Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

privileges which publicly had been
promised me ; and this was an early
object lesson of relentless pressure .
including subjection to a network
of student and faculty spies .
One day toward the end of September,
while discussing the effects
of urbanization on social norms, I
criticized the obsolescence of some
professed codes of sexual conduct ;
then, as if to salvage the class from
its shock, gave assurances of my
abiding adherence to them . I told
of my efforts the previous year to
launch an association of virgins on
the campus, and that one member
grew sick and dropped out and the
other flunked out . I also explained
that the reason Howard's wall
clocks always differed as to time of
day was because every time a virgin
at Howard passes a clock the clock
stands still . Within 30 minutes after
that class was over, the chairman of
my department was calling me in
excitedly to say that the dean had
said that a student had said that I
had said that I was the only virgin
on Howard's campus .
The superiors then proposed to
"observe" my classes, and, when I
refused this unique attention,
threatened to fire me, but backed
down when I remarked, during the
hearing, that I had once been the
best cotton-picker in Creek County,
Oklahoma and that, should it
ever come to that, I could ale ays
burn my doctorate and go back to
picking cotton . After the hearing,
they sent a letter reappointing me,
mainly because (as they later said
44
in court) they feared student disruptions
should they fire me during
the school year, but they nonetheless
persisted in threats and harassment,
warning that if I did not fall
in line there was "going to be a
war ."
Late one evening, after a heated
confrontation with a superior, i
ducked into a middle-class bar near
the campus where I encountered a
number of older professors . Their
plights surprised and horrified me .
I decided from then on that, if then;
was "going to be a war," then I was
a soldier and should act like one .
Meanwhile, students had been
staging protests for grievances
which typify universities everywhere-against
curfew regulations
and other aspects of the right not
to be treated as children . The Law
School students were prominent
here, led chiefly by Jay Greene,
later expelled and now on scholarship
in the Yale Law School, and
Art Goldberg, a Jewish student
from Berkeley now in Rutgers Law
School . Their activities consisted
mainly of rallies where Jay Greene
and other students would "rap" to
a crowd of several hundred, then
read resolutions drawn up in legal
language ; and the crowd, after being
told that the resolutions were to
be delivered to President Nabrit,
would joyfully clap their hands and
disperse . Nabrit practically never
acted on the resolutions, except for
a few faint promises, even when he
was on campus, but the procedure
was always repeated anyway .
March 1968 NEGRO DIGEST