It’s Black History Month, and I can’t help thinking about how it has become, for me, less an academic issue and more a personal matter. I do this with feelings of guilt, because I was taught that it was crass and “low class” to feel important because of the “important” people you know or have met. And it was even crasser and less classy to brag about it.
And yet, here I am doing it. I knew Maynard Jackson, the first black mayor of a southern city (Atlanta); he taught me to do “hand jive” when we were both 15 years old. Also at 15, I had a 15-minute conversation with Elijah Muhammad, who tried to explain Islam to me; I was bewildered.
I met Dr. Ralph Bunche on an elevator in New York City. I babysat for Whitney Young (as he babysat for my parents when he was a college student). I met Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Mary McLeod Bethune, Roland Hayes, “Dizzy” Gillespie, Marian Anderson, Wilt Chamberlain, Gayle Sayers, Percy Heath, Samuel L. Jackson, Moses Gunn, Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael, Louis Farrakhan and Robertearl Jones (James Earl Jones’ father, and he did spell it that way at that time). And did you know that I met and supported Harold Washington and Carol Moseley Braun when they both ran for re-election to the Illinois Senate?
And if I live long enough, it might become remarkable that I once stood only a few feet away from Barack Obama in Petersen’s Ice Cream on Chicago Avenue, when he began his major race.
Did you know that George Washington Carver, at Tuskegee Institute, gave my father two dead rabbits and asked him to give them to my grandmother to cook for dinner? (My grandfather worked for Booker T. Washington as head of the academic department at Tuskegee Institute.) Unfortunately, I never met Martin Luther King Jr. But, Martin Luther King Sr., whom I met, was one of the bosses of one of my former bosses. (That’s quite a stretch, but then, it was MLK!)
So how do I justify this bragging about my association with these accomplished people, whose accomplishments I had absolutely nothing to do with? I suppose I could claim that it puts me in a position to explain to black children and teenagers that these were ordinary people, and that ordinary people can, and do, extraordinary things through thought, hard work and developed talent.
But closer to the mark is the fact that I am also proud that I live in Oak Park – home of Frank Lloyd Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Dr. Percy Julian – with a pride that is no different from that of thousands of other Oak Park residents who take pride in their hometown. It is a natural human trait to admire and want to be associated with highly accomplished people; most of us would not consider a little bragging to be inappropriate.
Of course, anything can be taken too far. For instance, if we were to signal to our children that we value our more academically skilled kids to a greater extent than we do the rest, then we would create a real problem. But, that is another discussion for another month.
Ralph Lee is a 32-year resident of Oak Park and current president of the Oak Park and River Forest High School board.