Why was our history so important to us? Because we had been told that we had none. Just six years before we arrived in New Haven, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper claimed that “there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness.” In his view, history was “essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement,” which Black Africans simply did not have, an idea that echoed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries after it found endorsement in Hegel’s posthumously published Lectures on the Philosophy of History. By extension, in the racist scheme of things, what applied to Africans applied to us.
In one of his first lectures, Professor McFeely underscored what was at stake in the teaching of our history by quoting Arthur A. Schomburg: “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future…. History must restore what slavery took away.” Then he quoted Carter G. Woodson’s dictum that “if a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.” Our generation, the affirmative action generation, the largest class of Black students in Yale’s history, had been issued a call to arms; in studying Black history we were on a mission, and we threw ourselves into the task of restoring what Woodson called “the accounts of the successful strivings of Negroes for enlightenment under most adverse circumstances,” which “read like beautiful romances of a people in an heroic age.”
Du Bois wrote that “the Negro has long been the clown of history; the football of anthropology; and the slave of industry.” By mastering the hidden facts of the Black experience just a year and a half after Dr. King’s murder, as so much about American race relations was changing, we were charting the path of our people’s future. We could have no idea at that time how much we were part of these changes nor how much more was about to change. The initial cohort of Yale’s experiment in affirmative action hit New Haven—and Mr. McFeely’s class—at the high-water mark of Black radicalism. Black Panther Party members greeted us on our arrival in New Haven, which had become the center of the Party’s attention after nine of its members—including its cofounder, Bobby Seale, and the leader of its local branch, Ericka Huggins—were indicted there. The school year would culminate with a campus-wide moratorium on classes and May Day rally, both in support of the Panthers on trial and in protest of the Vietnam War.