Freshman Year

Nearly four years earlier, in 1965, my parents had driven me to Cornell on a cloudless Saturday afternoon in September. It was the first time any of us had been to Ithaca or to Cornell University, whose campus is built on a hill overlooking a glacial valley and Cayuga Lake, thirty-five miles long and almost five hundred feet deep. Ithaca was a sleepy town, we could see, segmented by dramatic gorges and surprising waterfalls tucked here and there, appearing suddenly when you rounded a corner.

In the flats below the university lay the little town, a nothing-much place with modest houses built for mill workers, a small downtown where there was a men’s clothing store, a Rothschild’s department store, some restaurants, four movie theaters, a drugstore, some churches, the Selective Service draft office, and the courthouse. Outside of town was farmland and smaller towns.

I had applied to three schools—Penn State, Ohio State, and Cornell. Cornell appealed to me because it was in the Ivy League and in New York State. I missed New York City, where I’d enjoyed being a public school student for six years, from third to tenth grade. But my Ohio high school guidance counselor steered me away from urban schools, thinking I was too young to navigate city life and college at the same time. Fine, I thought, but it’s still New York.

I knew that at college, nobody would know I was only sixteen. (I’d skipped two grades.) It would be a huge psychological weight off my shoulders, not always having to be on my guard against guys eager to put me down and gain advantage over me because of my age. It was going to be real liberation, I thought, not having to prove that I was not a person you wanted to mess with. People’s ignorance of my birthdate would even the playing field.

Our peripatetic living pattern—we’d moved three times in eight years because of my father’s work, from Baltimore to New York to San Diego to Ohio—had two indelible effects on me. The first was that I became self-contained. I was perpetually the new kid on the block, and other kids were sometimes friendly and welcoming and sometimes not. This uncertainty taught me to be content with friendships that were offered, and indifferent to those that weren’t. The second effect stemmed from my experience in New York City public schools, which at that time practiced a policy of “accelerating” the best students (in contrast to current educational philosophy, which emphasizes “enriching and deepening” the educational experience). I scored 150 on an IQ test and was an excellent student, so I was accelerated past fourth grade and then again past eighth grade. I had no difficulties with this academically, but it exacerbated and reinforced my inclination to be guarded. I entered high school at age twelve, the youngest in my class. Some classmates admired me for this; others thought it was an opening to put me down and try to belittle me.

I remember very clearly my conscious decision one day on the playground at P.S. 15 in Queens, when some older boys were trying to bully me, that I wouldn’t allow others to diminish my self-confidence or self-esteem, as though I had something to be ashamed of for being accelerated academically. I will always define myself, I decided, and never allow others to define me. Put-downs and hazing would not make me feel diminished. They would not make me feel anything. This was the origin of what became my lifelong tendency to be a maverick. And because of this decision, I simply didn’t need a lot of approval from my peers, and yet I always seemed to be popular. In my one year at Abraham Lincoln Senior High School in San Diego, I was elected to the high school student representative position on the city board of education, and in my one year at Newark Senior High School in Newark, Ohio, I was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” by my high school senior class.

I leaned my head against the car window in the backseat and looked at Cornell. I could see the McGraw Hall clock tower piercing the sky, and a long stone building with a breezeway and columns. I was stunned. I think my parents were too. What a magnificent campus! We drove slowly down West Avenue, following temporary signs that pointed arriving freshmen to the dorms, and we could see Libe Slope rising from the street out the driver’s side window. It was a steep grassy hill, smooth as a vertical golf course, crisscrossed by walkways and dotted with cherry trees. At the top of the slope stood grand university buildings, including the library that gave “Libe” Slope its name, and the hub of student life, Willard Straight Hall. The buildings above us at the top of that slope stood stark and imposing against a blue sky. I thought, “Man, this is what I’m talking about: college.”

It had rained earlier that day, leaving the grass fresh and the pavement dark, but now the sun was out. Orientation staff wearing special white straw hats directed us and the hundreds of other families where to park, where to bring our trunks and suitcases, which doors to use to enter the buildings.

The dorm I was assigned to wasn’t grand. It was one of the nondescript University Halls, room 5208. When we got to my room, I was surprised by how small it was. But what did I know about dorm rooms? I didn’t have anything to compare it to but my expectations. The room had two beds and two desks, and so I guessed that someone else would arrive soon. I started to unpack my things. Mom and Dad lectured me gently, reminding me I’d have to work hard. They said they were proud of me and expected the best. My mother kept looking out the window and exclaiming how beautiful the place was. I half-listened to them.

I was one of only thirty-seven black students in a freshman class of 2,600. This was a fact that must have weighed more heavily on my parents’ minds than it did on mine. They were both from the South, from poor families that had struggled under the boot of Jim Crow, and they had both escaped those constricted circumstances by getting college educations and moving north. But like most black people of their generation, they remained wary, careful.

Figure 1 / Tom, age three months, with his father

My father’s carefulness manifested itself in his formality. He was one of the most formal, gracious men I’ve ever met, polite in the extreme, controlled and correct, deferential. He called everyone “sir” or “ma’am.” Before any significant car trip, he called us all to bow our heads and pray together for God to watch over us. We had prayed that morning in Ohio before we set off for Ithaca.

Born in 1909, my father, Edward W. Jones, started life with two strikes against him: he was a dark-skinned and heavyset Negro in a color-conscious world, and he came from a poor, broken family. His hometown, Charlotte, North Carolina, had two major train lines running through it—the Seaboard Airline Railroad, with its brick and stucco passenger station, and the Southern Railway on 4th Street in downtown Charlotte. When I listen for the soundtrack of my father’s childhood, I hear those trains, clacking in and out of the city, hissing and groaning, their rhythmic noise becoming the beat of escape. And most of those trains coming in and out of his city, day and night, included Pullman cars, on which worked Pullman porters, the first group of black workers in America to successfully organize in a labor union and consequently the most revered blue-collar workers in the wider black community. Porters were respected for the dignity they’d demanded for themselves and for the hard work and long hours they put in and got paid relatively well for.

Figure 2 / Tom’s father in 1957

Despite his circumstances growing up in a poor family, my father willed himself to find a way forward, to build a meaningful life worthy of praise. In high school, when his family broke up, he took a room in a boardinghouse run by a relatively well-to-do black woman named Stella Watson. She must have seen that my father was serious and intelligent, because she pushed him to apply to the Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary in town, a black college, which he did. He earned a master of divinity degree there, and then a master’s in physics from Indiana University. He entered the ministry first, because that was the primary path of opportunity open for black men in the South in the 1920s and 1930s. During World War II, he served as a captain in the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps. After the war, he became a minister in the Presbyterian Church in Hillburn, New York. Finally, in the late 1940s, as racial discrimination softened somewhat, he began to get work as an engineer, using his technical skills in the defense industry. He also passed the licensing examination and became a licensed professional engineer. He was working at Picatinny Arsenal when I was born in Philadelphia in May 1949. His career really accelerated in 1957, when he was hired to work on the Atlas missile program at American Bosch Arma Corporation in the New York City suburbs on Long Island. This opportunity followed the Russian Sputnik launch, which galvanized America into a space race with Russia.

Whenever the Lionel train company, which made lifelike toy replicas of real trains, would come out with a new car or engine, my father didn’t delay. “Sons,” he would say to me and my two brothers—especially to me and my oldest brother Ed—“shall we go to the train store this weekend?” In our basement he had set up a waist-high table with intersecting loops of tracks that filled an entire room measuring twenty feet by twenty feet. There were mountains and valleys, bridges and trestles, a brickyard and a little village and a passenger station, towns, and a church. Down there in the train room, putting together the necessary electronics, carefully wiring the miniature lamps and train signals, making adjustments to the tracks and the cars—it was when my father was most relaxed, most happy.

My mother, Marie Carter, was born in 1911, in Martinsville, a small town in southern Virginia with an economy driven by cotton, tobacco, and furniture making. Like my father, my mother had a difficult childhood but found a way forward through education. She earned an associate’s degree from Barber Scotia College in North Carolina and found employment as an elementary school teacher in the 1930s. (Thirty-five years later, she completed a bachelor of arts degree at Muskingum College in Ohio.) In 1938, my mother and father were married. I was the youngest of four children: my sister Marie was born in 1940, my brother Edward Jr. in 1941, and my brother James in 1945. My dominant memory of my mother is that she was always there for me. In many ways she seemed to live her live vicariously, taking to heart her children’s successes and failures, rather than focusing on her own needs and desires.

“Do you think you guys should head back home, soon, sir?” I said, after we’d sat and talked a while as the whole glorious Cornell campus beckoned to me through the second-story window and I could hear conversations drifting in from the hallway and outside.

“Yes, I suppose so,” he said, sighing and pushing himself off the little chair by the desk with some effort. He straightened his tie and reached for his hat. Mom stood too and picked up her purse.

My roommate arrived, a white boy from upstate New York. He was in the agriculture college. I think he wanted to be a farmer. He was fine, but we weren’t going to be close, I could tell. We had nothing in common. I would have to look farther afield than my own room for friends.

Later that day, after my parents had left, I met Skip Meade, whose room was directly above mine, on the third floor. We started talking and I liked him right away. I thought, “Here’s a black student in my dorm and he’s just like me.” I felt a rush of relief, the lifting of a worry I hadn’t even been conscious of harboring. Skip, who seemed to be from a family much like mine, hailed from Madison, New Jersey, a suburb of New York. “Skip” was his nickname. His real name was Homer, after his father. He was outgoing, confident, and funny. He was a guy who had seen a million movies and read many books. And like me, he was excited to be at Cornell and seemed happily dedicated to the pursuit of a good time. As we walked through the dorm, people he must have met earlier in the day called out to him. It was the first day of school and already he had friends and seemed to be popular.

On the first day of classes, Skip and I were walking along the wide promenade in front of Willard Straight Hall when we spied three black guys standing there, sizing us up. The steps of the Straight was the place to see everybody, and they were there to see what girls might show up and what other black students might have arrived on campus for the new school year. We introduced ourselves and talked for a bit before moving on. As it turned out, these three sophomores would later become some of my best friends at Cornell: Charles McLean, Milton Fleming, and Greg Grant. Years later, Charles told me that when Skip and I left, he turned to the others and said of me, “Oh, this guy is going to be a factor,” indicating that I was going to be credible competition for girls. “We decided to enlist you,” he said. “Easier to have you in the tent than outside the tent.”

Students had been assigned mailboxes, and I found in mine a surprising invitation that first week. It was signed by a Ms. Gloria Joseph in the Dean of Students’ office, and she was welcoming me as a member of the COSEP class. I was hereby invited to attend the first COSEP meeting of the year. COSEP, which I had not been aware of during my application process, was the acronym for the Committee on Special Education Projects, an initiative launched by Cornell president James Perkins to increase the number of black students at Cornell. Apparently the thirty-seven of us black students in the class of 1969 represented a marked increase in diversity over previous years. In President Perkins’s first year in office at Cornell, just two years earlier, there had been only six black students in the entire student body at Cornell—a shameful example of discrimination at a school that had, in the 1920s, a much more sizable black population and had even been the birthplace, in 1906, of America’s first black intercollegiate fraternity. Why, during the civil rights movement, had the black population dwindled to almost zero at a school whose motto was “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study”? President Perkins recognized the hypocrisy and the opportunity to make a positive change, although this wasn’t something I appreciated fully until years later.

On orientation day, there were dozens of tables and booths set up in front of the freshman dorms and around Willard Straight Hall, along the big patio in front of the building. The booths were manned by staff and upper-classmen. Here were all the activities and groups you could become involved with: intramural cricket, polo, the football team, which had open tryouts, the campus Democrats, religious groups, student government, and so forth. I loved football and had played in high school in California and Ohio, but I hadn’t been able to be a star. I was an excellent athlete, but my classmates’ two-year advantage over me showed in their physical development and experience, so I knew that it wasn’t realistic for me even to try to join the team at Cornell now.

But how am I going to be somebody on this campus, I wondered? One of the tables offered information about running for class office. I walked up to it.

“What’s this about?” I asked. The table was manned by two white upper-classmen, Dick Balzer and Elliott Fiedler. I liked them both immediately—the way they talked, their coolness, a certain cockiness that felt familiar to me. They reminded me of my Jewish friends from seventh and ninth grade in Junior High School 59 in Queens, when I’d gone to public school. Their attitude was “If you want to be a bumpkin, go hang out with those other people.”

What were the responsibilities of the class officers? Nothing significant, I learned. There was basically no reason to have a freshman class president.

Dick said, “Why don’t you run?” and I said, “Well, maybe I will.”

To run for freshman class president, one had to submit a short application and then sit for an interview with a student government committee whose job it was to weed out weaker candidates. Only candidates approved by that committee advanced to the actual ballot. A few days after my interview with the committee, a list of accepted candidates was posted on a sheet pinned to the bulletin board in Willard Straight Hall and my name was nowhere to be seen. I thought back to my interview and wondered what could have gone wrong. Or, I wondered, maybe it was a color thing?

Before I could even think much more about it, Dick and Elliott found me in the dining hall. They were smiling, excited. “Why not run anyway? Those guys are bozos,” they said, referring to the election committee that had eliminated me from the running. “We’ll mount a write-in campaign.”

I agreed. Sure, why not? It would be a good way to raise my profile in the class, meet more people. Dick and Elliott made signs that read “Don’t listen to the election committee, listen to yourself.” I liked the boldness of that. I thought it was fun—the attention, the interest these older students showed in me—but at the same time, I was amazed. Look at all this stuff that’s happening for me! This is like a dream. My name on posters in the hallways. I myself campaigned quietly, person to person, keeping a low profile. And then election day dawned and I wrote in my name, as a write-in candidate. How many of my new classmates will also write in my name, I wondered?

To everyone’s surprise, I won the election and was one of the earliest black class presidents in Cornell’s history, thanks, really, to the machinations of Dick and Elliott, who I think got a kick out of integrating the student government and being power brokers behind the scenes.

Elliott Fiedler recently wrote the following recollection of these events:

My first-semester classes included psychology, American history, French, calculus, and computer science. I was a student in the College of Arts and Sciences. I didn’t know yet what I wanted to be, professionally. The sky was not the limit, in those years, for a black man, but I felt pretty confident nonetheless. There were still whole fields absolutely closed to nonwhites, and others that promised to be nearly impossible to enter, especially in the business world. Those were the days when there were only two black people starring on television, Bill Cosby and Diahann Carroll, and five black people in all of Congress.

Much more culturally crucial than student government was the Greek system of fraternities and sororities. People today may not understand or remember how big the religious distinction (and discrimination) was in those days, but the WASP fraternities didn’t want Jewish students in them. In fact, some national charters explicitly forbade the religious or racial integration of fraternities. Although Cornell was the birthplace of the first black intercollegiate fraternity in America, there were no black fraternities or sororities at Cornell by the time I was there.

Dick and Elliott were members of the most prestigious Jewish fraternity, Zeta Beta Tau. My chance meeting with them at the election table during orientation opened up a relationship for me with that whole side of Cornell—Jewish students and the ZBT fraternity.

Rushing was allowed in the second semester of freshman year. That semester, only ten to fifteen of the thirty-seven black freshmen were rushed by fraternities or sororities, and only six to eight ended up joining one. By my calculations, over three-quarters of the black students were consequently excluded from the heart of social life at Cornell. It was a major exclusion that would have far-reaching effects on the racial climate and on many black students’ feelings of marginalization.

But I was rushed by five or six fraternities. The process went like this: You got a call, or a visit to your dorm room, with an invitation to attend one of their mixers. Skip and I were both invited to the first ZBT mixer, held at their beautiful frat house on Edgecliff Place, an old stone mansion perched on the edge of the gorge.

We wore jackets and stood around talking with the various ZBT brothers. This was a test of your conversation skills, your level of sophistication, how much you knew. Were you funny or sharp? I felt completely at home and was pleased to be asked to join in the middle of the semester, which I did. Skip also joined. The next year, we both lived in that grand mansion on the edge of the gorge and enjoyed the sounds of birds singing in the tree branches just outside my window. I enjoyed fraternity life and liked my fraternity brothers. I developed close friendships with three in particular—Andy Chodorow, Bart Lubow, and Jay Levine.

Although I was a member of a mostly white fraternity, and had good friendships there, my closest group of friends were black—Charles McLean from Ithaca College, and from Cornell, Milton Fleming, Greg Grant and Warren Barksdale, both from Harlem, Les Hutchinson, and Skip Meade.

We were all city boys. Ithaca was a small town in the middle of nowhere, more than an hour from Syracuse, and it was what we called a cow town. Charles McLean called it “basically Appalachia.” We had grown up, all of us, in or near that pulsating, integrated, bustling heart of America that is New York City. When he was as young as nine, Charles had sometimes used his pocket money after school to take a train from Long Island into Manhattan, where he liked to buy steak sandwiches for ninety-nine cents at a place right by the Penn Station subway stop. He’d polish off his sandwich standing on the sidewalk, strangers hurrying past him on every side, then get back on the train and ride home. His parents never even knew that he’d been in the city and had a meal, nor would they necessarily have cared, as long as he was home and at the table for dinner.

The best aspect of my own youth had been the good fortune to live my most formative years, from ages eight to fourteen, in New York City. Subway and bus fares were only fifteen cents, and Yankees bleacher seats cost only a couple of dollars, so my allowance for cutting the lawn and other odd jobs enabled me to explore and enjoy a broad swath of the city. I roamed from Yankee Stadium in the Bronx to Coney Island in Brooklyn, where I liked to buy a hotdog and sit on the boardwalk watching people. Then I’d go on the rides, especially the two giant wooden rollercoasters built in the 1920s, the Cyclone and the Tornado. I would go to the Central Park Zoo, where there were cheerful penguins, monkeys, and noisy parrots. I fully appreciated the wondrous good fortune of living in a city where one minute you could be walking on Fifth Avenue and the next minute you could walk through a big park with a zoo, wild animals chattering and cawing. It was another reason to love the place—the stark contrasts. And I frequented the museums in Manhattan and the New York Public Library, a cavernous, limitless place, intensely American and democratic, where they had every book ever written, it seemed to me, and every type of patron you could imagine, from hobos to society ladies with smooth hair and flowery perfume. I never felt any sense, as a boy, of threat or danger because of my race. I never felt unwelcome or watched as I roamed the city and soaked it in. The place was mine as much as it was anyone’s.

New York City at that time was in its peak years of public educational excellence, including its highly regarded tuition-free public college flagship institutions, Hunter College and City College of New York. Middle-class families of all races were attracted to the quality of New York City public schools, and I received an excellent education in integrated schools.

Charles told me that when he arrived as a freshman at Ithaca College in 1964, his assigned roommate came into the room, threw down his duffle bag, allowed Charles to shake his hand, and then excused himself, saying he’d be “right back.” Half an hour later he returned, grabbed his bag from the floor, and left without a word. It took them weeks to finally find Charles a replacement roommate, even though, like Cornell in my freshman year, Ithaca College was overenrolled and had a crowding problem. The guy must have gone straight to the housing office to complain about having a black roommate.

The replacement roommate turned out to be something of a character, who Charles sometimes told us about. One night the roommate announced that he was going to do a thousand sit-ups in the hallway. “It went on for hours and hours,” Charles reported to us.

On one of his first trips downtown, to window-shop, Charles had stopped in at the men’s clothing store on State Street, only to have the staff approach him and start speaking a loud, careful pidgin English to him. “Help with clothes? Shirt, pants, shoes?” When Charles replied in his perfectly fluent Long Island English, the clerks “recoiled,” he said, as if in shock. “There were more students from Africa than there were American blacks. The expectation in Ithaca was that if you were black, it was more likely you were from overseas.”

There were some black townies, though, and my friends and I wanted to meet them, mostly because we wanted to find black women to date, and there were so few black women on the campuses. Sometimes we’d go to the Elks Club downtown, the only gathering place for blacks. When you needed a haircut, you went there, because they had someone cutting hair a couple of days a week. They had a bar and, periodically, little dances and parties. It was a totally unsophisticated place, and the first few times we went there, there was some antipathy from the townies. They didn’t want college guys competing with them for the girls.

That year, several of my friends went down to the draft office on Cayuga Street and signed up. It was a rite of passage, and it afforded you a draft card, which let you drink at bars at a time when the legal age in New York was eighteen. Although I was in the ROTC program at Cornell, I was only seventeen at the end of freshman year, so I made myself a fake ID.

I loved everything about my freshman year, including the ritual of trudging up Libe Slope on Saturday morning for 8 am classes. I had made friends early and I was well known and popular. I rarely missed dances or parties where the pretty black student singer Sonye Edwards, who sounded like a cross between Diana Ross and Aretha Franklin, was performing with her band. I chased girls. My favorite was my fellow black freshman Joyce Shorter, but she wasn’t interested in me. She wanted to date upperclassmen athletic stars instead. But Joyce and I became friends and maintained that friendship over the years.

On the evening of March 19, 1966, most of us, the black college students in Ithaca, crowded around a television set in a dormitory common room to watch Texas Western College square off against the Kentucky Wildcats in the NCAA finals. As the announcer talked, the starting players for the Texas team arrived, one at a time, at center court to be announced. The first player there, the point guard, black. The next player, also black. And so on until the full squad of five stood there in a line, all black. It was the first time in American history that a coach had started an all-black squad in a championship game. Then it was the Kentucky team’s turn to gather at midcourt, and since they were an all-white team (they wouldn’t have their first black player until three years later, in 1969), the game began as a tense matchup of white against black.

We sat shoulder to shoulder on the sofa, some of us on the floor, and we leaned forward, holding our breath. “The tension was so great anytime a black person was on the TV,” Charles recalled to me recently. Looking back on that night, we realized it was maybe the last time that all the black college men in Ithaca could gather together in a single room. By the next fall, it would be impossible. Or if not impossible, at least very unlikely.

At the end of the semester, rather than go home for the summer, I stayed at Cornell and worked a summer job as a waiter at Johnny’s Big Red Grill in Collegetown. I never again went home to live with my parents.

Sophomore Year

I lived in the Zeta Beta Tau house sophomore year. It was easy and comfortable for me, I found, to live in two parallel worlds—the white fraternity world with Skip and my white friends, and also the black student social and political world with Skip and a group of black friends. I was active in student government and continued to be happy at Cornell. This was where I belonged. But the intensity of debates at the Afro-American Society (AAS) meetings, and the urgency of the national civil rights movement, gradually pulled me deeper into racial issues.

In our sophomore year, an unprecedented number of black students arrived in Cornell’s freshman class because of President Perkins’s COSEP initiative. There was something different about the new freshman class. Whereas the black students in my class had almost all come from within fifty miles of New York City, many of these new students were from Detroit, Cleveland, Texas, Arkansas, from ghettos and from largely black high schools. Many were southern and rural, and they arrived on campus with something we hadn’t come with: an already partially developed sense of militancy born of grievances, an impatience to reform the world, to get rid of injustices they had felt more keenly that we had. We rubbed each other the wrong way from the start.

The first time I met John Garner was at an Afro-American Society meeting in the fall of 1966. My first impression was that he perceived and interpreted every event through very different eyes and different sensitivities from mine. He didn’t seem to enjoy Cornell in the least, or relish the good luck of being there and the chance to take advantage of all that it offered us. How completely alienated he seemed from all things Cornell—the classes, the professors, the conversations and obsessions, the fashions and the amusements. I wondered why he had come to a place where he seemed so uncomfortable. But here he was, and he was the leader of this disaffected cohort of black students in the class of 1970. He set the tone of “black consciousness.”

I tried to be friendly toward every group of black students, but Garner and company quickly evinced intense dislike of me and Skip Meade. Just hearing us talk, it seemed, angered them, or seeing that we were comfortable wherever we went. Skip and I, they said, were “not really black.” What? I thought. This idea of “blackness” being defined solely by one’s adherence to a strict class compartment or to a revolutionary idea caught me offguard. It was a familiar cancer, though, one I’d first encountered when older boys wanted to put me down for skipping grades in elementary and middle school. “It’s not black to be smart” was the message. Similarly, Garner’s crowd’s message was “It’s not black to be middle class” and “It’s not black to fit so comfortably into the white Cornell scene.” I believe that this cancer exacts an enormous toll on the black community in the form of educational underachievement, as so many black children are implicitly steered away by their peers from trying to excel academically, because academic excellence “isn’t black.” The resulting lack of educational achievement reverberates through diminished career opportunities and income for many black families. In my opinion, this cancer is a major reason for the perpetuation of the black underclass and arguably, in the current era, robs black people as surely as racism and discrimination do, contributing to the inferior condition of blacks in America.

This idea that Skip and I and our friends weren’t black enough infuriated me, especially when I thought about what I knew of my own family’s history. I knew that my father and mother had been born in poverty in 1909 and 1911 in North Carolina and Virginia, respectively, in an era of harsh racial discrimination. They had managed—against long odds—to become educated and lift themselves from poverty into the middle class by building successful professional careers. Was it my parents’ fault, or my fault, that more black families had not achieved comparable success? How could it be?

My father’s success flowed from his faith in God, his belief in the value of education, and his commitment to hard work. On many nights in my childhood, I would say good night to my father knowing that it would be hours before he allowed himself the luxury of sleeping too. No, he had work to do, at his big wooden desk at home, after a full day at the office. Late into the night he studied and wrote, drafting important scientific papers on electronics, or weightlessness in space, and design guidelines for thermal environments in space. Science didn’t care about color; it cared about relevance, research, breakthroughs, truth. My father put in the long hours needed to publish numerous papers in top scientific journals, an achievement no layoffs or racist slights could take away from him.

Dad was rarely unemployed, and he was fairly well compensated, but he lived at a time when blacks were last hired and first fired. As defense contractors won new business in the 1950s and 1960s, his skills were in demand, and he secured good employment. But every time the contracts ended, Dad’s position was invariably eliminated. He was never included in the ongoing core company teams. This meant that our family relocated frequently as my father moved from job to job.

I enjoyed an important six-year period of stability while my father was employed at American Bosch Arma Corporation in Garden City on Long Island, working on the Atlas missile guidance system. His position was senior engineer, Missile Guidance Systems, Product Reliability Department. This unusually good job resulted from the Russian Sputnik launch in 1957, which spurred the United States to ramp up spending on missile technologies and the space race. After that job, we spent a year’s sojourn in San Diego, California, in 1963–64, for my junior year in high school, where my father worked at General Dynamics on the Centaur missile system. Then, a year in Newark, Ohio, where he worked at the U.S. Air Force Instrumentation Laboratory in the position of physicist, Mechanical Standards, Calibration and Metrology Division.

And it wasn’t just his intelligence and hard work that had gotten him and us to where we were. It was also, I knew, his faith in God. When I thought of his humble, rock-steady faith, and his late nights of toil, I couldn’t square it with the sneering disdain the “black vanguard” had for me and my friends and our families.

It could be that part of why the newer crop of black students didn’t love us was that we were so dedicated to living the good life. And we were not, as first-semester sophomores, strongly focused yet on social justice and racial equity. For example, one weekend, when Smokey Robinson and the Miracles were scheduled to play a concert in Barton Hall, we hired some freshmen to go early and save good spots for us right up by the stage. While they stood for hours there and the crowd filled in behind them, we had a small, elegant dinner party for our girlfriends at Charles’s apartment on Seneca Street, with a piano in the front room and big windows in the back looking out onto a lush garden. We did the cooking. Then, when our dinner was over, we took our dates to Barton Hall, an old airplane hangar turned into a field house and the largest concert venue on campus. When we arrived, we took the freshmen’s place down front and sent them to the nosebleed seats, seconds before Smokey Robinson took the stage.

Another day, we challenged the younger crowd to a game of flag football, which could be a very aggressive, physical game. You could knock people down; it was organized brawling. They accepted our challenge and said they’d meet us for the game the next day, on the quad for the women’s dormitories. Charles, who had played quarterback in high school and who was and remains today one of the biggest sports fans I’ve ever met, rubbed his hands together happily and said, “If we can run the ball up their throats, we’ll take their hearts.”

We devised some plays. And we choreographed some showboating inspired by the Dallas Cowboys, which had become a franchise a few seasons earlier and had a way of shifting that was new: they’d call a number and then readjust, in unison. “That was a very sexy, attractive thing to do,” as Charles put it later. When we borrowed that move on game day, surrounded by a decent crowd of casual onlookers—girls—we were rewarded with a collective murmur of surprise and appreciation from the crowd. We went on to dominate the other team with our plays, too, and the opposing team slowly shrank in numbers as, one by one, their players slunk off. The game did not improve relations between us and the younger men, either. There’s a tendency to attribute serious philosophical or political motives to events of the past, but sometimes animosities grow out of simpler things …

Whenever we found ourselves in the same room, John Garner and I would argue at length. On two occasions our verbal confrontations deteriorated into physical fights triggered by name-calling. How dare he think he was blacker than me? I had good friends like Warren Barksdale and Greg Grant who came from Harlem, so I didn’t perceive my clash with Garner to suggest any sort of economic class conflict. I saw him as a guy who just didn’t like me for his own reasons. As always, I resisted—with the weapon of indifference. Unless you act like their opinion matters to your perception of yourself, your enemies can’t get any satisfaction.

Like most other black students, I went to hear the black speakers who were visiting our campus and introducing us—passionately and influentially—to contemporary black thought. People like James Farmer (CORE/Congress of Racial Equality), poet LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka), Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, Stokely Carmichael from SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and Malcolm X from the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims). We heard them all and were electrified by their words.

John Garner and his friends aspired to be part of the “black revolutionary vanguard,” in the footsteps of Malcolm X, Carmichael, Huey Newton, and Seale. In contrast, they labeled me and my crowd “mainstream Negro integrationists,” in the mold of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins (NAACP), and Whitney Young (National Urban League). I could feel the tension growing between the self-styled “revolutionaries” and the “integrationists,” a tension that mirrored the same divides in black communities across America. The broader black community was torn between those who advocated nonvio-lent protest and civil disobedience in pursuit of integration and civil rights, versus those who advocated armed self-defense, self-determination, and black separatism.

I was converted slowly, to an extent that surprised me. Exposure to my student peers, visiting campus speakers, and my own immersion in the literature of the movement gradually caused me to question my thinking as a “Martin Luther King integrationist.” I read hundreds of books on black history, slavery, African colonialism, sociology, and civil rights in America. At the same time, the Watts riots in 1965 and the Newark and Detroit riots in 1967 created an impression that black America was on the verge of outright rebellion or armed insurrection. In 1968, when riots erupted in Washington after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the U.S. military positioned marines with machine guns on the steps of the Capitol building and in front of the White House. I had to pick a side.

I had joined army ROTC as a freshman mostly because my father was an army veteran and my oldest brother had been in ROTC at Hampton Institute, but in my sophomore year I dropped ROTC. An unfair percentage of American casualties in Vietnam were black men. Black men, with a much-reduced chance to get an education exemption or a cushy assignment in the National Guard, were being used and they were dying. Suddenly I didn’t feel like being seen in a uniform that symbolized that.

I was thirsty for knowledge about the story of my people. I learned to understand the significance of language, and I embraced the Malcolm X–inspired “language of self-definition and self-determination” which was crystallized in the terms “Afro-American” and “black,” in preference to the terms “Negro” or “colored,” which are associated with colonial exploitation and slavery. The need for a black studies curriculum that would enable black students to learn more about ourselves became, for me, the most important political issue on campus. Knowledge is power. People who are ignorant of their history are psychologically crippled.

Even though I did not personally like most of the “John Garner group” of students, I was influenced by their arguments to think more deeply about the place of blacks in America and the political implications of our historical subjugation and oppression. While I rejected their criticisms of my “bourgeois” background, I understood that my family history and personal life experiences were not representative of the realities that confronted most blacks in America.

Junior Year

My junior year was absorbed by a deep dive into reading about sociology, anthropology, economics, and politics. Black students had succeeded in securing a few black studies courses, and I enrolled in most of them. I drifted away from my white friends, and my ties to ZBT weakened. Near the end of my junior year, in April of 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and the ensuing widespread black inner city riots (or insurrections, depending on one’s perspective) crystallized my thinking. Black America might be evolving toward armed revolution. If that day arrived, I thought, my place would be fighting next to my black brothers and sisters for freedom and respect.

Garner and his friends espoused a “revolutionary dialectic,” in which the “revolutionary vanguard” engages in political demonstrations and confrontations to expose the inherent contradictions and injustice of the prevailing power structure. The demonstrations and confrontations would raise the political consciousness of followers and “educate the masses.” In practice, this meant that Garner and his friends were the cutting edge in three major political events that shaped the tone of Cornell’s campus and led directly to the Willard Straight Hall takeover.

The first significant political event came in the spring of 1968, when Garner, Bert Cooper, and Robert Rone initiated demands to fire visiting professor Michael McPhelin for racially insensitive remarks in an economics class they were taking, and subsequently led an occupation of the economics department offices in Goldwin Smith Hall. The second major political event occurred in December 1968, when the same group of five or six black students engaged in disruptive actions in support of securing a black studies program. They hadn’t—and wouldn’t—come to the AAS beforehand to propose taking this sort of action, of course; they just went off and did it, rogue, creating a situation in which less politicized students had to “raise their consciousness” to support them. In this way, some black students were being manipulated into backing tactics that they wouldn’t otherwise have endorsed.

It was AAS’s vision that Cornell launch a black-run, academically autonomous black studies college. The Garner group’s demonstrations attempting to force this issue included brandishing toy guns in the Day Hall administration building, dancing on tables in the dining room at Willard Straight Hall, dumping books from shelves in Olin and Uris libraries, and disrupting an intercollegiate varsity basketball game at Barton Hall. All the AAS negotiations thenceforward intertwined two issues—the internal judicial review and possible punishment of students involved in those disruptive demonstrations, and a black studies program. What had been a political fight over black studies was, in effect, partially co-opted into a fight about sanctions against individual students.

On April 4, Skip and Charles and I were riding in Skip’s VW bug. I remember that we were by the girls’ dorms on campus. The radio was on. Maybe they were playing “You’re My Everything” by the Temptations, or “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. The music stopped abruptly and an announcer came on. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot in Memphis. We looked at one another. Skip slowed the car but did not pull over. Devastation. Heartbreak. Fury. Black revolutionaries at Cornell and in black communities across America nodded knowingly, saying, “I told you so. America is hopeless and cannot be redeemed.”

After King’s assassination, it appeared to us that America was on the brink of revolution. In fact, it was. Riots in over a hundred cities. In June 1968, the Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down and killed. And in August 1968, massive daily antiwar protest marches at the Democratic nominating convention in Chicago erupted into severe police repression and violence. It seemed like America was coming apart at the seams, and we black students at Cornell subsequently initiated self-defense measures by gathering firearms at our 320 Wait Avenue headquarters.

One of the new black freshmen was Stephanie Bell from the Bronx. She was beautiful and had a toughness and swagger I liked. She was passionate about the arts, a free spirit who had close friendships with both white girls and black girls. A New Yorker through and through, she’d already marched against Vietnam while still in high school in the city, and had hung out with Stokely Carmichael, a friend of one of her older sisters. Stephanie was a talented painter. We became friends, although she later admitted to me that she hadn’t liked me when she first met me; she thought I was too square, too straight. But we quickly grew close, and Stephanie would tell me stories about all the other guys who were trying to date her, pestering her. Her mother had warned her against having anything to do with men at college.

I was Stephanie’s first lover. She got pregnant almost immediately. She didn’t know she was pregnant until she complained to her mother about feeling sick all the time and her mother took her to the doctor. She was terrified. A baby had not been in her plans, nor in mine. She was still a freshman. Back in the Bronx, a high school friend had gotten an illegal abortion and died. There was, she told me, an underground network at Cornell that all the women knew about. If you became pregnant, this network would help you buy a plane ticket to London for an abortion.

We decided to get married.

I hadn’t lived with my parents since entering college, but they consented to host our wedding at their home in St. Albans, in Queens. We were married in August of 1968 by my father, followed by a small reception at my brother Ed’s place in Hempstead. I wore a traditional African tunic to our wedding, to my parents’ consternation. My father didn’t especially like Stephanie, I could tell, because he didn’t approve of our situation, but I didn’t need him to love her.

Senior Year

Senior year was dominated by the ongoing reverberations from Dr. King’s assassination the previous April, the assassination of Robert Kennedy in June, and the bloody confrontation in August between police and antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Cornell campus politics were dominated by the continuing black student demands for a full-fledged black studies program and amnesty from judicial sanctions for the John Garner clique of students who had conducted disruptive demonstrations. The dominant strand of politics in the Cornell black student community was reflected in the evolution of our student organization’s name from the Afro-American Society to the Black Liberation Front (BLF).

Senior year, John Garner left campus, dropped out of Cornell for good, to do community organizing work. I had the feeling that he had given up too soon, without really accomplishing anything. The AAS was badly split between Garner’s group and people like me.

Another significant political event on campus happened in February of my senior year, in 1969, when Eric Evans, Gary Patton, and Larry Dickson—part of Garner’s clique—interrupted and then physically manhandled President James Perkins, lifting him by his collar to remove him from his place at the podium at a symposium on South Africa. They, and many other students in the audience, were there to demand that Cornell University’s endowment divest investments in South Africa. This physical confrontation spurred demands on campus for strong judicial proceedings and sanctions against disruptive students.

The cross-currents and tensions culminated eventually in the April 1969 black student takeover of Willard Straight Hall. The night before the take-over, black students convened an emotional all-night meeting at our Wait Avenue headquarters. Accompanied by the beat of bongo and conga drums, we danced war dances and sang war chants to prepare emotionally and psychologically for the coming confrontation. At dawn, we marched across campus and seized Willard Straight Hall.

The Straight takeover started early Saturday morning, April 19, of Parents’ Weekend. I was not one of the planners of the takeover. Nor was I a member of the Afro-American Society leadership committee in the early stages of the plan. In fact, when the idea to take over the building came to a vote the day before, I voted against it. It didn’t seem like a good idea to me. Hadn’t we already won the university’s agreement to launch a black studies program, and wasn’t that the really crucial point—more important than some judicial decision against students who had in fact done the things the administration accused them of doing? Their physical confrontations had spurred demands for strong proceedings and sanctions against disruptive students. And hadn’t those students engaged in those actions without consulting AAS? But I would go along, I would lend my physical support, because of my commitment to our group solidarity.

Willard Straight Hall is a massive, labyrinthine building made of blue-stone. It was commissioned by the widow of a distinguished Cornell graduate, Willard Straight, and it was completed and dedicated in 1925. It is a substantial structure with stone and tile floors, multiple staircases, mullioned windows, and several entrances, the main entrance opening onto a wide plaza that is the main pedestrian thoroughfare of Cornell’s central campus. The building’s purpose, from the beginning, was to be a student union. And in 1969 it was still the hub of nonacademic student life. There was a stage for theater productions; there were dance studios and music rooms, game rooms, a library. The fourth and fifth floors, though, were used as a sort of hotel for short-term visitors—trustees, alumni, and parents. In the basement was the student radio station, WHCU, in a little office crammed with papers and posters, equipment and chairs.

The night before the takeover, someone set a wooden cross wrapped in fabric afire on the porch of Wari House, the university housing for black women. All night long, fire alarms went off every few hours at residence halls across campus. The night was filled with the recurring sound of sirens as the fire department trucks raced to address the nonexistent fires. Roughly a hundred of us arrived at Willard Straight Hall early that morning and evicted the occupants—janitorial staff, visiting parents—into the rain. We were occupying the building. After we’d been in the building for a few hours, the administration and most of the campus knew what was happening.

At first, the takeover was peaceful. I was playing pool in the Straight game room on the lower level when suddenly I heard a commotion in the hall outside—angry shouting. I couldn’t make out the words. I put down my cue and went into the hallway to see what was going on. Events now began to spin in unpredictable and unanticipated directions.

A group of white fraternity guys had gained entry through a window at the back of the building on the ground level. They were arguing with a group of black students, shouting that we had no right to take over the building. I recognized some of them. And as I was standing there in that moment, it just flashed through my mind that whatever I had thought of its merits initially, the takeover certainly was not going to end this way, with a group of fraternity guys from Delta Upsilon throwing us out of the building. I covered the distance between us with a few long strides and went straight to the leader of the DU group. Standing close to him, I said, “We’re not talking about this any longer,” and I punched him square in the face. Instantly, a brawl ensued—punches, wrestling, rolling around on the ground, shouting. We threw the Delta Upsilon guys out of the building.

Step by step, I was then drawn deeper and deeper into the dynamics of the Straight seizure and our confrontation with the university administration. In the wake of the Delta Upsilon vigilante action, we heard many rumors regarding possible attempts to oust us from the building. Some were rumors of police action. Some were rumors of another fraternity attack. Some were rumors of vigilantes from the rural areas surrounding Ithaca. We made a decision to bring in weapons to defend ourselves.

My mentality was shaped by my deep dive over the past two years into black history and literature. I had come to Cornell ignorant of these topics because they weren’t taught in the public schools I’d attended. As I became educated in the true story of the three-hundred-year history of blacks in America, I had become angry. I developed a belief that American slavery and oppression could not have survived for so long without the implicit cooperation of the oppressed. I felt that my ancestors, and the ancestors of most other African Americans, had not resisted slavery and oppression to the extent that they could have and should have. I knew they had been literally beaten into fear and submission, and I believed that overcoming this legacy was the only way to win freedom and respect. Slaves could be tortured and killed for resistance and rebellion, but they became productive economic assets only when they cooperated in submission to the slave masters. I thought, What if my ancestors had simply drawn the line? Drawn the line and refused to be enslaved. Drawn the line and refused to be treated as subhuman. I thought that if they had fought for their freedom and dignity, yes, many would have died, but they also would have been free, because a people who refuse to acquiesce cannot be enslaved. Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person.

The wheel of history, I thought, had turned; my generation were to be the African Americans tasked with the obligation and destiny to finally draw the line and end our oppression in America. In a five-year span, President John Kennedy had been assassinated, Malcolm X had been assassinated, Martin Luther King had been assassinated, and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. We were in an endless war in Vietnam, where hundreds of black soldiers were dying every month. Riots were raging in cities across America. And our university was dragging its feet on supporting the black studies program and the fair judicial system we deserved. Maybe that meant that the time to act was now, in Willard Straight Hall, at the heart of white power—the Ivy League. As unlikely as it might be, was this idyllic campus in rural upstate New York about to take center stage in America’s racial drama? If so, maybe that meant I was in the middle of a historic event. I understood that history is often a series of accidental and unplanned occurrences in which ordinary people must make decisions about what to do. Sometimes they decide to do ordinary things; other times they decide to do extraordinary things. I had also internalized a conviction that one of the necessary strategies to end oppression was to raise the price of oppression, and that meant black Americans had to be willing to fight, and die if need be, to win our freedom. This right now, I thought, might be one of those crossroads, and I have to be prepared to do something extraordinary.

Our weapons, seventeen shotguns and rifles, were stored at the AAS headquarters building, on the other side of campus. There were campus police surrounding the Straight, and we knew we’d have to evade them if we were going to be able to leave the building, get the weapons, and manage to bring them inside. I was one of the students who slipped out, with two others, through the same window the Delta Upsilon boys had used to gain entrance. My heart thudded in my chest. The night was cool. There were no police in sight at our Wait Avenue building.

On our way back across campus, we clutched the weapons, wrapped in blankets, under our arms, and we waited, hidden in the bushes near the Straight, for the door to be opened on a prearranged signal. It flew open and we dashed into the building past the startled and unsuspecting campus police. We had enough guns to arm seventeen, but there were nearly eighty of us—men and women—occupying the building. I was armed with a hunting rifle that I owned. I had grown up going deer hunting with my father and brothers, and had been in army ROTC as a freshman. I was an excellent marksman.

Tension was high inside the Straight overnight and into the following morning. They’d turned the electricity off on us, and so the only lights were a few powered by the building’s emergency generator, and candles we found in the kitchen. Students sat and lay against the walls, nervous, wondering what would happen next. Some studied. Finals were coming up. “Did you hear …?” and “Well, I heard that …” Rumors were flying about impending attacks from more vigilantes, or from a large force of local and state police gathering in Ithaca to move against us. Later it was tension from the reality of weapons on-site, and the unpredictability of what might happen at any moment. I could see apprehension and doubt tinged with fear in the eyes of some black students, especially those without weapons. They seemed stunned by the dramatic escalation of a typical 1960s college building occupation (building takeovers were as common as dirt in those years) into what was now an armed confrontation, something very different.

As I looked into their eyes, it occurred to me that many of the black students had fragile psyches and were not accustomed to confronting, or winning against, white authority. This hardened my attitude, and my emotions swung decisively into an assurance that “we’re going to win this, one way or another.” I was now fully committed to the fight. And fights are for winning.

Fortunately, the introduction of weapons seemed to galvanize the university administration into a sense of urgency about ending the takeover. They seemed to fear, and were probably correct in doing so, that events could rapidly spin further out of control. They were probably most concerned that the police forces gathering in downtown Ithaca might decide to end the occupation by force. The possibility of gunfire ringing out on campus, of students being shot dead, of a SWAT team storming the building and taking it back by force … these images were in everyone’s mind, theirs and ours.

By Sunday afternoon, April 20, the university administration negotiated a settlement with us, in which the most important point was that the administration committed to convene a faculty meeting on Monday, April 21, and request nullification of the judicial reprimands against the black students. And so it wasn’t a total victory for the AAS/BLF but a temporary victory, contingent upon the faculty’s voting to give us, finally, what we demanded: not only a black studies program but also a clean slate for the protesters.

Figure 3 / Tom exiting Willard Straight Hall at Cornell University, April 1969 (By permission of Steve Starr, photographer, AP).

Over the phone, we agreed to leave the building, but we refused to disarm first. No, we will march out with our weapons, we said. In the end, the administration sent representatives over to us. They would exit the Straight with us. Their presence would protect us from being fired upon, and it would also show that we had reached an agreement together.

I would bring up the rear, I decided. “We should take the rear,” I told Skip. He understood the symbolism immediately: we were the rear guard, and we were the ones most prepared for a fight. Skip looked like a gunslinger in a Clint Eastwood western—floppy hat, woolen poncho he had made from drapes in the Straight, cigar between his lips, rifle at the ready resting in the crook of his arm. Skip, like me, had grown up hunting and knew how to handle a rifle. When we opened the double doors and stepped out into the day, we were met with the chants of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) supporting us, by stony silence and stares from parents and some of the faculty, and by the clicking of camera shutters. We marched across campus toward our headquarters building in military formation. Armed black male students were in front and in the rear and on both flanks; in the middle, women and other unarmed students.

I felt a sense of pride in this display of solidarity and courage, and its implicit repudiation of hundreds of years of American history of blacks cowering in fear. I was quoted in a contemporaneous interview saying:

That night, my brother Ed called me. At eight years my senior, he was a twenty-seven-year-old Vietnam veteran and an executive at New York Telephone Company. He told me that our parents were besides themselves over the takeover and my role in it. He said, “Police have guns! Don’t make me have to drive up to Ithaca and track down the person who shot you.”

On Monday afternoon, April 21, the university faculty voted against the negotiated settlement to dismiss the judicial reprimands, condemned the seizure of Willard Straight Hall, and condemned the presence of weapons on campus. The formal resolution on which the faculty voted included conciliatory language “expressing sympathy for the problems of the black students in adjusting themselves to life at Cornell,” and invited AAS representatives to meet with the Faculty Council the following day.

Reports and rumors were that the faculty resistance was led by a core of conservatives from the government and history departments. I was a government major and personally knew many of the leading faculty members of those departments. In their classes I had debated the role of race in American history and government, and I had emphasized the importance of Negro slavery to produce tobacco, cotton, and sugarcane as cash crops that were a key pillar of early American economic growth and capital formation. In their classes I had argued that cheap Negro slave labor had enabled the accumulation of substantial pools of capital, and that these “excess profits” from slavery had propelled America’s rapid economic growth from the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s. Unfortunately, I had learned in their classes that the ravages of slavery and the story of blacks in America did not figure very prominently in the versions of American history and government taught by faculty icons such as Walter Berns and Allan Bloom. I knew that we were essentially invisible to them.

On Tuesday, April 22, we ignored the invitation to meet with the Faculty Council. I argued with the BLF leadership committee that we needed to shift our strategy from acting alone to engaging more actively with white students to form an alliance that could defeat the faculty conservatives. My stance was controversial in BLF because the prevailing “Black Power” sentiment and rhetoric was for black self-determination and complete independence from “honkies” and “white devils.” Eventually I secured grudging approval to engage with the broader white student community. I thought that I could work effectively with the white students because I was well known and familiar to them from my history as freshman class president, student judicial board member, member of the Quill and Dagger honor society, and member of Zeta Beta Tau.

My first initiative was an interview early Tuesday evening, April 22, on radio station WHCU, back in the basement of the Straight. The host asked me questions and I gave answers calculated to be harsh, frightening. I escalated the fight with the conservative faculty, calling them out by name. I said that the faculty vote placed black students in a position where we had to choose whether to possibly risk our lives to defend our principles, or bow to the faculty position. I said that I had made my choice, and I would fight for my principles. Then I said that what was different this time from American history, where blacks had done all the dying, was that now the faculty conservatives would also have to decide if the principles they were espousing were worth the possibility of risking their own lives. They couldn’t just decide that blacks might have to suffer in a fight over principles, but they had to face the same question for themselves.

When I named specific faculty members and administrators, I warned that their names and addresses had been given to people who would ensure that they and their families met the same fate as me and my family. When the interviewer asked if there was anything that Cornell could do, I ended by saying, “I would suggest that the faculty have an emergency meeting tonight and, if they can do so by nine o’clock, nullify this decision. After nine o’clock it’s going to be too late. Cornell University has three hours to live.”

I left the basement radio station office and went to the meeting SDS had convened to decide how to support AAS. It was scheduled for 7:30 pm in Bailey Hall, which had a capacity of approximately two thousand seats, but so many students turned out that the meeting was moved to Barton Hall. When I arrived at Barton, where we’d seen so many concerts and basketball games, and where my ROTC drill practices had been held my freshman year, there were approximately six thousand students in attendance. Black students owe an enormous debt of gratitude to David Burak and the SDS leadership for not letting us be isolated and alone in our fight. SDS maintained a vigil outside Willard Straight Hall during the takeover, and SDS organized this student rally which would decisively shift the dynamics of our confrontation with the faculty conservatives.

Six thousand students: it was the largest crowd I’d ever faced, a sea of mostly white faces. I didn’t think it was likely that black students alone could achieve a mutually acceptable compromise with the conservative faculty, but I knew that if I could get those white students on our side, we would win. I stepped up to the mic and gave a speech in which I explained to the white students why the black students’ struggle was important in the historical context of slavery and racism, and I explained the principles underlying our fight for black studies and against the judicial board’s sanctions. I understood how to reach the white students by appealing to their sympathies on the one hand, and appealing to their fears on the other hand. I concluded by asking them to support AAS, and asked for a show of hands. The response was overwhelming. At least four thousand hands shot up. And a few hours later, this new entity, this crowd of students that became known as the “Barton Hall Assembly,” declared that they were occupying a building too, Barton Hall, in support of AAS and in support of faculty nullification of the judicial reprimands.

As word spread around campus, the “Barton Hall occupation” swelled to ten thousand students. My mission was accomplished. I didn’t think the hardcore faculty conservatives would bend in the face of potential physical harm to black students, but I knew they weren’t prepared for a confrontation with ten thousand white students.

The next day the university faculty convened again and this time voted to nullify the judicial sanctions. I spoke again to the Barton Hall Assembly and told them, “That faculty decision to nullify was made right here. They didn’t make any decision; they were told from this room what to do. The old order has ended, and this is the new university community.”

When I eventually called my parents a week after the takeover, my father was too upset to talk. “I’m praying for your safety” was all he could say. Mom got on the phone and said that Dad thought I had destroyed my future and would likely be gunned down by police sooner or later. She cried and kept saying, “I don’t understand what is happening! Why are you doing this, son, why?” Because, I said, I was caught in an important historical moment, and I understood what it meant, and I had to do what that historical moment required. I called again a couple of weeks later to say that I expected to graduate at the end of May but they shouldn’t come to Ithaca because I was not going to participate in the graduation ceremony.

After the Takeover

I was not surprised when John Garner dropped out of Cornell before Willard Straight Hall. I was also not surprised when Ed Whitfield, who had led the takeover and the negotiations with the administration, dropped out after Willard Straight Hall, along with other Garner sidekicks. They were going to work on founding Malcolm X University in Greensboro, North Carolina. It seemed to me that they had been alienated from the Cornell experience and what the university had to offer from the first day they arrived on campus. I thought they were heading into a dead end by leaving Cornell without completing their undergraduate degrees, and it was fortunate that more Cornell black students did not follow Garner’s and Whitfield’s examples. Their whole line of thinking was flawed, I thought. Rather than distancing themselves, black Americans desperately needed the commitment and support of elite higher education institutions to provide educational opportunities for the black community, and to provide national leadership in changing the prevailing racial climate in America.

One thing that especially turned me offabout Garner and Whitfield was that while they criticized and complained constantly about various campus issues, they rarely engaged constructively with the university administration. They rarely participated in any of the various committees, commissions, or study groups that the administration organized to address the issues black students raised. And they would often accuse the black students who did participate of being “co-opted.” I began to suspect that these aspiring black revolutionaries feared constructive solutions arrived at through engagement. They were more interested in exposing “inherent contradictions of the power structure” and “raising the political consciousness” of the black community than they were in fixing things and really arriving at practical solutions. Their approach meant that they never took responsibility for actually getting anything done. In contrast, even during my most “angry militant” phase, my nature was to be a problem solver, and I was a leading participant in most of the university study groups, commissions, and committees that addressed black student issues.

In the spring of 1969 I was the lead AAS negotiator on the final agreement with Vice Provost Keith Kennedy to establish the black studies program as an “independent center” outside of any academic department, and with an initial budget of $250,000 (equivalent to several million dollars today). I was also heavily involved in the recruitment process that identified Professor James Turner and recruited him to Cornell as the founding director of the Africana Studies & Research Center. I knew that nothing gets done in large bureaucratic institutions like Cornell unless there is a determined “champion” to drive the process, and I suspected that the departure of Garner, Whitfield, and their “revolutionary” clique might tempt some administrators and faculty to try to “reshape” the Africana Center agreement through bureaucratic maneuvers and delays. Not on my watch, I thought. So I stayed at Cornell for three more years to champion the administrative processes of getting the Africana Center up and running successfully. Education, I knew from my father’s life, was the way out and the way up—education combined with hard work. I stayed at Cornell because I believed deeply in the educational importance of a strong black studies program, and I thought it would be shameful if nothing of lasting significance and value emerged as our legacy from the black students’ struggle which culminated in the Willard Straight Hall takeover.

I received my draft notice from the Selective Service in the spring of 1969. I was to report to the U.S. Armed Forces station in Syracuse, New York, for my pre-induction physical examination. My medical history included a heart murmur from birth, but it had never impaired me or limited me physically in any way, and I doubted it would be sufficient to justify a medical deferment. The odds were high that I would be drafted immediately after graduation in May. This was typical for college seniors approaching graduation and the end of their student deferment. The Vietnam War was extremely unpopular, and antiwar protests on college campuses and in major cities were in the news daily. Outside the White House, demonstrators chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Many of my college-age peers were agonizing over what to do about the draft, and some chose to flee the country to Canada or elsewhere. Some applied for conscientious objector status, and risked potential criminal charges if they were denied CO status and refused to be inducted. Some became active draft resisters who refused to comply with the draft and faced criminal prosecution. And some went, as ordered, and shipped out to Southeast Asia, where they found themselves immediately in grave danger, slogging through swamps in the jungle, raising their M-16s above their heads to keep them dry, tiptoeing through minefields, killing, being shot, blown to bits by mines, ambushed, or taken prisoner.

When I reported for my pre-induction physical, I was directed to a large waiting room with many other pre-inductees. After sitting and waiting for half an hour, I lay down across several chairs and closed my eyes. The soldier at the desk in front of the room walked over and told me to sit up. I opened my eyes, looked at him, ignored him, and closed my eyes again. Many of the other pre-inductees started laughing. The soldier left the room and returned shortly with an officer. “Tom Jones? I’m going to be conducting your interview. Come with me,” he said. I got up and followed him back to a small office. When we were seated across from each other, with his desk between us, the officer (probably a psychologist) asked me how I felt about the possibility of being drafted. I said, “I think the war is wrong, and is primarily residual imperialism against Vietnamese nationalists who are fighting for freedom from French and American colonialism. I have no fight with them, but if I have to go, I’ll go. I’m not going to give you an easy way to get rid of me by jailing me for draft resistance. And I’m not going to leave the country and give you that easy way to get rid of me. I figure that my fight is to organize young black men to fight for civil rights and freedom from American oppression, and I can just as well do that in the army, where you have plenty of young black men who need leadership. So I’ll continue to do what I’m already doing, but I’ll just do it in the army.”

The outcome was that I received a 1Y classification, which meant I would be drafted only in the event of a national emergency. In the twisted logic of the era, the country was fighting a major war in Vietnam but had not declared a “state of national emergency.” Consequently, I was never drafted and never served in the military. I was fortunate because my fate in the military might have been similar to my black Cornell classmate Larry Dickson’s, who was drafted in 1969 and died shortly afterwards in what the army claimed was a training accident at Fort Dix in New Jersey.

I wasn’t headed for the army or the war, but I didn’t have a plan for what to do or where to go. I was emotionally and psychologically drained and exhausted from the events of the previous months. My personal life was in turmoil. I had no income to support a wife and child—Stephanie had given birth to our son Nigel in January, just a few months before the Willard Straight takeover—and I was teetering on the brink of emotional collapse from stress. I went to the university’s Gannett Medical Clinic for help, and was admitted for observation. In hindsight, I think I was experiencing what was then called “combat fatigue,” which today is known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). At that critical juncture in my life, Professor Barclay G. Jones, chairman of the Department of City and Regional Planning, offered me late admission to Cornell’s master’s in regional planning program in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, plus a fellowship and stipend to pay my tuition and living expenses.

For some reason, I had liked Professor Jones from the start. I met him in my sophomore year. He taught city planning courses and historic preservation and was a world authority on earthquakes and the prevention of earthquake damage to buildings and historic sites. During World War II, he had been taken prisoner by the Germans. He’d been a professor at Cornell for only eight years, but he was already a beloved mentor to many, including me. He seemed always to be in his office—especially late at night—listening carefully and calmly to whatever you had to say.

After the takeover, I got into the habit of frequently stopping by his office late at night to talk. He was interested in me, and not judgmental. He wanted to know my thinking. Why had I done what I’d done? What did I think about the various student and faculty positions on the controversy?

Professor Jones’s decision to admit me to the graduate program was not popular in some campus circles. But he nonetheless extended his hand and picked me up. He gave me critical time to clear my head and plan a way forward with my life. It was something he did not have to do, and I appreciated him for it very much. We became friends, and shared many thoughtful and wide-ranging conversations stretching deep into the night in his office at Sibley Hall. Professor Jones, in his bow tie and tweed jacket, personified the teachers who shape students’ lives because they take the time to care.

With time to decompress and reflect, I pondered the reality that many of the “black revolutionary” students, especially those who had left Cornell, harbored levels of animosity toward me which at times seemed like borderline hatred. They called me “Uncle Tom Jones” to disparage my family background and my friendships with whites. It’s just as likely, I thought, that I’ll be assaulted or shot by one of these self-styled “black revolutionaries” as it is that I might be attacked by white hillbillies or a county sheriff on some back road.

Conversely, there were whites at Cornell who extended friendship to me and helped me at critical junctures. I also believed, more broadly, that the history of America abounds with many white Americans of conscience and goodwill who fought alongside blacks to overcome America’s racial history and to create a better country. Recent examples that were fresh in my mind included SDS and the white students who occupied Barton Hall to support AAS against the conservative wing of the faculty; the large numbers of white participants at the March on Washington in 1963 and the Selma, Alabama, voting rights march in 1965. There was the courageous example of Cornell’s own Michael Schwerner, class of 1961, who was murdered with Andrew Goodman (the son of Cornell graduates) and James Chaney by the Ku Klux Klan for registering black voters in Mississippi in 1964.

These reflections, and my feeling of relief during my long talks with Professor Jones, my relief in getting back to studying, led me to conclude that I wanted to return to my roots. And my roots were faith and optimism. My parents’ lives were stories of hope and optimism. Our Christian religious faith is also a message of hope and optimism at its core. My formative childhood years in New York City had afforded me very positive interracial experiences, and a very optimistic sense of what was possible in America. I wanted to return to this sense of optimism and lead a positive life trying to build for the future. I did not want to be mired in anger and complaint, victimhood and self-imposed segregation.

When I wasn’t studying or spending time with my young family, I enjoyed the sense of achievement that came from being instrumental in the creation of the Africana Studies Center, and from completing the job of getting it up and running. I recognized that an ingrained sense of optimism, a positive outlook, is who I am in my core. And so, yes, I returned to my roots determined to align my life with people who share my fundamental moral values and principles, regardless of race or socioeconomic status. To paraphrase the famous words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington, I decided to select my friends and associates on the basis of the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

I also concluded that I was deeply proud that we Cornell black students had put our lives on the line at Willard Straight Hall. I had no regrets for the role that I played. I nurtured the idea that this glimpse of the “black intelligentsia” at an elite university arming in self-defense might shock American thought leaders and institutions into more energetic efforts to improve opportunities for black America. And I looked forward to a day when our action might be interpreted as an important historical statement that blacks in America were no longer willing to be passive, frightened victims of injustice. I thought it was possible that what we’d done might contribute to galvanizing a national sense of urgency that America was at a critical crossroads in race relations—the metaphorical fork in the road being either the “right fork” to political suppression and oppression or the “left fork” to political, social, and economic reform and inclusion.

After leaving Cornell upon graduating with a master’s degree in 1972, I never again associated with people or organizations that might be inclined to express the view that I was “not really black,” whatever that means. I was simply no longer willing to have any tolerance for those who thought they were endowed with the insight, wisdom, and moral authority to make such a judgment.

By the time I left Cornell, the Africana Studies & Research Center was established and operating successfully. Mission accomplished. But my marriage to Stephanie Bell did not survive the stress and turmoil of those years, and we divorced in 1972. Stephanie completed her Cornell degree and subsequently remarried. Our son Nigel lived with Stephanie during his younger years before coming to live with me in his teenage years.

I was impressed with America’s passage of important civil rights legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s commitment of federal government resources to the “War on Poverty,” and the growing efforts to promote affirmative action to accelerate black economic progress and social integration. It appeared to me that America was taking the “left fork” in the road toward political and social reform and economic opportunity and inclusion, and I wanted to participate in this “new America.” A new battleground was opening for my generation to seize opportunities that had never been available to any prior generation of Afro-Americans. I was determined to master the anger I had internalized at Cornell, and to convert it to positive energy to pursue those new opportunities.