The children of the migrants were Cedric’s classmates in the public education systems in place in Oakland, where he thrived in a community of Black educators. But the further up one went within these systems, the inequalities emerged. Notorious for their “tracking” initiatives, these schools became incubators for what reformers would label in more recent years as the “school-to-prison” pipeline. They were tracked on a pyramidal basis with the majority of the children of migrants placed at the lower rung. They received an inferior education by design, and the expectation in many cases was that these students would merely drop out. For those who did not make it through an education system that denied Black capacity for thought, reform school became their fate.45
Clara had remarried and was living on Calmar Avenue in Berkeley. By using her address, Cedric was able to attend the nearly-all-Black Burbank Junior High School. During his junior high years, Cedric was remembered as popular, “a leading character,” and in one instance he welcomed and befriended a Japanese student, a child whose family had experienced the internment camps. Years later, they remembered that Cedric was the only one that was willing to reach out to them, cultivating a relationship in what was for them a hostile environment. At Burbank, Cedric also nurtured his artistic side, taking up painting and photography lessons as well as portraying a “mystery” character in the yearbook, challenging students to identify him based on several clues; an act that endeared him to many of his classmates. He exerted a memorable presence among the adults at Burbank as well. More than fifty years later, Cedric’s physical education teacher reached out to him to tell him how proud he was of the work he would come to do.46
That engaging and welcoming spirit followed Cedric to Berkeley High, a school notable for its legacy of student activism and engagement but also, as Kelley points out, for its racism. Nevertheless, Cedric’s ever-present intellectual curiosity would again serve him well. This was all despite the fact that, like most migrant children, he experienced some level of “tracking” once he got there. In Cedric’s case, he was encouraged to take a shop class, despite his high marks in college preparatory classes like English, mathematics, and foreign languages. Black students at Berkeley were often placed on a trajectory toward skilled labor, perhaps, or less. Even as jobs were disappearing, as discrimination toward Black working-class people was increasingly a problem, “tracking” prepared students like Cedric for jobs that might one day be obsolete or for more infamous destinations, like the California Youth Authority.47
Yet he seemed to evade these tracks, excelling in all of his academic work, as well as in leadership positions, serving as vice president of his class (for the H-11 semester), Bicycle Court Judge, and the Circle B society, while remaining active in the track team, the jazz club, and the Spanish club. He was a budding photographer and writer. In a short story he wrote for English V, “Joshua Fit De Battle,” he told a tale of racist violence in the segregated South. A white man had murdered a ten-year-old Black boy for calling him “white trash.” He was acquitted. And his grandfather, Joshua, who had been talked out of taking matters into his own hands, was left to surmise whether it was possible that God was really “gonna give the world to the meek …”48 This story was written two years after the murder of Emmett Till, and one could see in its main character some shadows of Cap. It was also in his teenage years that Cedric would begin a lifelong love of music. Miles Davis was his favorite and, in what was a common experience of Black folk of this generation, sneaking into the clubs for Cedric was a rite of passage. He had even encountered Miles on one of those nights. Literally. Miles, unaware of the teenager’s presence, stepped on his foot. Cedric took it as a point of pride.49
For some who remembered those times, life at Berkeley, for a student like Cedric whose interests and friendships were eclectic, would have been alienating. Though he had developed relationships across racial lines, it would not have been enough to convert guidance counselors and administrators who would have categorized him as a Black student with West Oakland roots and thus relegated to a particular station in life. Despite these plans for him, Cedric lived on his own terms and shaped the educational vision that he required for himself, eventually graduating in 1958, ranking 95th in a class of 565, and deciding that he would continue his education, rather than function in and as what Berkeley schooling imagined for people like him.50 Among those from his community who knew him, this was expected. In fact, many children from Seventh Day Adventist families excelled academically. The socialization of the youth within these settings prepared them for classroom instruction.51 It was clear, however, that Cedric’s desire to know guided him as well.
Though they might not have shared all of his political sensibilities, Cedric’s family shaped him immeasurably. And they were proud of his achievements. He was his mother’s favorite topic of conversation. They sent him off to college with a sense of self, a sense of purpose, and a sense of how that connected to his Blackness. Aunt Wilma’s earliest lessons were the foundation for the intense library sessions that were to come. He saw models of what it is to be in community and to convene spaces for the purposes of learning and grounding. He saw it in how Daddy and Mama Do built spaces within their church groups’ religious instruction which were also for each other, for community.
It does seem a cliché that scholars, whose politics align with the folk, are intimately influenced by elders in their family – elders who are without degree and without portfolio. But the prominence of a cliché does not mean the absence of a truth. In fact, it might contain an important lesson. We are not self-created, and our capacity for and recognition of genius exists in places where regard for our humanity is kept at the fore. This may be that lesson.
In a 1999 interview where he evoked Whiteside’s influence, Cedric also framed the question of genealogy and political struggle within the deeper registers of African cultural traditions. He reminded us of the importance that enslaved Africans gave to a “world view in which the reiteration of names (an African convention in which the name of a recently deceased loved one is given to the next child born) reflected the conservatism and responsibilities of a community.” As families grew, it was necessary to maintain “the resolve to value our historical and immediate interdependence.”52 The Whitesides had the ability to make Cedric Robinson, to inform his orientation, because he lived a life that tapped into an ongoing, living tradition of how to be in and beyond this anti-Black world – a tradition that would then be represented and made available to us. To reiterate their names within a project of and for Black Study is to remind ourselves that we too are interdependent. Our work is only possible when it is connected to communities of meaning that reside in spaces often held from view. It is an urgent and prescient meaning of intellectual genealogy.
Notes
1 1. In his biography accompanying a 1999 interview with Chuck Morse, Robinson placed Whiteside’s name, alongside C. L. R. James and the sociologist Terence