Oral History with Staughton and Alice Lynd, January 13th, 2017, Part One

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Okay, so today is January 13th, 2017. And we are here: Catherine Murphy and Dan Kerr—that's how you pronounce your name Dan—with Staughton Lynd in the home of Staughton and Alice Lynd and we're continuing what is now our third day of a wonderful conversation with Staughton and Alice Lynd. Today we're going to talk with you about some of your teaching experiences, and mostly focused on Spelman—some of your teaching experiences at Spelman, more recently and currently at TCI, look a little—looking at some of the questions, a couple questions around Freedom Schools as you experienced them. Could you start by talking about how you decided to go to Spelman? Alice had told us the other day sort of about how you found out, but how did you take that? How did you then decide to go?

I think I should very briefly say something about my parents, and myself, and education. My parents were both college professors, my mother spent most of her professional life at Sarah Lawrence College near New York City. A very progressive college for very well-to-do young women. And my father was co-opted into the sociology department at Columbia University after the publication of Middletown, although he'd never taken a course in sociology. My parents pursued somewhat contradictory ideas, and I'm only 87 so I'm still at the beginning of working these out, but my dad took note of the fact that it was a kind of recurring phenomenon that I had a high IQ. When the University of Chicago Law School wanted to keep me out because I'd been involved in a major sit-in prior to applying for admission to the law school, they were frustrated by the fact that another part of their creed was meritocratic and I had done very well on the law school admission test.

So, my dad was a person who was just an outgoing, cheerful, hard-working human being who put a great deal of emphasis on figuring things out intellectually, which would then be carried out by a movement in the field. I think the time I saw him happiest was when he was invited to a United Automobile Workers conference in about 1950 and he gave a talk called "You Can Do It Better Democratically," and Victor Reuther—brother to Walter Reuther—wrote a little foreword in which he said that there'd been an insistent demand in the union for publication of Professor of Lynd's remarks. And I will remember as long as I live—we lived in an 8th floor apartment on Central Park West in New York City, and I remember my dad coming back from that trip and he was happier than I ever saw him at any other time. So I was supposed to somehow pick up the baton. On the one hand, working with groups like the trade union movement, which my father considered the most important force for a good kind of social change. And on the other hand, receiving tenure from one of three or four ivy league universities and excelling in that frame of reference as well. And for a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long long, long time, I did my best to do both of those things at the same time.

My mother was completely different. She had grown up in a Protestant household, Congregationalist. Very New England, where you didn't read the funnies on Sunday and in a variety of other ways tried to shape even minute details of your life to be consistent with a Biblical orientation. And she rebelled against this, she was the first child—the first of three daughters and what she extended to me was an absolute faith. In myself as a person who could and would find his way. And just to pick out a moment of that, in one of the innumerable times when I left home to go off—who knows where and what I would do,—she said, "oh wait, wait, I have one more thing to give you and, you know the fairy stories of the folktale, speak of a cake for your journey. I have a cake for your journey." And anything that I've been able to do in my life has just owed everything to her love and confidence.

In fact, it was excessive but on balance, tremendously helpful, because I did go through all sorts of bumps and corners. I dropped out of Harvard in the middle of a semester, I dropped out of Columbia in the middle of a semester. I dropped out of Harvard after I read Trotsky's Literature and Revolution, in which he says in the conclusion that in the future society everyone will be an Aristotle or Agata[sp?], and beyond these, new peaks will rise. I thought "well, where the heck is that, let me at it." I was on my way. And really, very similarly at Columbia I went to see a movie about The French saint, Vincent de Paul. He was originally a chaplain to the king of France and the king of France liked to have races among his courtiers in which the boats would be rowed by galley slaves. And there was an occasion, purportedly, where the king kept raising the beat of strokes per minute and the young Chaplain Vincent, more and more concerned, raised the question, "isn't it too much for them?" And the king said, "oh no, they like it. They're not like us." And then a man, a middle-aged man in the bowels of the galley collapsed. And Vincent clambered down from the high poop and took up the oar. And that's what I wanted to do in life. I left Columbia the next day. So, there was this very complicated notion of what education is or should be, and I kept trying to put them together in one fashion or another.

With regard to Spelman, that question presented itself interestingly. and, I'll never forget my—I taught, just, an extraordinary number of courses at the same time—but I'll never forget my first lecture. Here I am at an institution which, yes, is made up of African-Americans, but is named for the wife of the first John D. Rockefeller. So the institution was combining—trying to combine different things as well. And I knew that one way all of this was put together or papered over was by a strong religious, quasi-religious—at the chaplain attendance was compulsory for students. Alice Walker was disciplined for having her light on in the early hours of the morning reading French poetry. And so, my first lecture was on a course on world history, and my topic was the beginnings. My text was the Book of Genesis. I don't remember exactly what I said, but if you read some of the things I've written you'll find I'm still trying to put together what I think was a model for empathy and solidarity that had never before been seen on the face of the Earth to the same extent with things that I find inconsistent with that in the very same text.

Because, Let's take the Parables. The Parables show us employers, masters, absentee landlords, setting a standard for behavior that others are—that human beings are expected to exemplify. And the example that surpasses all others is that of God as an absentee landlord, a parable that appears in the Gospel of Thomas, which is merely a collection of sayings. And in addition in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke—three of the four synoptic gospels—and the story is that there was a landlord who dug out a vineyard, and then went into a far country but expected to collect rent from the tenants. And he sent two groups of servants who were killed or manhandled, and then sent his beloved son to get the rent. And I've asked, you know, biblical scholars ministers, what in the world is that all about? An answer comes, there are none. So that's been another unresolved strand in being a teacher or being a human being for me. I consider myself the world's only Quaker Marxist, and I will confess: I'm still trying to combine those different strands in what I got from my parents, but also have, just over and over again been been challenged to put together.

I'm going to take a little pause and just refold this because it's slightly distracting. I'm folding it one more time. Is that comfortable for you?

Yeah.

Ok. So, um—

So let me just continue with Spelman for a moment. I did conventional things: I had lots of classes, I graded blue books. I did some unconventional things: I created an honors class. Alice Walker and Gwendolyn Simmons AKA Zohara—sorry, Gwen Robinson AKA Zohara Simmons—were members of that group. And I just picked out the most provocative and interesting social science books that I could find like Seeright Nells[?] or Fanon. and we read them and talked about them, but what was really going on—and this is something I just come back to again and again—was not in books, and not—at least all together—in things that students wrote. Although, the way Howard and I identified Alice Walker and became the co-discoverers of the future Pulitzer Prize winner was that I was reading blue books one night, and I hate blue books, and there was this particular one that I came on, say at 11:30 at night, and it was substantively at the very least B+, probably A-, but it was written like a poem. And so the next day I hustled around to Howard who lived just around the corner. I said, "do you by any chance chance have a student named Alice Walker?" He said, "do I have a student named Alice Walker? She has just written a paper on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky that you wouldn't believe." he was teaching a course on Russian something-or-other and tried to give them Russian novels as a way to add a dimension to the material. But what was really going on was that we were all modeling for one another what it meant to be an educated, housebroken person who knew which side of the plate to put the fork on and so forth, human being. And I think—Howard has departed, but to the best of my knowledge, I just got a note from Alice Walker the other day, I presume she's still alive and that the same is true of Gwen. And what else are we doing then then saying, "hey, you know what I did recently? I was on that boat that tried to get into Gaza" and etc.

And I remember the first year I was there, John F. Kennedy was proposing to renew—I think I have this right—atmospheric nuclear testing and we were the one institution in the south. The innocence of my life. Somehow, we rented, we went to Washington, it was the famous occasion in which the weather was very cold and Kennedy sent out hot coffee to the picketers who were protesting his policies. A really signature—I mean, it was class. And we stayed at the home of a student named Roberta Smith, and when I tried to to pay the family, they wouldn't let me. And I remember Roberta saying, "Mr. Lynd, if somebody asked you to unswivel your head and give it to them, you'd do it." And obviously that didn't have to do the latest assignment and the survey course on American history, it had to do with the kind of human beings that we were. Similarly, one Christmas-time, Alice Walker did Alice and myself the great honor of inviting me to her family home in Eatonton, Georgia, where her father, a sharecropper all his life, and her mother lived. And such a meal must have been in preparation for six months: the preserved fruits, everything that I remember—Alice, who was smoking at that time, ducking here and there to smoke a cigarette to help her get through this very significant moment of inviting one of her favorite teachers to meet her family.

Gwen had—really of all Spelman students or young African-Americans whom I knew—the hardest road to walk, in that she was from Memphis, and Memphis is a very short distance from Mississippi. And I formed the conclusion that the entire black population of Memphis lived in terror of Mississippi. And the idea of their daughter—their daughter who was able to go to Spelman, the finishing school for all young, black women in the South—their daughter wanting to go to Mississippi was a catastrophic event. If I sent Gwen money for bus fare, the family intercepted it, didn't give her the money. When Gwen indicated—as did several Spelman students, the volunteers were by no means all white—when Gwen indicated that she wanted to go to Mississippi for Freedom Summer, her family, at least verbally disowned her. I've never pursued the details, but very courageous, very dramatic, and Gwen dropped out of college to become a full-time SNCC [Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee] staff worker and didn't go back for years. And at the last SNCC reunion that Alice and I attended, Alice and I spent all one evening talking to Gwen, and I said, "Gwen, I know I'm supposed to be your teacher, but right now I feel I need some help from you." She had in the meantime become a a Muslim and a disciple of a Muslim teacher in Philadelphia. And what was important about that I think was, you know, not that I was [dramatic gasp] famous teacher, intellectual, activist asking for help from a student. It wasn't that, it was—of course, that's what we did. We needed to learn from each other's lives, and that's what Spelman education was at its best.

I remember another student, Barbara Walker, who'd somehow in a way that I don't remember, wrote a little something about what had been important to her in a certain year, and part of it was "got a Christmas card from Staughton." You know, it was obviously difficult, complicated to be a civil rights activist, and it did involve choices between being a Spelman young lady suitable for marriage to a Morehouse man, and getting arrested time after time in downtown Atlanta. Looking back on it, I'm just absolutely convinced that what different ones of us acted out to the others in dealing with those life challenges were the most important part of whatever education happened at Spelman during the three years I was there.

We're going to pause for one moment, because, we have a full card.

Did it just go? Did we miss anything?

So, we missed a little bit, at the end.

I think I said the same thing several different ways, so I wouldn't worry about it.