I realize that I am not fighting just for myself, or my people in the South, when I fight for freedom and equality. I realize now that I fight for the moral and political health of America as a whole and for her position in the world at large. I see that I aid the African and the Asian in their struggle for self-realization by my example as I push the cause of freedom a step further by gaining my own. I know that I show the Communist that one can advance in a democratic society. I know that I, in my individual struggle for improvement, help the world. I am no longer an isolated being—I belong. Europe helped me to see this!
There were many other inspiring teachers and preachers during my Spelman years who befriended me, guided me, and shared the struggle for racial justice. M. Carl Holman was a Clark College professor and poet who later moved to Washington to become Deputy Director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, President of the National Urban Coalition, and my son Jonah’s godfather. Dr. Samuel DuBois Cook, of whom I gushed in my diary, “I’m in love with his mind,” was a professor of political theory at Atlanta University and later president of Dillard University, a disciple of Dr. Mays, and a gifted teacher. Howard Zinn thought I’d gain greatly from taking one of Sam’s graduate courses in political theory. He was right. I basked in the imaginative challenges of Sam Cook’s classes as he invited us to construct visions of a future world order through the ideas, beliefs, and lives of Gandhi, Tolstoy, Trotsky, Bakunin, Lenin, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others.
I thank Sam Cook for prodding me to try to see and feel the world through the eyes of others and to open my mind to and digest a variety of ideas and attempt to apply them to the life and circumstances around me. He helped me eschew doctrinaire rigidity, and he, like Howard Zinn, was always there with the bottom-line question: How will a position help or hurt others or bend the universe closer to justice?
Esta Seaton taught me English at Spelman, and she and her musician husband Danny provided warmth, intellectual stimulation, and friendship. Howard Thurman, Langston Hughes, E. Franklin Frazier, and other great speakers who visited Spelman’s campus all created a climate of can-do and must-serve in us.
But three names are entered over and over in my college diary and mind’s eye: Dr. Mays, Charles Merrill, and Howard Zinn. Like my Daddy, they reinforced in me a sense that I could transcend the world I lived in and help transform it into the world I wanted to see. They taught the oneness of humankind and shared a passion for justice and excellence. They empowered me to make a difference. I thank them and hope to pass on their torch to those coming behind.
5
EUROPE
WHEN I WOKE UP on my first morning in Paris on my Merrill Fellowship and looked out of my window at teeming crowds on Boulevard St. Michel below and the beautiful Luxembourg Gardens across the street, I jumped up and down and yelled and pinched myself again and again. Having no one, parent or teacher or chaperone, to prescribe the day was a manmade miracle of Howard Zinn and Charles Merrill. I was nineteen and on my own—free—for the first time in my life!
In the first months away from home and Spelman’s gated community, I could not believe that I could go wherever I wanted, when I wanted, and do whatever I wanted. I have always loved exploring and wandering off the beaten track with no set destination for hours and hours and whole days. I roamed Paris streets, alleys, nooks, and crannies unafraid, hungrily drinking up sights and sounds and smells and people and art and history and differences with uncontained excitement. I would sit for long spells in the Luxembourg Gardens reading and watching the children’s sailboats. Sitting in a public garden was a new experience for me and I soon learned to relax and enjoy it. I had known no public spaces like that in America’s South and am so mindful now of the importance of beautiful spaces for the nourishment of the spirit and of the mind. I thought nothing about getting up one morning and traveling alone to Ireland to walk in the countryside near Dublin and then traveling to roam the streets of Belfast, and later Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland. I loved exploring the fairytale city of Edinburgh, listening to the great Zagreb Solisti String Quartet, and going to concert after concert after concert during the Edinburgh music festival. I first experienced Pablo Casals and the great guitarist Andrés Segovia in Europe. I caught a train to Spain to experience a bullfight, which I hated, but I basked in El Greco’s Toledo and Madrid’s Prado museum. I found I loved being alone to read and daydream. In Paris, I would haunt places where Victor Hugo and Zola had walked, and every time I walked across one of the Seine’s bridges I put myself in the skin of Camus’ disengaged protagonist in The Fall, a defining book in my life. I read Colette and D. H. Lawrence and Sartre and Frantz Fanon and hung out where Richard Wright and other self-exiled Black artists gathered.
At the International Student Hostel at 93 Boulevard St. Michel where I stayed and at the Sorbonne where I took a summer course in French civilization, I met young people from all over the world. The 1956 Hungarian Revolution had flooded Western Europe with young political exiles. My roommate came from Uruguay. Hours of dialogue with African counterparts made me realize the commonality of our freedom struggle but also how much America not Africa was my home. How proud I was of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and of Mrs. Rosa Parks and the swelling challenges to American apartheid back home. In Paris, I engaged in long, honest interracial conversations with southern White students who like me were seeking to reconcile the chasm between America’s professed principles of equality and freedom and its actual practices.
In Europe, wellsprings of long-suppressed rage bubbled up within me against the confining prison of segregation my native South and country had imposed. I knew I’d never return to that prison again either as a Black citizen or as a woman. No one would ever again define my place or what I could achieve or be on the basis of race and gender.
I can’t stand routines and bureaucracies that stifle individual creativity and possibility. I bristle at the immoral, unfair, and blanket sorting of children, especially children to whom life’s lottery has dealt a tough hand, by adults or peers who write them off as “underprivileged” or “inner city” or “under-achievers” or “disabled” or “geeks” and therefore worthless by prevailing societal measures. Since I did not realize what I could not do, I tried everything time and opportunity permitted. I managed to learn enough French to pass my courses at the Sorbonne and later in Geneva and took a year of Russian so that I could greet the Russian people whom I was determined to visit before returning home. Tolstoy’s writings had profoundly affected me as a college student, especially The Kingdom of God Is Within You, What Men Live By, Where Love Is There God Is, and The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Thanks to Howie Zinn’s insistence that I not be boxed in by a prescribed program, I could and did decide that I could stretch my dollars to stay in Europe for fifteen rather than twelve months—two summers and an academic year—if I went to the University of Geneva in Switzerland rather than remaining at the Sorbonne. Geneva was cheaper and had a graduate school of international relations which I thought would help me explore my then career dream of entering the Foreign Service.
I lived frugally and saved every possible penny from my $3,000 Merrill Fellowship so I could not only attend the University for the school year but also participate in a six-week Lisle Fellowship student exchange to the Soviet Union. My savings from scrimping, some scholarship help from Lisle, and, I now know, sacrificial help from my mother, who sold two small pieces of property my father had left her, made the latter trip possible.
I squeezed in a summer seminar at Lincoln College at Oxford University before the academic year in Geneva. At Oxford, I stayed at St. Hilda’s College, walked the beautiful grounds of Balliol College where our summer seminar coordinator was a student, and attended classes at Lincoln College with young people from around the world. I marveled at God’s graceful circles when I returned to Balliol for my son Jonah’s graduation when he earned his doctorate as a Rhodes Scholar and we attended a luncheon given him by his tutors at Lincoln Colle
ge. The sense that all is planned by a Higher Being returns to me often.
In Geneva, my three American roommates and I shared two rooms. Our first rental was with a Russian countess who had known Leo Tolstoy and his wife, and who railed about what a terrible husband he was. My roommates and I rebelled when the countess tried to re-institute Spelman in Geneva by imposing rigid strictures and routines on our lives—teatimes, expectations about conversation (which, I now recognize, were simply a lonely old woman’s need for company), and curfews. After a few months the four of us decided to split up and move around the corner. I lived with a Swiss woman who befriended us but kept a more hands-off stance with her college-age American charges testing their wings. The nearby John Knox House headed by Paul Frelich was a haven for fellowship and meals. I liked my roommates very much, and the four of us continued to be friends and to travel together during school breaks. My French would have been much improved, however, by not rooming with Americans!
Two other friendships provided encouragement, familylike meals, and stability during my stimulating Geneva schoolyear. Vivian and Joe Young, Black Americans, provided a home away from home. Joe worked for the International Labor Organization (ILO) and Vivian was a full-time mother to all young newcomers. She shepherded me and Roslyn Pope—the other Spelman Merrill Scholar—through Italy and up to her quiet Swiss chalet where she still returns every summer. It is a source of enormous satisfaction for me that Vivian, now over seventy-five, working with Joe and their son, Butch, heads Stand for Children in Delaware and shares with children the same warmth, advocacy, and support she did with me as a young Black college student in a strange land. Vivian came to my Spelman College graduation and has remained a constant presence in my life even when we do not see each other regularly. On my first day at Yale Law School, I met a young restless Black man at Yale’s graduate school who was uncertain about what he wanted to do with his life. I advised him to leave Yale and go to Geneva to see Vivian. He was Donald Stewart, who later became president of Spelman College and head of the College Board. Later it was my pleasure to broker a marriage between Donald and the lovely Isabelle Johnston whom I’d met on a summer Crossroads Africa project in the Ivory Coast. Isabelle now heads Girls, Inc., which provides mentors for young girls.
My other Geneva friendship was with Liliane Jacot-Descombes, a wonderful Swiss nurse who became like a sister. She had fallen in love with Finley Campbell, a Merrill Scholar from Morehouse whose Detroit preacher father, Dynamo Campbell, had run revival meetings in my father’s church and whose family often stayed with our family. Liliane was a sturdy anchor who accompanied me to and literally pushed me through the door for the scary oral exams in French at the University of Geneva when I froze, convinced I was going to flunk. She moved to Atlanta the following year, married Finley, who was teaching at Morehouse, and adopted two interracial children, who are now grown and living in Geneva, where she returned after their divorce.
I did pass my exams administered by three stern examiners. When I was done, I hitchhiked with a young Black woman friend from Geneva to Hamburg, Germany to meet my Lisle Fellowship group and then took a train to Warsaw, Poland en route to the Soviet Union. Hitchhiking was the one experience I probably would not repeat. My Daddy always cautioned against it at home but in Europe it was and is safer and Karen and I arrived sound, untouched, and on time after rides mostly with truck drivers. We did question our judgment after accepting a ride from two young motorcyclists who misread our intentions and tested our wills when they went off the highway into an empty field. Protest and prayer delivered us from what they perceived as a sexual invitation. My friend returned home to America and I met Rev. William Keys, my Lisle leader, and the group, which included a big, brown, beautiful Spelman student, Virginia Powell, whom the Russians would stop, stare, and point at as if she were a Black princess, and one brilliant Black man from Washington, D.C., Henry Robinson. In Warsaw I called a Polish friend, Stephan Durski, whom I’d met at Lincoln College at Oxford. Stephan picked me up, drove me with his friends to the ocean many miles away, and returned me to Warsaw at the crack of dawn barely in time to catch the train to the Soviet Union with my frantic group and leader.
The summer of 1959 in the Soviet Union was magical. I experienced the American Exhibition in Moscow, one of the windows being opened into the Iron Curtain that made possible student exchanges like mine. I witnessed the exciting Khrushchev-Nixon debate from a few yards’ distance; met Carl Sandburg whose multivolume biography of Lincoln my Daddy had bought for us when we were children; and debated with Moscow University students and other Soviet citizens but always in carefully arranged settings. We danced with warm and stout Soviet women at a youth camp near Sochi in the Caucasus (the war had killed millions of Russian men), roamed with crowds of Russian peasants through the priceless treasures of the Hermitage in Leningrad and saw the Tsars’ beautiful dwellings at Petrograd. In addition to wanting to visit Tolstoy’s home, Yasnaya Polyana, I had hoped to find and meet Dr. W. E. B. DuBois in the Soviet Union, but by that time he had moved to Ghana. And I look forward still to going to Tolstoy’s home.
The Soviet Union’s constraints on thought and daily life made me bristle just as I did in the segregated South. I left with no illusion about Communism.
A chance personal meeting with Khrushchev and the president of Czechoslovakia topped off the summer. Our Lisle student group was visiting a rural Russian village near the Black Sea resort of Sochi when three big cars drove up and out stepped Premier Nikita Khrushchev, the president of Czechoslovakia, and other dignitaries. The villagers brought out bottles of vodka and large glasses with which we engaged in toasts one after another as we danced and sang and celebrated the leaders’ presence. I took the first drink of my life. My teetotaling family had been influenced by my Baptist daddy’s anti-alcohol stricture, but also by a family predilection to alcoholism that ravaged the lives of three of my maternal uncles and later two of my brothers. My brother Arthur overcame it and made a wonderful contribution to other recovering alcoholics as head of an alcohol and drug rehabilitation center in Brooklyn; my brother Julian’s productive life as a teacher and caretender for the elderly was cut short. Good manners, I thought, precluded my refusing huge refills as I got happily drunk for the first time in my life. I was less happy the next day!
I loved the Russian people and learned that summer to distinguish between them and their political rulers whom I did not love or trust. Attending a Baptist church service and hearing the mournful songs and moving harmony, I felt as at home as I did in Black Baptist churches in the South. Similar feelings of home washed over me decades later attending a church service in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, crammed with mothers bearing babies and old men leaning on prayer sticks amidst ancient but somehow familiar prayer and musical chants and rhythms.
I could never return home to a segregated South and a constraining Spelman College in the same way. After wandering the world, sharing the struggles for liberation of Hungarian, African, and Iranian students, sensing the longing for freedom of my Soviet student guides and counterparts who secretly shared their fears and frustrations, discerning the common thread of God in my fellow human beings, the genie of freedom could not be put back into the bottle of racial and gender segregation in America. As I reluctantly returned home to a changing South, the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. King were poised to give a powerful outlet to my longings.
While I was in Europe, Dr. King had been stabbed in the chest by a mentally ill woman in Harlem. I prayed hard for him and thought years later about this period in my life and his, including his recuperation in Rev. Sandy Ray’s home on President Street in Brooklyn, the parsonage of the Cornerstone Baptist Church where my brother Harry, Rev. Sandy Ray’s successor, now lives. When I visit Harry I sleep in the bedroom where Martin Luther King, Jr., healed before returning to southern battlegrounds to forge a more racially just America.
Home again after more than a year abroad, I was eager to share my experiences and to help
transform my homeland. I had missed my mother greatly and loved returning to report back to my Black home community that had sent me off with much pride and prayers. My brother Harry, who had succeeded my Daddy as pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in 1954, met me at the dock in Quebec on my return home from Europe. When he told our Shiloh congregation on my first Sunday back how I had ordered lunch for the two of us in Quebec in French, the congregation responded with a loud warm hum of pride. I was home.
6
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., AND A SPRING OF CHANGE
THIS LETTER, dated March 4, 1997, carrying a return address of “The Master’s House, Trumbull College, Yale University” arrived on my desk bringing a great gift of memories from the past.
Dear Ms. Edelman,
This package will come as a surprise to you. Let me explain how it came to be in my hands.
In 1987 we moved from the chaplain’s house, 66 Wall Street, to Trumbull College. While packing I came across this notebook which I had never seen before. I read enough to see it was a diary from a student at Spelman. I’m a journal keeper myself, so I felt sure the owner would like to have this. I tossed it in a box for High Street, expecting to write Spelman for an address once I could decipher this name on the front of the notebook. Now, ten years later, we are packing to leave Trumbull College. I was sorting out books yesterday and came across this mystery notebook again. Thumbing through it I said to Harry: “This woman may be famous today. Look, she says she plans to go to Harvard. And listen to this beautiful prayer.”
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