Black Philosopher, White Academy: The Career of William Fontaine

Chapter Nine: White Racism and Black Power

  White Racism and Black Power The s Begin F    politics had a claim on Fontaine’s life. Ferment at home and overseas drew his attention. He felt most comfortable in the early s when exhortation and political pressure combined to move the Kennedy administration in the correct direction, both in foreign and domestic affairs. Kennedy’s intellect sided with progressives in racial matters. Black activism, including the work of Fontaine’s former acquaintance Martin Luther King, was edging the United States toward desegregation. The administration would propose a more potent civil rights bill than that of . Anti-Communism was complementing the quest for African independence overseas. After Kennedy’s death in , Lyndon Johnson proved a far more effective advocate for civil rights, and the  and  Civil Rights Acts eventually ended the segregated southern way of life and ushered in a new era of racial tolerance in the North. At Penn in the early s, the issue of ‘‘discrimination’’ discomfited white liberals. They favored desegregation in the South as a matter of law. Yet talk about de facto segregation in their own neighborhoods prompted them to sweat and exposed the racism endemic in the North to much of white America. Even if administrators at the university tried to maintain the status quo, issues of fairness troubled them, and they struggled with their prejudices. Again and again, combative black Americans and pushy students on the left exposed the limits of northern egalitarianism as it pertained to daily life on campus. A biracial coalition at Penn pointed to bias in admis- White Racism and Black Power  sions policies, student housing, and the employment of low-level workers.1 Suddenly, for the university, race had a high profile, and deans and provosts wanted eagerly to point with pride to whatever black presence they had. Suddenly, Fontaine had a considerable importance to the school, although he embodied the racial ‘‘tokenism’’ of an era that did not know how to cash out its promises of equality. Initially, I conjecture that because African matters occupied Fontaine, Penn only slowly pushed him front and center. Then for a short time in the mid-s he had a role as the visible black faculty member, in the brief period before his tuberculosis finally did him in. Even when healthy, however , Fontaine was a thinker about civil rights, not a doer; he was always a bit standoffish, not an activist. He hardly capitalized on the new place of race at the school. Between  and  Fontaine did not see much beyond the increased violence about racial matters all over the United States and the rise of political passion. The hopeful dialogue about race in the interchange between John Kennedy and Martin Luther King had barely begun before it had given way to a more strident era. The unpredictable enlargement of the struggle for equality, for all Fontaine knew, could eventuate in social regression. He noted several times the troubles of ‘‘the long hot summer’’ of , when riots occurred in many black ghettos in American cities.2 He worried not just about the progress of desegregation but also about the rise of black racism. He finally despaired because the war in far-off Vietnam undermined the antiCommunism that, he thought, allowed for the promise of democracy in Africa. He believed war would rework social mores at home, but he could not say how. The domestic fallout of the war in Vietnam burst forth less predictably than had such fallout in the past. And then, always cautious, Fontaine was once more ill. A tiny number of black students at Pennsylvania in the s could declare their U.S. citizenship, and in a period of social upheaval they had an uncharted position at a prestigious white institution. In  John Wideman, later a notable novelist and writer, entered Penn’s freshmen class, some twelve hundred strong, as one of a half-dozen African Americans.3 A poor black young man, Wideman did not have an easy time. In his sophomore year he learned that Penn had a black professor, and Wideman thought that maybe such a person could help with his insecurities about his place at a white university. Wideman walked over to College Hall and spotted Fontaine near the offices of the Philosophy Department but walked past the man, afraid to    introduce himself. As Wideman told the story, on his way he had come to fear that ‘‘if Bill Fontaine was teaching...