11

A Return to See How Far We’ve Come

In 1980, when I was thirty-one and living in Boston and working at Arthur Young, I finally sat down to write a letter that I had been thinking of writing for quite some time. My life had evolved incredibly well since April 1969 at Willard Straight Hall, and I was thankful. I was successful, happily married, and healthy in mind, body, and soul. My thoughts sometimes strayed to wondering what my life experiences might have been if I had been arrested then or even imprisoned. Or—worst of all—what if I had died in a gun battle? I believed that President James Perkins was the person primarily responsible for the forbearance with which Cornell had acted in April 1969, and I felt a moral obligation to thank him.

He must have replied immediately upon receiving it, because I got his return letter the same week:

It had nagged at my conscience for many years that I had been instrumental in creating a grievous wound at Cornell that had not healed. Some black students were so emotionally traumatized by the events of 1969 that they never completed their Cornell degree, and some never completed college at all. Faculty careers and families had been disrupted as some professors chose to leave Cornell in the wake of the takeover. President Perkins had become, in those months in 1969 and since, the primary scapegoat for the wrath of the faculty and the board of trustees, and he had resigned under pressure in 1970. I found his fate ironic, really, because it was he who had created COSEP to champion increased black student enrollment at Cornell in the first place, and he who had prevailed in negotiations with the AAS to prevent violence. In my mind, Perkins’s commitment to black progress was further evidenced by his position as chairman of the United Negro College Fund when he became Cornell’s president in 1963.

In 1987, former Cornell professor Allan Bloom published his book The Closing of the American Mind, a strong critique of events at Cornell and of higher education in general in the 1960s. I read his book and laughed at the irony of the title. From my perspective, the most perniciously closed minds had been those of Cornell professors Allan Bloom and Walter Berns and their like-minded colleagues who had ignored the ugly truths of American history. Professors Berns and Bloom were inspired by the noble themes and threads in American history, of which there are many, and their passion translated into masterly classroom presentations. Their courses were always very popular. But they tended to ignore or minimize historical themes and threads that didn’t fit their noble narrative storyline. They didn’t teach explicit falsehoods, but they lied by omission and they minimized historical realities that didn’t fit their fairy-tale version of American history and government. For instance, they did not teach about the ravages of slavery inflicted on millions of African Americans. They did not teach about the genocide committed by American settlers and military forces against Native Americans, nor about the racial terrorism perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan against African Americans from the post–Civil War Reconstruction era on through the 1960s. It was as though these ugly historical realities simply didn’t exist in the academic courses taught by Berns and Bloom and most of their colleagues in Cornell’s professorate.

And then what happened when students like me challenged their sanitized fairy tales? They became irritated. The African American, so integral to the American story, was simply and almost utterly excluded from the standard curriculum, which is one of the reasons why black students at Cornell and other universities had to fight for black studies. We had to insist upon an education that included us. On balance, the civil rights movement, anti-war movement, women’s liberation movement, and gay pride movement have opened America’s eyes to historical truths and contradictions about our country. Through this acknowledging of historical truth, and resolving to come closer to achieving America’s noble founding ideals, America has become a better country.

It became important to me, upon reflection, to remember those at Cornell who had lifted me up and to celebrate positivity and progress. In 1992 I made a gift to Cornell to endow a fund for planning programs in honor of Professor Barclay Jones, who had given me the time and friendship and guidance I’d needed all those years before. “This endowment,” I told the university, “is dedicated to Barclay Jones in recognition that everybody stands on somebody’s shoulders—and over the years, Barclay has willingly offered his shoulders to many of his students, including me.” The fund supports work in the department Barclay led, the Department of City and Regional Planning, as well as the graduate planning field in general, which spans several departments in the university.

And then, two years later, I conceived the idea to endow an annual James A. Perkins Prize for Interracial Understanding and Harmony to honor President Perkins’s legacy and sacrifice, and to foster a spirit of healing and reconciliation in the Cornell community. My gift was an atonement, a token of gratitude, a way to honor him, and a way to foster and support “activities that promote interracial respect, understanding and harmony on campus,” as the official description of the prize states.

The A. D. White House is a lumbering, creaking old brick home in the Second Empire style, originally the official residence for Cornell’s inaugural president, Andrew Dickson White. It sits up on a little hill on East Avenue, set apart from any other buildings. Today it houses the Society for the Humanities and hosts special gatherings, including the announcement of the Perkins Prize. That first announcement was a small affair, with some students and faculty and alumni, a few trustees, and some people from town in attendance. It was a quiet event but full of hope and affection. I made these remarks there that day:

After my remarks, the first-ever Perkins Prize was awarded, to the Cornell Political Forum, a student-published nonpartisan journal of respectful and impassioned intellectual debate. It was a respected forum for productive dialogue among a diverse set of viewpoints. The next year, at the ceremony to award the second annual Perkins Prize, the Festival of Black Gospel was recognized for its work in presenting annually an inspiring jamboree of choirs and individual artists, which attracts hundreds from campus and the town and surrounding region. Again, both President Perkins and I attended the award ceremony, and this time a local pastor, the Reverend Douglas Green of the First Congregational Church of Christ in Ithaca, was in attendance with his wife. They came up to speak with us afterwards, an encounter he was to recount later in a sermon to his congregation (which he was kind enough to mail to me). He concluded that sermon with these words:

Figure 20 / Tom and former Cornell president James Perkins at the inaugural Perkins Prize award ceremony, May 1995 (Cornell Daily Sun photograph by Aurianne Nappi, Class of 1996).

My favorite Perkins Prize winner over the years was the Intergroup Dialogue Project, which won in 2014. It has as its mission and goal to raise the consciousness of all, develop a campus climate of understanding, build relationships across differences, and help people learn to work through conflicts. The dialogues, which are given a new theme each semester, are focused on race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. Thousands of Cornell students have taken the IDP course for academic credit, and enrollment is usually oversubscribed. Through this program, students are trained to make positive contributions to creating a more respectful and inclusive society in an increasingly diverse America.

I was surprised and very pleased with the reaction to the Perkins Prize. The May 5, 1995, Cornell Daily Sun front-page headline read “Former Straight Opponents Make Peace,” and the story by Seth Stern read, in part,

But the reactions to the Perkins Prize were not universally positive. An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer quoted a faculty member who had “left Cornell in disgust,” describing both the 1969 and 1995 campus events as “obscene,” and quoted Ed Whitfield, who “called Jones a sell-out.”

When I was forty-three, members of the Cornell University board of trustees, along with senior staff in Alumni Affairs and Development, reached out to me and asked if I would consider being nominated for a seat on the board. My appearance on the nominee slate in 1993 stirred controversy and irritated the unhealed wounds from the Straight takeover. On April 7, a month before the board would vote to admit the nominated members, the New York Times ran an article about me titled “Evolution of a Protester: From Guns to Governing”:

I was graciously welcomed to the Cornell board by chairman Stephen Weiss, vice chair Patricia Stewart, and many other board members. One of my first duties was to serve on the presidential search committee charged with recommending a successor to President Frank Rhodes. In late 1994 our search and deliberations concluded with the appointment of Hunter Rawlings as Cornell’s tenth president. My immersion in important board committees and decisions deepened my sense that I had unfinished business at Cornell, a feeling that had troubled my conscience for years.

The university was planning an event to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Straight takeover. The organizers asked if I would be willing to speak at the event, since I was in the unusual position of being a member of the board and a key player in the takeover.

As I worked to draft remarks, I realized that I wanted to speak to the black students of today. I did not want merely to relay history or make something of an apology for behavior I no longer believed wholly correct. At the same time, I did want to convey something of the heat and necessity of the protest.

In April of 1994, I returned to the Straight to deliver my speech. I entered the building at its main entrance onto Ho Plaza, the same doors where we’d exited armed and triumphant all those years earlier. The podium was set up in the Memorial Room—a gracious room with a vaulted ceiling and high windows on three sides that flood the room with light. I faced a crowd of alumni, staff, and current students. My talk, which was titled “Reflections on the Sixties and the Nineties,” read in part:

Vestiges of a debate between me and some of the other students involved in the takeover lived on. On the thirtieth anniversary of the Straight take-over, the April 21, 1999, Cornell Daily Sun published an opinion column by Anthony Zuba, Class of 1999, which captured the essential elements of my alienation from the “blacker than thou” dynamics on the Cornell campus. The column, which was titled “A Straight Comparison,” proceeded to compare my life and career to Ed Whitfield’s, and also to compare current Cornell students’ reception of us:

If such a “Jones-Whitfield debate” were ever to occur, I would say that I have no criticisms of the way that Ed Whitfield has lived his life, and I hope his community service endeavors have been successful. I would also say that Ed should acknowledge to the Cornell black community that I’m the person who stayed at Cornell in 1969 to ensure that the Africana Studies & Research Center actually materialized in the aftermath of the Straight, while Whitfield and a group of like-minded thinkers left Cornell that spring and summer and never returned. I would ask Ed to acknowledge to the Cornell black community that Africana probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the work I did to get it approved, funded, and implemented. I would also say that I have drawers full of letters from people whose lives I have touched over the years in the companies in which I’ve worked, thanking me for promotions and compensation increases and for helping to create corporate environments conducive to their success. Many of those letters are from black men and women who are grateful for being better able to provide for their families. And I would say that I’m also appreciative of the letters I’ve received from whites I’ve worked with in corporate America thanking me for opportunities afforded to them, and thanking me for helping to renew their faith in America and the prospects for racial progress. I’m also proud of the letters and recognition I’ve received from the faculty and staffat St. Aloysius School thanking me for providing funding and technology resources which have had enormous impact on the education of hundreds of low-income black children in central Harlem.

I respect the life choices Ed Whitfield has made, and I hope that he and those who emulate him will someday learn also to respect the life choices that I and others like me have made. We both should be judged by the same standard, which is that success means that those whose lives have intersected with ours have been made better because we have lived and because they have known us. Finally, I would say to Ed that the day I will respect him most is the day when he publicly apologizes for calling me a “sellout,” rebukes the Cornell black students who disparaged me by calling me “Uncle Tom Jones,” and repudiates this type of name-calling in the black community.

When President Perkins died in 1998, I attended his memorial service in Princeton, New Jersey, and spoke at the invitation of his family. I was thankful that I had reached out to President Perkins while he was alive and that the Perkins Prize was a source of comfort to his family.

Seventeen years later Professor Walter Berns died, and his obituary, written by Sam Roberts, was in the New York Times on January 14, 2015. It read in part as follows:

In July 2014 I received an email from Cornell president David Skorton inviting me to participate in Cornell’s 150th anniversary celebration, a year of events taking place worldwide.

Needless to say, I was pleased and proud to be invited to participate in this historic commemoration and committed immediately to participating in the first event, to be held in New York City. I drafted a script and shared it with Doug Bernstein, the freelance producer hired by Cornell to stage the event. Doug suggested judicious edits to sharpen the message and fit my allotted two-minute time slot. He also explained that during a portion of the program devoted to “community and tradition,” I would be onstage with two professors discussing their research as examples of Cornell’s impact on the broader world.

My final script read:

As I spoke these words, names of these majors and centers scrolled on the large screen behind me:

• Africana Studies & Research Center
• American Indian Program
• Asian & Asian American Studies
• Center for Intercultural Dialogue
• Jewish Studies Program
• Latino Studies Program
• Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program
• Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Resource Center
• Muslim Cultural Center
• Program Houses:

•  Akwe:kon
•  Ecology House
•  International Living Center
•  Just About Music
•  Language House
•  Latino Living Center
•  Multicultural Living Learning Unit
•  Risley Residential College
•  Ujamaa Residential College

My remarks were warmly received at both of the sesquicentennial programs held in New York City. Cornell was pleased with the audience feedback in the follow-up online survey and invited me to participate in as many of the upcoming presentations in other cities as I was willing to do. I agreed to speak at the next one, in Washington, D.C., in November 2014, and again received strong audience response. This success encouraged me to do all of the scheduled Cornell sesquicentennial events, except for the one in Hong Kong, so I eventually participated in presentations in Boston, Palm Beach, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and London. I did this because I thought it was important for the takeaway message from Straight Takeover/Guns at Cornell to be recorded in Cornell history as a message of racial reconciliation and community healing. Straight Takeover/Guns at Cornell is just one chapter in Cornell’s continuing progress toward achieving its unique promise to be both an elite and an inclusive institution of higher learning.

April 2015 found me at Cornell again, for the Charter Day celebration that was the culmination of the sesquicentennial year. I sat for an hour on a sunny Saturday afternoon in the new Sesquicentennial Grove at the top of Libe Slope, directly behind the statue of Ezra Cornell. It is a beautiful spot, where winding gray walking paths bisect the green slope and below the paths are the residential halls and the Cayuga Lake glacial valley, dotted with faraway houses, everything spread out before you as if you were a bird in the sky. It is a spot where I must have sat fifty years earlier, maybe with Skip or Charles or Nigel’s mother, when we were students. As I took in the view, I reflected on my long association with Cornell, dating from my freshman matriculation in September 1965 and making up one-third of Cornell’s history.

The Sesquicentennial Grove is marked by benches, a path, plaques, and a timeline. I was impressed with the timeline’s portrayal of Cornell’s unique history as “the first truly American university,” especially by the university’s inclusion from the start of women and people of color, which was not the norm at other American universities at the time. This theme of inclusion is reflected in the stone carvings of Cornell founder Ezra Cornell’s famous words “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study” and in the stone carvings of Cornell’s first president, Andrew Dickson White’s, well-known description of Cornell as “a place where the most highly prized instruction may be afforded to all—regardless of sex or color.”

The theme of inclusiveness is also reflected in the grove’s stone carving of Cornell’s historical timeline, which includes these two entries:

• 1964—President James Perkins creates a Committee on Special Education Projects (COSEP) to attract minority students to Cornell.
• 1969—During the decade of the civil rights struggle, over a hundred African-American students seize and occupy Willard Straight Hall for 33 hours, leading to the resignation of President James Perkins.

I mused to myself that it would have been even better if the timeline memorial designers had included the student demands during the takeover, the reason behind the action: the desire for a curriculum that included our own real part in history. I also thought it would have been a nice touch if they’d included one additional inscription:

• 1906—Alpha Phi Alpha, America’s first black intercollegiate Greek letter fraternity, founded at Cornell.

As I sat at the edge of the grove, many other visitors paused to read the inscriptions and remark on the history. “I’ve heard about that takeover,” I overheard one woman say to her companion, who in turn replied, “I didn’t know all this Cornell history. This is great.”

Figure 21 / Tom, Rosa Rhodes, Frank Rhodes, and Addie (left to right) at the Frank H. T. Rhodes Exemplary Alumni Service Award ceremony, September 2017 (Cornell Alumni Affairs photograph by Chris Kitchen for Cornell Brand Communications).

My Cornell story was capped in 2017, when I was honored with two extraordinary awards, the Frank H. T. Rhodes Exemplary Alumni Service Award, which is given out to just a handful of alumni each year who are celebrated together at a tribute dinner, and then I was named a presidential councillor by the board of trustees, the university’s very highest honor. News of both these distinctions came to me by way of letters from Cornell’s new president, Martha Pollack. Because I had expected neither award, I was at once surprised, humbled, and grateful to have my service and financial support for my alma mater recognized in this way.

In September 2016, Addie and I attended the dedication ceremony for the opening of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C., which is part of the Smithsonian Institution. It will probably be the final addition to the National Mall. It is an extraordinary structure whose shape echoes a Yoruban crown, and the color varies in response to each day’s unique light and color. The architecture is elegant and striking, and brings a new dimension to the National Mall by presenting a unique and powerful visual statement: this building is about a people whose story belongs to the American national story, and yet it’s also about a people whose story is also decidedly different.

I came away from the dedication with newfound respect and appreciation for President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura. In 2003 President Bush signed the legislation establishing the museum, and Laura Bush has been an active member of the museum’s advisory council. In his remarks at the dedication ceremony, President Bush said that NMAAHC is important for three reasons: (1) It speaks to America’s commitment to truth; (2) it speaks to America’s capacity for change; and (3) it showcases African American talent and greatness.

Bush’s remarks caused me to reflect that NMAAHC answers the question posed by historian Nancy Isenberg: “Can we handle the truth?” I think NMAAHC answers, “Yes, we can.” And our capacity for truth and our capacity for change have enabled us to become a better country, and will continue to do so far into the future. This is what is most exceptional about America, and the museum tells that truth to the entire world.

During much of the dedication ceremony I was overcome with profound gratitude. Tears of joy ran down my face—joy at being alive and present in person to participate in this extraordinary historic event. Congressman John Lewis spoke of how the museum means that “as long as there is America, the African American story will be told on the National Mall, and tell American history through an African American lens, … and describe the African American tributary which flows into the great river which is America.”

President Barack Obama said, “This museum represents how we remake ourselves in accord with our highest ideals … and this commitment to truth is where real patriotism lies.” I agreed with the sentiments expressed by Smithsonian secretary David Skorton, former president of Cornell University, who said that most of us are blessed with only a limited number of extraordinarily memorable days in our lifetime, and that the dedication and opening of NMAAHC was one of those days in his life.

The dedication ceremony concluded with the assembled thousands singing “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” also known as the black national anthem. Written by James Weldon Johnson as a poem in 1899 and set to music by his brother, the lyrics fit this occasion so perfectly that it could have been written specifically for this NMAAHC dedication and celebration of the African American journey in America.

The choir wore formal black evening attire and entered the church in a measured procession one by one, each person carrying a lit candle that shone in the dimmed sanctuary. I studied their faces as they walked past my pew, and I could see pride to be part of the event, and I also saw in their faces the strength of people whose lives have not been easy but who have endured and overcome. Addie and I sat shoulder to shoulder in a crowded pew. It was a few days before Christmas 2016 at the Grace Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, New York. The choir was accompanied by an orchestra numbering about forty instrumentalists.

As they sang their repertoire of seasonal and gospel songs, I saw their faces become radiant with joy. These are descendants of slaves, I thought, like us. Their families have known hard times, and even now many probably have difficult struggles to make ends meet. But look at how they’ve taken their struggles and converted them, through internal spiritual strength, into the beauty and nobility reflected in their faces and in their dignified and worthy lives. Listen to the majesty they attain together as a choir in this extraordinary worship service of music. Their internal spiritual strength, I realized, is like the pressure of the earth that converts coal into diamonds.

I wish that the entire black community in Mount Vernon, especially the black men, could open their eyes and see how their neighbors have been transformed through faith, and say, “I want to be like them.” And I wish that all of America could see this Grace Baptist Church Christmas concert and these radiant people, and understand and be proud that America is a beautiful mosaic, assembled from a long history of racial oppression and social injustice, a substance still in the process of becoming a diamond. This is America today, and all Americans should be proud of how far our country has come. We all should be inspired and reassured in our hearts that we can walk into the future together—many races, many religions, many nationalities, many ethnicities—confident that America will continue to become a better country with each successive generation.