Come to think of it, maybe you should come by the office anyway when I’m not at home, so you wouldn’t have to be writing love letters to elderly women and carrying on. Dr J and I probably wouldn’t have been married fifty-seven years if I had let the ice man and any and everybody who took a notion come by and hang around.--Dr. Nathan Hare
Greetings, Plato Negro,
...Anyway, as I said before but don’t know if you got it, I was planning to write to remind you you’d missed a lot of addenda to the archives by coming at random and I wasn’t at home, so you only got the big box of videos of Dr J’s speeches;. but I just noticed pictures of her and her mother, ad infinitum, including when Dr J was the keynote speaker for the Centennial Commencement and the simultaneous celebration of Langston University’s first one hundred years. They had to hold it in the football stadium, with folding chairs covering the field on top of the stadium seats, and still there were African-Americans lined up four or five deep outside the fence all around it. It was an unforgettable event that would set fire to the notion that black people aren’t interested in education, as most of the thousands had come out to the middle of a red clay pasture in Logan County, Oklahoma, to see their friends and relatives graduating, as they of course had not, and they were cheering like it was the Mardi Gras. It was worse than a football homecoming against a rival team.
There’re a lot of other pictures here, including my mother’s father, who was his slavemaster’s son, and maybe, cause there used to be, a small one of the slavemaster (my great grandfather) himself is still among them. No use for me to lie, it’s a world I never made. I think I’ll try to take them over to the office myself, and they’ll just be there, and if you miss out again, you can drop by the office and box with me over whatever is there.
By the way, I see the Bantam book on the 1968 black studies conference at Yale, Black Studies in the University, is here. Surprisingly, I think it’s out of print and little known for a Bantam Book on Yale of a historic academic occurrence. Maybe you got a copy earlier, I think I had two -- where Yale had me and Harold Cruse and Maulana Karenga and Charles Hamilton (Black Power, with Stokely Carmichael) and Gerald McWorter, McGeorge Bundy , Alvin Poussaint, and Armstead Robinson, then the mentor of a Yale freshman in the audience, Henry Louis Gates, and at least a couple of white Yale professors; yet titled my presentation “A Radical Perspective on Social Science Curricular.” I think I got the meaning of black studies in there (Cf. e.g., The Graduate Journal, circa 1970), but I had only arrived at San Francisco State a month or so earlier and hadn’t yet imbibed it to the extent that I would later, in my observation and discussion with the students and street (mostly ex-con) intellectuals and five months of striking, plus months of pre-strike plans and post-strike negotiating (I used to call it “Negrotiating,” because the BSU had pitched the strike on a principle of “non-negotiation” (which was so divergent, it got in Pogo’s Sunday strip), based on their reading of Lenin’s distinction between “Autonomy” and “Self-Determination” and the “Little Red Book” of Mao Tse-Tung.
Come to think of it, maybe you should come by the office anyway when I’m not at home, so you wouldn’t have to be writing love letters to elderly women and carrying on. Dr J and I probably wouldn’t have been married fifty-seven years if I had let the ice man and any and everybody who took a notion come by and hang around.
What did I do to be so black and blue?
Bear with me.
Nathan
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