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Commentary
*Mama makes reference to the
break between the Fall and Spring semesters. I did not go home
for Christmas. I was still working on my master’s thesis and
probably trying to find a place to live.
At the writing of this letter, I was at the
end of five years of study at College Park. This Spring semester
was my last in the English Department. I was near completion of
my thesis on the writings of Martin Delany, which was entitled
"The Ethnographic Image of Americans in Black and White: An
Exploration of the Ethnic Writings of Martin R. Delany
(1812-1885)." This thesis was presented April 1981 and
defended before Drs. Donna Hamilton, Eugene Hammond, and Lewis
Lawson.
These professors, however, did
not lead me in this study and examination of racial ideology and
propaganda. Dr. Max Wilson, now passed on to glory, must be
given that credit. He was an Haitain exile and professor of
philosophy at Morgan State and later chair of the philosophy
department at Howard University. He took me under his wing. For
I was lost, a refugee from a broken marriage, dashed hopes in
the black consciousness and labor movements. He believed that
Americans suffered from three unreconciled strivings--race,
religion ,and sexuality.
After the disaster that was my marriage,
under the encouragement of a movement buddy Lee Uhuru, I joined
Nicheren Shoshu and began chanting "Nam Yo Ho Renge Kho."
(I still have my scroll.) By coincidence we ran into Dr. Wilson
on Park Avenue near his home in Bolton Hill, an upper
middle-class section of central Baltimore. I had studied with
Dr. Wilson as a sophomore in 1966-1967 at Morgan. We renewed our
acquaintance. He was quite interested in what I was doing and he
asked me to keep in touch. I did and we became quite good
friends. He invited me into his home and treated me almost as a
son.
In 1974, under the umbrella of Morgan State’s
University Without Walls, we began a study entitled "A
Search for Self." He wanted to provide me a classical
education. I studied the history, literature, art, music, and
then the philosophical works of the major European countries and
then the United States. He encouraged me to go to museums in New
York, to opera and ballet programs. I read Proust, Joyce,
Lawrence, Miller, Mann, Gide, Tolstoy, Heminway, Freud, Jung,
and other modernists.
By the time I began my graduate program at Maryland, I was
ready to reexamine the race question. Maryland’s graduate
library had the whole Arno Press reprint series of black
writings. And I devoured it. It was in that library that I
discovered Martin Delany and his relationship to Frederick
Douglass. |
