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A13B “Myne owne familiar friend” 1968 “Myne owne familiar friend.” The psalmist in a major mood switches voice with this melancholy note marked by bitterness, recalling a friend—“after my own heart,” with whom he “took sweet counsel together”—who turned against him. The psalmist then returns for solace and life itself to the Hebrew God Yahweh, the one personal relationship—whether blood family, ethnic, tribal, national, or fraternal love—that can always be counted on reliably. “I will put my trust in thee.” With the years 1968 and 1969 came a series of deaths, each one amounting to a powerful blow to any realistic hope for peace and justice. Old friends departed. Surviving ones, especially younger friends, seemed less reliable than before, treacherous at worst. And Sadie Gray Mays’s cancer apparently recurred. Whatever her ailment, it was a condition that the couple again kept secret, but her reduced horizon bore down heavily on each of them.1 Besides the loss of the truest and oldest friends, Bennie and Sadie Mays found it hard even to talk with many of their younger friends and associates. Such folk laughed at the Mayses’ language, or worse, they were stiffly polite and then laughed behind the Mayses’ backs. Young activists used a variety of terms, sometimes all at once, and it was hard to know what these terms were intended to mean. “New Negro” had been vaguely redefined and then abandoned as a term sometime in the optimistic months after 1953. The Mayses accepted the disappearance of this term, as they had accepted and indeed welcomed the disappearance of “Race Man.” But what term could describe the person of color who sought justice and peace? Indeed what term could describe any person of color? What once was New Negro was now variously called “black, sometimes capitalized self-consciously as “Black,” later called “Afro-American” and then “African American.” New leaders disputed the correct term, but reached 1968 257 consensus on rejecting “Negro.” There were competing and conflicting goals for people of color, and Bennie and Sadie Mays were suspicious of every one of those new terms because they were deeply suspicious of the new leaders proclaiming new goals. In thinking back over it, especially looking through correspondence and publications, the plain term “Negro” was discarded with a haste and a derision that seems stunning. The slain hero Martin Luther King, Jr., had proudly called himself a “Negro,” and while he lived, the term was fully accepted from his lips. Yet mere months after his death “Negro” became nearly equivalent to “Uncle Tom.” In fact the insult “Uncle Tom”—sometimes now rendered as a wry “Tom”!—would be laid on Bennie and Sadie Mays in spite of their decades of courageous campaigns against white oppression. For a University of Chicago couple, the imprecision and sloppiness of the language about social policy and social science was a problem. For veterans of the most dangerous days of the “long” civil rights movement, the insults from the uninformed and the inexperienced were gall and wormwood. In this mess there remained the task of training young men to lead, and for that there was the legacy of Morehouse. Yet in the period after 1967, the House itself was threatened and from within, by folk shaking their fists and yelling and dismissing everything that Bennie and Sadie Mays had built between 1940 and 1967. And while the young folk danced their dances and did their drugs and shouted their insults, the sly white folk resegregated everything—at least as far as the Mayses could see. None of this morass was completely unexpected, but Bennie and Sadie Mays were remarkably alone and lonely in the face of the current version of race relations as the 1960s, a decade of achievement and progress, ended. Soul, black pride, black power: initially Bennie and Sadie Mays thought they understood these words, and sometimes they used them. Initially, they considered themselves marchers continuing in the same long campaign because they had understood the post-1967 world as an extension of their own continuing and career-long marches. They came to find, however, that new leaders were starting entirely new marches. Integration with its opportunities for power, wealth, and influence for young men of Morehouse, and an integrated society with opportunities for all people of color were now rejected, even at the mo ment that a real middle class was being formed and material well-being was increasing for most minorities. If the new...

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