Chapter Nine

STRIVE AND STRIVE MIGHTILY

… WHILE IT IS A GREAT TRUTH TO SAY THAT THE NEGRO MUST STRIVE AND STRIVE MIGHTILY TO HELP HIMSELF, IT IS EQUALLY TRUE THAT UNLESS HIS STRIVING BE NOT SIMPLY SECONDED, BUT RATHER AROUSED AND ENCOURAGED, BY THE INITIATIVE OF THE RICHER AND WISER ENVIRONING GROUP, HE CANNOT HOPE FOR GREAT SUCCESS.

—“Of Booker T. Washington and Others”

After I graduated from college in 1992, I moved to Boston, where I was told that my birth father, Jack Baynes—who was apparently known for hanging around the Berklee School of Music in the late 1960s and early 1970s—was last seen. I found an apartment on a street one block from the Berklee School and was hired as a research intern at Blackside Productions, the largest black-owned documentary film company in America, best known for its award-winning fourteen-part series Eyes on the Prize, which documented the civil rights movement.

I had learned of Blackside and Eyes on the Prize while in college, and I was excited about the opportunity of working with such a stalwart black organization. I was, though, far more focused on the possibility of bumping into my birth father. Even though I possessed only one picture of him, taken twenty-five years before—a profile shot of him wearing sunglasses, taken from a distance—I was sure that I would recognize him as soon as I saw him, and that I would magically match my eyes to his.

It wasn’t as if I was in any kind of hurry to march into the Berklee School and ask the registrar or whomever if she knew of a guy named Jack Baynes who used to hang around there— the chance of seeing him one day somewhere on the street was too awesome to mess with. Plus, what if the registrar did know a guy named Jack Baynes? Then what?

The project I was hired to work on at Blackside was a documentary film for The American Experience series on PBS; it was called Malcolm X: Make It Plain. My unpaid internship included listening to taped speeches made by Malcolm X. Never in my life had I been so riveted, so moved, and so saddened by the loss of a human being as when I began listening to those tapes. Up until that point, all I’d known about Malcolm X was that he was angry, black, and had been shot dead. But here, I experienced the way his voice pulsated, the furor, the focus, the command of language, his courage, his dignity. I was absolutely turned out. I started to miss him terribly without ever having known him. I was not even alive when he was.

My birth mother (whose sole descriptive account of my birth father when we first met had been, “Basically, he was a dog”) wanted nothing to do with any kind of encounter between us. She didn’t actively discourage it, but she did make it resolutely clear that under no circumstances did she want him to know where she was or how to reach her. Fair enough—I respected that. Her brother, however, had maintained limited contact with him over the years, and he offered to set up a meeting on my behalf whenever I was ready. A few months after I moved to Boston, I was ready.

Jack Baynes didn’t show up the first time. He did, however, show up the second time, with not so much of a fatherly embrace as a throttlehold of decaying desperation. He didn’t seem to belong to anything or anyone. His dark skin glistened with sweat as tears gamboled loosely in his eyes as evidence of a cruel, unsatisfied longing endured for years. I asked him if he still played guitar, and he told me that he didn’t because, he said, maybe he hadn’t been good enough at it, or because he hadn’t been inspired anymore after his baby girl—me—had been taken away from him by forces he could not control, because the white man, the government, didn’t want him to win at anything. And, by the way, how was my mother? It had all been a conspiracy, he told me, that I had been taken away from him, just as slaves had been sold away from their families. If my mother hadn’t been white—not that he didn’t love her, because he did—none of this ever would have happened and we’d all still be together.

The next day at Blackside, as I listened to Malcolm’s words, I thought of these two snuffed-out black men: Malcolm X and Jack Baynes—one immortalized, the other painfully mortal.

This account reflects, in some ways, Du Bois’s cautionary suggestion that “while it is a great truth to say that the Negro must strive and strive mightily to help himself, it is equally true that unless his striving be not simply seconded, but rather aroused and encouraged, by the initiative of the richer and wiser environing group, he cannot hope for great success.” Although perhaps arguable whether in “the richer and wiser environing group” Du Bois meant white America or those who have benefited from higher education, or both, for Malcolm X and my birth father, Jack Baynes, the “richer and wiser environing group” was indubitably white America. Malcolm only realized the positive value of said environing group’s contribution and impact on his life and work shortly before his death—after a trip to Mecca, he returned with a newfound acceptance and appreciation of white people; months later, he was shot—while Jack Baynes, on the other hand, realized only the group’s limitations.

For Vernon E. Jordan, who helped organize the integration of the University of Georgia and personally escorted Charlayne Hunter-Gault, one of the university’s first black students, through a hostile white crowd in 1961, who has served as the Georgia field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as director of the Voter Education Project for the Southern Regional Council, as head of the United Negro College Fund, as a delegate to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House Conference on Civil Rights, as president and CEO of the National Urban League, and who has survived an assassination attempt, the “richer and wiser environing group” is Vernon E. Jordan himself.

Jordan has not so much sought out encouragement from white America, or the upper echelons of academe, as he has invited the option of what it, or they, may have to offer, an offer he may then accept or pass on. He has made discerning choices, and today, those choices, and the life and the man they have informed and helped to make, reveal not the secrets of a great success story. In fact, there are no secrets, no mystery, surrounding the extraordinary life of Vernon E. Jordan. He has, very simply, taken his life seriously, and he means for others to do the same.

Vernon E. Jordan, Jr.

I guess I’ve always pretty much known what I wanted to do and was determined to do it. I grew up in a house where there were no limitations put on my goals. I was encouraged by my parents to succeed, and although I knew that when I stepped outside of my home there would be this notion of a larger dominant group in the way of white America, I couldn’t let that turn me around. People thought it was crazy that I wanted to be a lawyer, given the fact that black people could not go to law school in Georgia, or be in the bar association, for that matter. But that was not a deterrent as much as it was a reason to keep going. I have never believed that black people need the support of white people to succeed.

I invite the support of white people to the extent that I choose. All that I do and have done has always been my choice. When I got ready to go to college, the teachers at my high school in Georgia said, “Well, why are you going up there? Morehouse isn’t good enough for you?” They didn’t understand why I wanted to leave the South to go to college. And I said, “Because I want to.” I had some notion that if I stayed down south and went to Morehouse that today I would still be hanging on the corner of Thayer and Chestnut, watching the girls go by. I was interested in the bigger challenge, the larger world, and I wanted to grow in ways that I thought I would not have grown if I had stayed in Georgia.

On August 15, 1953, my mother left a note on my bed that said, “We want you to go to college wherever you want to go. If you go to Howard, you might be more comfortable, more at home academically and socially. But you go wherever you want to go.” And that’s what I did. I lost my buddies, though. We had decided that we were all going to Howard together—we were going to rent a house, have a car, be sharp every day and chase good-looking women. That was the plan. But then this guy came to my high school from the National Service of Scholarship Funds for Negro Students, and he talked about the option of going to school up north—and I got interested in the idea. I applied to Dartmouth and Depauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where I was accepted. After that, one night when I had to work, my girlfriend went out with my buddies, and I became the topic of conversation. They said things like, “He thinks he’s white; he thinks he’s smarter than us.” The next night, my girlfriend told me, “Your friends are not your friends. They think you’re breaking rank.” And then she told me to go on up there to college in Indiana anyway and do what I had to do.

There was nothing in my mind telling me I needed to go to a white school to succeed—I wasn’t mature enough to think about it as a strategy. It was just what I wanted to do. Right after I finished high school, I went up to Depauw for an educational guidance conference, and I was the only black among about fifty students. The director of admissions told me that Depauw was not the school for me, and that I should go to Ball State. He also told me that the notion of my wanting to be a lawyer was crazy, and that I’d probably end up being a high school social science teacher. I just said to him, “I’ll be back.”

While my parents were proud of my decision, there was some trepidation on their part because I was going into what they thought could be a hostile environment. They took me to school. We drove—my parents, my brother, and I—to Greencastle, and they all spent the weekend there with me. We went to mixers and met various professors at the university, as well as important figures from town, like the bank president—it’s a very warm town. The last night, my brother shook my hand and ran off, all excited that he’d have the bedroom to himself for the first time; my mother, with tears running down her face, kissed me and said, “God bless you, son”; my daddy told me I couldn’t “come home.” He said, “These teachers think these kids are smarter than you. They read faster. They went to better schools than you. But you can’t come home.” I was stunned by that, and I asked him, “What am I supposed to do then, Daddy?” And he said, “Read, boy, read.” When I graduated four years later, he came up to me, shook my hand, and told me I could come home.

I didn’t go to Depauw University just to learn. By my very presence there, I was a teacher, as well. And that didn’t bother me, because my view was that whatever problem the white students might have with me was not mine, but theirs. I don’t know where that conviction came from, but I knew that if I allowed myself to be uncomfortable in their presence, I was doomed. That has been my attitude about everything. When I was growing up and we went downtown to segregated Atlanta, my mother would say before we left, “Go to the bathroom now. Drink your water now. So that when we get downtown, you don’t have to subject yourself to the system.” So we peed before we went downtown.

There’s a passage in the introduction to my book (Vernon Can Read!) that reads: “I choose to stick with what I know and believe fervently about the progress of black life during the decades of which I write.” The way I feed that belief is just by living it—get up every morning, go to work, work hard, take nothing for granted. I believe that whatever I want, I need to get for myself. There are no handouts, and I don’t want them anyway. I just want to go to work every day. I want the same opportunities these other guys, white guys, get. The thing I know for sure is that the Man will take care of himself—the white man. It’s my job to work it out so that I can be where he is on an equal basis, because if I am, he cannot take care of himself without equally taking care of me. I think that’s what it’s all about. Does it work the other way—if I’m taking care of myself, am I equally taking care of the white man? I don’t worry about him, because he’s always going to be all right. I worry about the brothers and sisters, though, because the support system is different for them.

This notion of a support system is relevant to what Du Bois was talking about in The Souls of Black Folk in terms of an “environing group.” When I went to college, the only thing my daddy could give me was permission. That was not true of any of the white boys I went to school with, but I could not worry about that. Being born into Phillips Exeter Academy was their garden to tend, not mine. I needed to tend my own garden.

I don’t mention Du Bois in my book. But if you look through my speeches over time, starting at the Urban League, I quoted him a lot. I read The Souls of Black Folk for the first time simultaneously with Up from Slavery, by Booker T. Washington, while I was in college. Even though I thought they were both right, I especially loved what Du Bois said about the responsibility of the Talented Tenth to the masses. Du Bois thought, and he was right about this, that we had to have a cadre of educated people to lead, to plan, and to teach. I believed it then, I believe it now, and that is how I’ve tried to live my life.

My view of the Du Bois–Washington debate is that like most things in life, it was not either/or; it was both/and. An example of that is if you go to Atlanta today: The jobs that we used to dominate—as electricians, waiters, doormen, tailors, and barbers—in part because of the Talented Tenth theory, we don’t dominate anymore. Du Bois was right about the responsibility of the educated, but everybody can’t go to Morehouse, and we need to figure out something for those folks to do. And Washington said, “Teach them farming, tooling, and so forth.”

There is a direct relationship between the farmers and the cadre of leaders. They have one commonality—their blackness. When the white man discriminated, he didn’t make a choice between the educated and the uneducated black man. It was “To Whom It May Concern” if you were black, and to a certain extent, it still is. I can stand next to an elevator porter on Sixth Avenue in New York dressed in my suit and my Turnbull shirt, and neither one of us will get a taxi.

Du Bois was quite uppity. When he lived in Atlanta, you’d see him around town in his black suits and his spats. He was not a man of the people. John Hope Franklin (the great civil rights leader and historian, and author of the classic book From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans) tells a great story about Du Bois, and he can tell it much better than I can, but I’ll do my best. When John Hope Franklin was a student at Harvard, he worked in Durham, North Carolina, during the summers. If you were traveling between Washington and Atlanta, Durham was one of the few places where you could stop and there would be black restaurants. John Hope Franklin was a waiter at one of these restaurants, and Du Bois came in one day, alone, and Franklin was very excited to see him. He went over to Du Bois and said, “My name is John Hope Franklin. Like you, I went to Fisk University.” Du Bois said nothing. Franklin said, “I’m also a student of history at Harvard, like you.” Du Bois said nothing. Franklin said, “I’m also going to get a Ph.D. from Harvard, as you did.” And finally, Du Bois said, “Good evening.” He was not a man of the people.

The great contradiction about Du Bois is that even as he was not a man of the people, he could write truthfully and eloquently about the people. For that, he is forgiven. He understood the aspirations of black people, and that understanding lives on.