11
Fieldston School, New York
April 10, 1969
I returned to drinking and it escalated dramatically along with my extramarital activities. Yet, needing to work and still functioning fairly well, I learned that the Ethical Culture Schools were seeking a Black administrator. I decided to apply for the position and was accepted for an interview as one of sixteen candidates, following which I was invited to a second round of interviews for the four shortlisted people. I was called a week later by Dr. Dan Wagner, who told me I was his choice. He had just been hired to be director of the schools and wanted me to be his assistant. I was to wear three hats: assistant director responsible for community relations, Project Director of the Upward Bound Program of 105 disadvantaged youth from New York City high schools, and a faculty member teaching African American history.
After my first four weeks on campus, the Black students expressed dissatisfaction with the other Black faculty member who had been advisor to the Black Students Union and asked me if I would become their faculty advisor. It was spring and we had an immediate problem: the preparation of the four-week encampment. We had a bang-up four-week encampment for 30 students who would be the cadre for “role modeling” for the 125 students who attended the summer school program at Fieldston (which is one of the Ethical Culture schools), with its beautiful campus and very adequate equipment for all the courses. This was a big change from the poorly equipped public high schools from which the Upward Bound students were recruited. The summer school was very successful, and 90 percent of our Upward Bound students who were seniors were recipients of scholarships to major colleges.
Nationally, the Upward Bound program had a similar high percentage of acceptances. The sad thing was that Upward Bound had been conceived as a pilot program for 100,000 youth who would be “models” for 1 million students in such programs designed to transform ghetto youth from dropout-prone high school students to college-going members of families who had never had a college graduate in their families. Imagine the impact that such a transformation would have on the youth of the ghetto and their families. But, unfortunately, no such expansion of the Upward Bound Program ever took place!
I decided to resign from the position of assistant director at the Ethical Culture schools. The schools had been so polarized by the divisions over the Black students’ demonstrations that Dr. Wagner; Spencer Brown, the conservative principal of Fieldston School; and I, as advisor to the Black Students Union, were asked to resign. I considered putting up a fight to stay but decided that the situation was too polarized for me to be effective without the support of the board of governors. I then received a call from Aaron Bindman, who wanted to interview me for a possible opening in the Sociology Department at SUNY at New Paltz. Bindman had been looking for a Black faculty candidate for New Paltz. He had met Carl Marzani and John Killens on two different occasions and asked them if they knew of possible candidates. Both of them, independent of each other, had recommended me. Bindman told me of the situation at New Paltz. There was no Black faculty in sociology, the Black Studies Department had difficulty finding candidates who were qualified, and there was also the possibility that the chairperson of Black Studies, Dr. Marjorie Butler, who planned to retire, might consider me as a replacement.
Bindman asked me about my experience. I replied, “Well, I’ve taught dialectical materialism, political economy, the Negro question, class struggle, the civil rights movement, strategy and tactics in party training schools for ten years, supervised faculty at the Jefferson School of Social Science for four years, lectured at Columbia, City College, NYU, written for Political Affairs and the Daily Worker. That record may not get me brownie points in the academic world, but I think I might be as qualified a professor as you could find.”
Bindman smiled and said, “Some of our people will object to our hiring someone with only a bachelor’s degree.”
I responded, “You know I have the equivalent of a Ph.D. in experience and qualification.”
He said, “That’s true. How about coming up to New Paltz and meeting some of the key people?”
I replied, “What kind of money are you talking about?”
He answered, “If you come in at the assistant professor level, it would start at about $13,000.00 annually.”
I said, “I’m making $16,000.00 annually at the Ethical Culture schools. I couldn’t take such a drop in income.”
Bindman said, “It’s possible that we can bring you in as an associate professor. That starts at $15,000.00 and you can supplement that teaching six weeks at the summer school, but the drawback is that you would come up for tenure in three years! If you start as an assistant professor, it would be six years before tenure would become an issue.”
I said, “I’m willing to take my chances on that!”
Thinking about my years in the party, my success at helping to train and mold cadre, my problem of not being able to respond to all the requests for teaching assignments and speaking engagements, and my popularity as a figure in the movement, I felt no qualms about being able to stand up to a tenure struggle in the shortened period of time. I also had a general estimate of the caliber of most college professors and knew that I measured up favorably.
The courses sponsored by the Department of Sociology in the various correctional facilities in the mid–Hudson Valley were where my approach was especially useful. During the eleven years I taught at New Paltz, I had the pleasure of teaching at Walkill, Napanoch, Greenhaven, Coxsackie (a youth facility), and Dannemora. I found that most of the inmates had a much clearer comprehension of the exploitative structure of society and were less subject to illusions about democracy. The most exciting experience I had was meeting a group of inmates who, despite persecution by the staff at Napanoch, were able to form the first inmates’ branch of the NAACP in the United States. One of them, Frank Abney, was put in “lockdown” supposedly for violations of prison rules when in fact he was attending my course Introduction to Sociology. In reality, the prison administration was led by the warden, Jack Warenetzky, a racist, who tolerated the existence of the Ku Klux Klan, to which many of the correction officers belonged. After his release from prison, Abney went to Howard University, becoming the director of an influential radio program in Washington, D.C. His courage, determination, and effective leadership ability were an inspiration to the other men in his cell block and beyond. Another inmate at Napanoch, after finishing his sentence, enrolled at New Paltz in a prison follow-up program organized by the Department of Sociology, graduated with bachelor’s and master’s of arts degrees, and then moved to the Midwest, where he became an official of the state organization of the NAACP. Another inmate, upon completing his sentence, returned to his home community in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where he led a most influential community organization that won major victories in the struggle against drugs and for housing rehabilitation.
Among these men, the very opposite of antisocial attitudes was manifested, and many of the college students could have used their example in their postgraduate life. By contrast with such self-rehabilitation under the guidance of a positive program, we can see how destructive an impact the criminal justice system has on the Black community, where one out of four Black males is either under probation, subject to parole, in confinement, or waiting to stand trial.
I have often said, “It only costs approximately $10,000.00 annually to send a youth to a four-year college. Wouldn’t our society be better off if we invested our funds in the constructive policy of sending youth to college, instead of imprisonment at a cost of $40,000.00 annually?”
Unlike most professors, I spent a great deal of time doing community work as an example of my understanding of citizenship. The most important community activity evolved in the organization SCORE, an acronym for Strand Community Organization to Rehabilitate the Environment. SCORE was a community organization that had failed because of the extramilitant and nationalist orientation of its first leader, Jerry Moore, and two of his friends, Ed Leftwich and Bill Haley, who were interested in the possibilities of SCORE’s revival. We decided to meet because of my experience in community organization.
I met with the three of them and in a short time we had generated a board of directors and a membership involving local grassroots people. I was elected chairman of the board, on which Reverend James Childs, the leading minister of the Black community in Kingston; Everett Hodges, the twenty-five-year chairman of the Ulster County NAACP; and some other representative members of the community also served. Ed Leftwich became the executive director and over the course of twenty years an estimated $3 million was funneled into the Kingston community as a result of the activities of SCORE.
Based on the success of SCORE, I proposed to a group of community leaders in the Hudson Valley that we attempt to emulate SCORE’s success by setting up a Mid–Hudson Valley Minority Regional Congress that would be able to develop programs in all of the major towns of the mid–Hudson Valley—Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, Beacon, and Westchester County groups headed by Paul Redd. Most of these programs were successful, so I could say that my becoming a faculty member at New Paltz enabled me to bring my organizing ability to fruition in ways that were not possible during my party days. The least I can say is that my presence was felt in more dramatic and lasting ways. I had a special thrill in the knowledge that I was performing these activities in the hills and valleys of the Hudson River, the homeland of the Ramapo Mountain People, my mother’s tribe.
By 1981, after being rehired as an adjunct associate professor every two years, a very conservative woman, Alice Chandler, was appointed president of the college. During this time, the college was directed along increasingly conservative lines and I felt less gratification teaching in the atmosphere created by Chandler. The Sociology Department was trimming its sails so that the department meetings manifested the transition from a department known for its radicalism to a department almost indistinguishable from the notoriously conservative English Department. I was past the time of eligibility for Social Security, so I decided to retire.
In the fall of 1981, however, the minority faculty of Black and Puerto Rican professors called for an outspoken conference protesting the attrition of minority faculty on the campus under the conservative rule of Dr. Chandler. They were demanding greater attention to fulfillment of affirmative action policies and issued statements indicating a major upsurge toward democracy on the campus. Because I was the only Black professor in the Sociology Department, and feeling that I might get support from the minority faculty, I decided to withdraw my retirement letter. The department refused to reinstate me despite my eleven-year record in which I had been characterized as one of the ten best professors on the New Paltz campus. It was here that I had felt most fulfilled as an educator, gratified by my students who called me Malimwu—“teacher” in Swahili—but I decided not to put my energies into what appeared to be a losing battle and rather turned them toward the possibility of becoming technical director for the forthcoming film The Cotton Club.