bradley’s former employer, Saint Louis University, in whose shadow I came to a kind of maturity.
Like many of that era, I was a sports fan. I rooted for the St. Louis Cardinals but my Mississippi-born parents, whose taste of the acidulous bitterness of apartheid was more direct than mine, refused to do so and instead cheered for the Brooklyn—then Los Angeles—Dodgers because of the presence of Jackie Robinson, the African-American athlete who spearheaded the desegregation of baseball in the twentieth century. I have toyed over the years with the notion of writing a play with this conflict over baseball between parent and child standing in for a larger dramatic tension.
Ironically, sports led me to Princeton in 1966. During my senior year at now defunct Beaumont High School in North St. Louis, Bill Bradley of neighboring Crystal City, Missouri, was much in the news because of his exploits on the basketball court for the Princeton Tigers.2 It was not as if I intended to play ball at Princeton, but I was then—and still am—an avid consumer of the news and Bradley’s heroics placed this Ivy League school in my field of vision. Thus, I decided to apply and then was accepted.
This was a propitious moment in that the U.S. elite was under pressure during the Cold War as Moscow pointed the finger of accusation at Washington because of Jim Crow and the U.S. attempt to win “hearts and minds” in a rapidly decolonizing world was compromised as a result.3 These tailwinds propelled me to New Jersey by the fall of 1966.
Assuredly there were classmates of mine during my four-year stay there who felt a sense of isolation in being in central Jersey at an all-male school, disproportionately comprised of Euro-Americans of a certain affluence. However, I confess that I was not among them. After all, I was in the center of a megalopolis and recall early on visiting jazz clubs in Manhattan with my late black classmate and fellow Missourian (Kansas City in his case) Darryl Johnson, checking out Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, and Albert Ayler and developing a lifelong interest in their jazz music.4 It was because of Darryl’s influence that I studied the Romance languages—he was fluent, I only had reading ability—that subsequently enhanced my academic research.5
I do not recall how, but at some point during my early tenure at Princeton I met Larry Frazier, now a prominent attorney in Washington, D.C., but then a student at Columbia. In the argot of the day, he allowed me to “crash” at his dorm room in Morningside Heights.6
During the late summer of 1968, I was “quasi-homeless” after my summer gig in Washington, D.C., expired. I had worked as an intern on Capitol Hill for then Congressman Bill Clay of St. Louis (his son now holds the seat). That year, I recall hanging out at the Penn Relays in Philadelphia, which was a magnet for black students from the Ivy League and other students from the region and as well, and spending time at “Q by the Sea” in Atlantic City, a festive occasion headed by the African American fraternity Omega Psi Phi (I think I learned about this from Frazier, who had pledged at Columbia).
If one could reach a nearby city, one often could find a place to “crash” almost instantaneously. Thus, I recall an annual event, “Spook Weekend,” hosted by black Yale students in New Haven where African American students flocked for a round-robin of parties. My contact there was Randy Hudson, my “homeboy” from St. Louis, whose father, George Hudson, was one of the leading Negro musicians of his—or any other—era.7
Lest one think that I was a mere social butterfly during that time, readers should know that during my time at Princeton I recall helping to raise funds for students then beleaguered at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg and, along with my classmate Rod Hamilton, dropping the money off in Philadelphia, then to be transported southward. I was at Columbia during the tumult of 1968 and was actually inside an occupied building for a while with black comrades. At the urging of my classmate Preston Holmes, now a Hollywood producer, I attended the massive rally in New Haven on behalf of Black Panthers then on trial, which then led me as a law student at Berkeley to do legal work for the BPP and teach classes at Vacaville State Prison.8
And, of course, I was part of the building takeover at Princeton in protest of the university’s holdings in institutions invested in apartheid South Africa. I recall certain students opposed to our presence—there and in general—imploring us to “go home,” though somehow I do not think they meant returning to our dorm rooms necessarily. That episode helped to solidify within me an abiding interest in global trends, particularly in Africa, which led me to eventually reside in Zimbabwe.9
Of course, hovering like a cloud above black Princeton was the memory and majesty of Paul Robeson, who grew up there. My classmate then known as Paul Williams was named after him. Williams, to no avail, implored the then retired actor and activist to come back home for a special occasion.10 Robeson went to Rutgers because he could not go to Princeton, so he retained no enchantment with the Ivy League university.
After Princeton I attended another Ivy, Columbia, for graduate school in history. By then I was also an attorney and, thus, aided students there in the 1980s protesting the university’s ties to apartheid, coming full circle in the process. I was then moonlighting as the leader of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, headquartered across Morningside Park in “Black Harlem.” It was from there that I was able to raise funds from the Council on Namibia of the United Nations and arrange for the U.S. visit of the recently freed political prisoner Andimba Toivo ya Toivo, founder of the Southwest Africa Peoples Organization (SWAPO) of Namibia, then under illegal occupation by apartheid South Africa. Readers who detect a tie between my peripatetic perambulating at Princeton and my subsequent career are not far wrong.
Retrospectively, I think I was relatively immune to the imprecations tossed at students like myself suggesting that somehow we did not belong or were not qualified to enter the hallowed halls of Ol’ Nassau. First of all, I was well aware that this concession, granting my admission to Princeton, was adopted under tremendous global pressure—the U.S. elite were trying to save themselves as much as they were trying to help those like myself; they also realized that giving the illusion that Negroes (as we were then called) had a “stake in the system” would be a stabilizing force for the system designed to profit them handsomely. Second, I was well aware of measures akin to alumni preference—that is, affirmative action for the sons and daughters of alumni and the affluent and generous donors and the like—and shared many a classroom with some of the dimmest bulbs among this variegated grouping.
Looking back, I think some of the most valuable lessons I learned at Princeton and Columbia were outside the classroom, such as how to navigate seemingly awkward situations (being quasi-homeless), how to raise funds for causes (Orangeburg, Namibia), how to use personal experience to enhance understanding of book topics (African liberation, Hong Kong, the South Seas, labor history, etc.), and most of all, how to survive in a society where white supremacy remains more than a cipher. Over the years I have conducted primary research on virtually every continent and I feel that paving the way for this wanderlust was my experience at Princeton particularly, being plopped in the middle of a megalopolis at the age of seventeen, having never traveled beyond Illinois and Kansas before then, and—as a result—being consumed by the new vistas opened to me. The papers and research notes I have accumulated over the years, with a particular emphasis on my Princeton and post-Princeton years, are now sited at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library and, as a consequence, may help future generations to shed light on the experience of African Americans in the twentieth