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Books by Jerry W. Ward Jr.
Trouble the Water
(1997) /
Black Southern Voices (1992) /
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008) /
The Katrina Papers
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A Meaningful Life: I Chose to Teach
at HBCUs
By
Jerry W. Ward Jr.
Whether I chose or
was chosen to teach at
HBCUs is an American knot, one that those who
delight in philosophical problems might untie. Near the
end of my tour of duty in Vietnam in 1970, I received an
invitation from Dr. N. J. Townsend, chairman of the
Department of English at
Tougaloo College, to join the faculty as an
instructor. I accepted it. The opportunity to teach at
my alma mater and give back four years of service in
exchange for the four wonderful undergraduate years
(1960-64) I spent there was more than merely attractive.
Tougaloo College had instilled in its graduates a
strong sense of obligation. In the 1960s, as the
1960-61 catalogue informed us, “great social ferment and
rapid change” was occurring worldwide and there was
“growing need for young men and women with intellectual
ability and breadth of vision, with Christian motivation
and discipline and with a spirit of outgoing goodwill
toward all men.” In the 1970s, there still existed a
need to help in “an awakening of people who have been
denied the privilege and opportunity for the good
life.” I felt obligated to help.
Armed with a M.S.
in English from the
Illinois Institute of Technology, two years of
courses at the
State University of New York at Albany where I
focused on the literature of the
English Renaissance, and the discipline my serving
in the United States Army provided, I began to teach
courses in composition and literature. My students,
unlike those of my generation, were strongly influenced
by what was left unfinished in the declining years of
the Civil Rights Movement and by the assertiveness
implicit in the
idea
of Black Power. They boldly challenged me to make
whatever I taught them relevant. Many of them thought
my regard for
Edmund Spenser and
Shakespeare was an act of treason or a sign of
slavish deference to their enemies. I understood, more
than they guessed that defiance was an integral and
noble part of the learning process at
Tougaloo, and I was beginning to understand the
value of the pedagogy of the oppressed. I quickly
became the subversive instructor. If my students
rejected
John
Milton, I would teach them to write well and to
think critically by close reading of LeRoi Jones’s
essays in
Home and his historical discourse in
Blues People. If
The Scarlet Letter had nothing to say to them,
Alice Walker’s
The Third Life of Grange Copeland anchored them
in the very heart of relevance and made them attentive.
My embracing the
ideas the students had about relevance did not lead to
my abandoning belief in standards of excellence in
performance which transcend race or ethnicity or class;
it did not lead to minimizing my interests in the works
of Plato,
Kenneth Burke and
Michel Foucault; it led to demanding that students
should digest
Malcolm
X,
Martin Luther King, Jr. and
Machiavelli. Relevance changes as the conditions of
American society change. For teachers, the desire to
truly empower students and the effort to devise
effective way of doing so must remain constant. Change
is inevitable, but it is not to be embraced without
severe questioning.
My students knew
that I had high expectations of them. As I grew as a
teacher, I began to appreciate the importance of being
at once demanding and compassionate. A good teacher does
not love his students. He simply refuses to allow them
not to love themselves. It has been rumored that one of
my students told another he would take my courses “…
even if I earn a ‘D.’ At least I will learn something.”
From my thirty-two
years of teaching at
Tougaloo College and eight years of teaching at
Dillard University I have learned much about
American higher education, my colleagues in the
profession of English, and the insidious idea that
African American students who choose to attend
Historically Black Colleges and Universities are
innately less intelligent than those students who opt to
attend other kinds of institutions. The fact that we
speak rarely of Historically White Colleges and
Universities is a clue about what has continued to
develop in the total history of education in the United
States. In higher education in America, the hegemony of
confirmative action prevails against any justice that
might be discovered, through full disclosure, in
affirmative action.
Two instances from
my life history cast light on what is a central and
continuing problem. Once when I was driving him from
Tougaloo College to the Jackson, Mississippi
airport,
A. Leon Higginbotham asked me where I wanted to be
in ten years. I replied that I wanted to still be
teaching at Tougaloo. He was much disappointed in my
answer, because he said he thought I would at least want
to be at
Harvard or
Yale. Some years later after I had earned my
doctorate at the
University of Virginia, a historian who had earned
his degrees at Yale asked why anyone with a prestigious
degree from UVA would want to teach at
Tougaloo. I retorted with signifying anger: “Why do
you with your prestigious degrees teach at so third-rate
a school as the
University of Southern Mississippi?” On the one
hand, it seems I was betraying the race and insulting
the aspirations of the integration-drunk black upper
middle class. On the other, I was squandering the
investment Mr. Jefferson’s university had made in me by
teaching niggers and untouchables. Despite the promise
contained in the election of
Barack Obama, I am not
convinced we should hastily conclude that the need for
having
HBCUs and exceptionally well-prepared scholars who
desire to teach at such places has vanished from the
American historical process. Talk about a “post-race
society” is only a clever and enslaving use of language.
And all Americans have a pathological and patriotic love
of being enslaved by the great God Capital in whom they
trust.
I never thought of
teaching as merely a matter of employment or as a
launching pad for ascent into fame as a critic and
scholar. For me, teaching had to be a more profound
investment. Nor have I been a missionary in quite the
sense we associate with those who labored and taught in
the nineteenth century when many
HBCUs were established. Despite attractive offers
to teach elsewhere, I chose to remain within the orbit
of the
HBCU. Until I joined the
Dillard faculty in 2002-2003, I never earned a
salary commensurate with my years of teaching experience
and the scholarly and creative contributions I produced
despite heavy teaching duties. Thanks to a regulation
in the old Tougaloo College Faculty Handbook, I had to
wait for fourteen years to be granted tenure; only 69%
of the faculty members in any department could be
tenured. As I near the end of my career as a teacher, I
realize the rewards most worth having cannot be reduced
to money and things. They can only be measured in terms
of how deeply and how well a teacher has made a
significant difference in the lives of others.
Whether I chose or
was chosen to teach at
HBCUs, I have no regrets about the choice. The
choice was right. The students I have taught since 1970,
particularly those I mentored in the
UNCF/Mellon
Program, have assured me time and again that I did the
right thing. I was pragmatic. Obviously, many teachers
and scholars in our country’s institutions of higher
education have done and continue to do the right thing
by way of helping young people to discover and maximize
their intellectual capabilities and to become productive
citizens of the world. Nevertheless,
HBCUs are unique sites for such work. To be sure,
the fate of educational institutions is determined, more
than we often want to acknowledge, by irreversible
changes in the world order. Few of them shall survive in
the 21st century. So be it. It is sufficient that once
in time
HBCUs enabled me to use my “intellectual ability and
breadth of vision” to become a better person as I
remained, as some black folk might say, in the
tradition. Sunday, July 24, 2011
Source:
JerryWardBlog
posted 27 July 2011
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The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story
of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government
By Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer
American democracy is informed by the 18th century’s most cutting edge thinking on society, economics, and government. We’ve learned some things in the intervening 230 years about self interest, social behaviors, and how the world works. Now, authors Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer argue that some fundamental assumptions about citizenship, society, economics, and government need updating. For many years the dominant metaphor for understanding markets and government has been the machine. Liu and Hanauer view democracy not as a machine, but as a garden. A successful garden functions according to the inexorable tendencies of nature, but it also requires goals, regular tending, and an understanding of connected ecosystems. The latest ideas from science, social science, and economics—the cutting-edge ideas of today—generate these simple but revolutionary ideas: (The economy is not an efficient machine. It’s an effective garden that need tending. Freedom is responsibility. Government should be about the big what and the little how. True self interest is mutual interest. |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” |
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Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this
simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but
this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake.
She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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