I had never planned to stay there. I certainly had never planned to go there. After all, only colored people went there. But I was white. And it was in the south. The fifties were only yesterday. My Uncle Frank cringed when he heard their music. "Goddamn jungle..." he'd mutter. OK, since I had never planned to go there, and I had never planned to stay there, what was I doing there? In the Spring of 1962, Morgan State College, Baltimore, Maryland, had a student body of 2,600 students, all but two of them -- a nun and one eccentric co-ed -- Black. For a Jewish boy coming of age in this era there were three non-negotiables: circumcision, Bar Mitzvah, and a college diploma, preferably in law, medicine, or orthodontia. These three were existential imperatives. The Hebrew trifecta. Without them a male child did not exist as a Jew.
I should have had my college diploma in 1962 having graduated high school in 1958. though I tripled my degree of difficulty by flunking out three times. I got an A in English, a C in philosophy, and an F in everything else, including ROTC and phys. ed., rebelling against authority being one of my strong suits. Given this, reasons still remaining murky, I enlisted in the Marine Corps. Once on Parris Island my Drill Instructor bellowed in my face, "Why do you want to be in my Marine Corps, maggot?" "Sir, because it's safer than being at home, sir!" The words just came blurting out. Home life had been precarious to say the least. My DI's expression was one of utter disdain. "Get outta my sight, maggot!" he sneered.
I trained as a combat engineer, and now once again walked civilian streets with few skills except how to break down an M1 rifle and put it back together again at night, blindfolded, in the sand. This is not a skill easily transferred to civilian purposes. What now? I thought about going back on active duty, but authority -- remember that one? -- still not my strong suit. What else? Drug store clerk? Produce manager at the A & P? Custodian at the local country club? Jews didn't do these jobs!
A neighbor, a white woman, worked in the Dean's office at Morgan and suggested I give it some thought. Dean Whiting, Dean of Students, was a reasonable man. Call him. I did, and without any memorable thoughts on a hot June day found myself crossing the quad to the administration building. It's bright white Grecian columns blinded me. I remember squinting to see and the feeling of my legs climbing the steps. Once inside the coolness of the interior settled around me. Summer school had not yet started. The halls were empty. I was probably wearing desert boots so my crepe soles made no sound. Neither did anything else. The quiet of an empty warehouse. Where was the dean's office? OK, there it is. Straighten up. Let's do this.
Dean Whiting wore a sport coat, tie, and really gentle smile. His office was full of books. I felt at ease in a way I never feel in a room without books. I don't trust you unless there's a stack of books on the floor beside your chair, preferably, each one about something else. I can't remember the details of our conversation but the upshot of it was that he allowed me to enroll in two courses for summer school, both English, I'm sure. The idea was that if I did well he would consider me a provisional student meaning I'd be allowed to enroll in a regular semester for four courses, twelve credits. We'd go on from there, see where we're at, what we'd do. Well, I knew exactly what I was going to do. I was going to ace those courses, all six of them, because, of course, since Morgan was a colored school it was an easy school. I'd score good grades then transfer to a good school, a white school. That was the plan. However, when the time came for me to transfer -- I had scored five A's and one B -- something had changed. I didn't consider myself politicized (I doubt I even thought about it), but Rosa Parks had refused to stand up, Negro college students from North Carolina had refused to leave a white lunch counter, and Malcolm was called Malcolm on campus even though most of the Morgan community did not want a separatist nation. Martin Luther King was Martin. Most students at Morgan were working towards a piece of the American pie, and the faculty, all of whom had attended schools like Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, and Yale, returned to the community and dedicated themselves to help their folks do just that. The campus was vibrant in ways I had never before experienced. Black Power hadn't yet appeared but it was on its way. Stokely was making himself known. Black Power, when it finally surfaced, made perfect sense.
The true magic of it all was Morgan's faculty. Encyclopedic knowledge delivered with the passion of a preacher. The profs were hungry to do it, and the students were hungry to get it. It seemed every lecture was a Ted Talk. I was beginning to know things, and the more I knew the more I wanted to know, the more I did know, those delightful subtleties that come with rigorous, creative thought. I read James Baldwin's "Another Country" and understood it. Morgan was not an ideological campus -- it was an intellectual and creative one -- still, I read slave narratives, was introduced to characters like Marcus Garvey, writers like Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Zora Hurston, Charles Chestnutt-- the entire Harlem Renaissance -- James Weldon Johnson's brilliant, "God's Trombones", and Chaucer's tales; the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley and that of Emily Dickenson; Richard Wright, Bigger Thomas, Hawthorne, Hester Prynne; the art of Romare Beardon; the frescoes of Giotto; the music of Scott Joplin with a whisper of John Cage. The point is: I learned twice as much as I would have at a "good" school.
The point is: I stayed, grew, and graduated.
Graduate school at Yale was next.
A Fulbright was awarded.
I did just fine.
