The Haverford Discussions: A Black Integrationist Manifesto for Racial Justice ed. by Michael Lackey (review)

The issue of separation versus integration has concerned black people in the United States since the establishment of the white-led American Colonization Society that sought to send freed families to Liberia. The argument then was should people seek a destiny in Africa, the land of their ancestors, or strive to make America a nation where civil and human rights were not limited by one’s skin color. Supporters of racial integration bitterly attacked those who deserted the enslaved population at a time when antislavery action was demanded. This argument even extended to the brief flirtation with Haiti when that government in 1859 offered free passage and land to those from America seeking a destiny in the “jewel of the Caribbean.” Even the staunch integrationist Frederick Douglass decided to emigrate, but the beginning of the Civil War convinced him that it was a golden opportunity to destroy slavery. An inhospitable racial climate during the 1890s pushed some to revive an interest in emigrating to Liberia as lynching, and Jim Crowism soured them on having the United States as their homeland. The Garvey movement of the early 1920s convinced some that the Jamaican was correct in classifying the United States as “a white man’s government.” The 1960s witnessed not only tremendous strides toward equality with the sit-ins, freedom rides, and voting rights struggles, which led to integrated public facilities and black suffrage in the previously segregated South. Militants questioned the wisdom of integration. Calls for black power in the ghettos and separatist ideologies on college campuses alarmed a group of intellectuals who met at Haverford College in Pennsylvania on May 30–31, 1969. It was an eminent group of scholars who gather to freely discuss the rise of what Lackey calls “the deep-level philosophy underwriting the agenda of separatism and integrationism” (xxi).

The participants were a group who throughout their careers fought for an integrated society. Among them were psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark, whose doll experiments convinced the U. S. Supreme Court in 1954 that segregation was psychologically damaging to black children and led to integration in public schools. Others were Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man; Anne Cooke Reid, drama professor; St. Clair Drake, professor and coauthor of Black Metropolis (1945); William Hastie, Chief Judge of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit; John Hope Franklin, historian and author of From Slavery to Freedom; Robert C. Weaver, first African American cabinet appointee as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; Adelaide M. Cromwell, director of African Studies at Boston University; J. Saunders Redding, holder of an endowed chair at Cornell University; Phyllis A. Wallace, an economist; Hyland Lewis, a sociologist; poet M. Carl Holman; and Eddie N. Williams, vice president for public affairs and director of the Center for Policy Study at the University of Chicago. Redding, Ellison, and Kenneth Clark were concerned about the life of African American students on campus, whereas Wallace and Holman focused on problems that began beyond the campus. Overall, the group understood that there was a difference between student demands and the concerns of noncampus groups. Nevertheless, their comments concentrated on students whose demands for separate dorms and courses that excluded white students they believed were badly misguided. They believed that whites needed African American history perhaps more than did black students, as racists believed, as described by Carter G. Woodson, that there was no loss in killing those who had no history worth studying. The decision of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio to meet student demands for an all-black dormitory led Kenneth Clark to resign from Antioch’s board of directors. The Haverford Committee had a right to express concerns with some of the more outlandish student demands. Students who occupied buildings to force administrators to develop ethnic studies programs had a great deal of influence on hiring. A colleague of mine taught at Vassar, where young women demanded black bedsheets instead...