My First Adult Job Interview, Teachers College

12 Monday May 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Upper West Side, Work, Youth

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Barnes & Noble, Beacon Theater, Calling, CMU, Disillusionment, Finishing Second, Hotel Beacon, job interview, Job Talk, Joe William Trotter Jr., PTSD, Racial Harassment, Rage, Steven Schlossman, Teachers College, Walking While Black, Writer, Writing

Teachers College today, West 120th (between Broadway and Amsterdam), New York, NY, April 15, 2014. (http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/).

Seventeen years ago this week (check the calendar – the days and dates coincide with the week of May 12-18, ’97) was perhaps one of the most euphoric and bitterly disappointing weeks in my entire adult life. It was such a strange week that it forced me into second guessing myself and my path in life for many years afterward.

But it didn’t start out that way. On Monday, May 12th, I did my very first post-doctoral interview, for an assistant professor position at Teachers College (Columbia’s school of education) in Morningside Heights (West Harlem, really). I’d flown in from Pittsburgh the evening before, and stayed at the Hotel Beacon at Teachers College’s expense, because Monday was going to be a very long day. It was loud that Sunday night, as there was some event at the Beacon Theater. But somehow, I had just enough discipline and memories of New York’s smells and sounds to fall asleep comfortably.

My day started at 8:30 am, so of course, I was up before seven. I put on my one and only suit — at least, the only suit I owned that fit my six-three, 215-pound frame — went over my job talk on multiculturalism, and went on my pensive way to the 72nd Street Subway entrance on Broadway. It was a meat-packed ride to 125th Street, where I had to get off (I had forgotten to walk down to 66th Street to catch the local 1 instead of the express 2 train) and walk the six or so blocks to Teachers College.

Original control house (left) and newer control house, on opposite sides of 72nd Street (IRT Broadway – Seventh Avenue Line), New York, NY, April 13, 2010. (Gryffindor via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

After that, my day was an eight-hour blur, meeting with faculty, grad students and deans. Making sure not to eat too much while being grilled with questions over lunch. Giving my job talk and making sure to tell jokes, to bring up facts relevant to this history of education job, and, of course, to smile. Talking with grad students about how I finished my 505-page dissertation in twenty-seven months, about my teaching style and about growing up in Mount Vernon. It was as intense a process as I had expected it to be, but I felt at the end that I’d done everything possible to get the job.

I knew that I was one out of only five candidates invited to interview, out of over 500 applicants. I even had the chair of the History Department, Steve Schlossman, lobby on my behalf for the job, prior to my interview. And, despite my former advisor in Joe Trotter, I’d managed to put together a group of letters from folks that should’ve passed muster. All I could do after the interview was wait.

But life didn’t wait to intervene. After leaving the interview for the hotel, I changed into my more casual clothing, jeans and a long-sleeve t-shirt, and went off to Tower Records and Barnes & Noble on 66th and Broadway, and later, Haagan Dazs (that last one was a big gastrointestinal mistake!).

From the moment I walked in the door at Barnes & Noble until I left a half-hour later, a Latino security guard tailed me as I perused books in the African American nonfiction, Cultural Studies and Music sections of the store, across three floors. As I walked out, I walked up to the guard and said

“While you were stalking me, you probably let half a dozen White folks slip out of here with books and CDs. Did you learn anything while you were watching me?”

“I was just doing my job,” the dumb-ass security guard said in response.

“Well, if following a Black guy around for thirty minutes is part of your job, you deserve to lose your job,” I said to him as I walked out.

It was a bit of a harbinger of things to come. I was more pissed off about these everyday slights — or, rather, microaggressions — than I’d been before Trotter and my doctorate. And I was less patient about waiting for what I wanted than I’d been as a grad student.

What your second-place prize often looks like, May 12, 2014. (http://www.wmciu.org.uk/).

Three weeks later, I received a reimbursement check for my travel and other expenses, and within twenty-four hours, a call from the search committee chair. I’d finished second for the job. Second! To whom, I still don’t know. The chair kept telling me, “you didn’t do anything wrong…you did a very good set of interviews,” as if those compliments would pay my rent next month. I was disappointed, hopeful, but disappointed. It was my first shot, my best shot, and I’d given my best effort. “What now?,” I thought.

It’s a question that I still must ask seventeen years, two books and two careers later. I’ve long since realized that the question of what my life would’ve been like if I’d gotten the Teachers College job was moot, because my issues were about more than finding work. I still would’ve been unhappy, with a New York-esque rage to go with it.

So I counted my blessings, and I count them still. Not getting this particular job bought me the time and energy I needed. I needed that time, to see myself as the writer I also wanted to be, not just the educator and thinker I already knew I was. A better, more personable, more revealing and feeling writer than the cold and metallic one that grad school and Trotter helped turn me into by the end of ’96.

Last Dance, The Last Class

09 Friday May 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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"Last Dance" (1979), Boredom, CMU, Coming-of-Age, Coursework, Department of HIstory, Donna Summer, Grad School, Growing Up, Loneliness, Pitt, Single-Minded, Student Life

The late Donna Summer, album cover, circa 1979, May 9, 2014. (http://digboston.com/).

Twenty years ago on this date was my last formal class as a formal student, a grad course at Carnegie Mellon with Kate Lynch on Comparative Urban History. I spent that evening of my last day of classes polishing up a twenty-five page research essay that compared the development of public housing practices in Toronto, Berlin and Chicago. It was too ambitious a paper, especially given that I did all the research for it in the final four weeks of that semester, after spending a week at AERA (American Educational Research Association) in New Orleans presenting on a panel and networking, and two days meeting the Gill side of my extended family for the first time. I just wanted to get it done, though.

I made my final edits to my introduction and argument and to a few of my citations and references just before 9:30 pm that second Monday in May ’94. I was working in a computer lab in Wean Hall, using one of the rare PCs on campus. Rare because Carnegie Mellon had made a ridiculous deal with Apple back in ’83 to be a Macintosh campus — a terrible move if you were using Macs in the 1990s.

Apple Macintosh II Computer, April 15, 2004. (Alexander Schaelss via Wikipedia). Released via GNU FDL/CC-SA-3.0.

Normally I wrote my papers on the University of Pittsburgh’s campus, as my alumnus status gave me access to computers and Hillman Library. Plus, it took Pitt almost a year to shut down my grad school accounts, allowing me to make thousands of copies of materials that I would’ve needed a month’s worth of my stipend to make at Carnegie Mellon’s Hunt Library. And, even after a year of torture and courses, nearly all of my friends and interests remained across the bridge connecting Oakland and Pitt with Schenley Park and the southern end of Carnegie Mellon’s campus.

Once I completed my paper, I walked over to Baker Hall, went up to the second floor, and dropped it off for Lynch to review and grade. It was all over but the dissertation overview defense and the dissertation itself. I was happy, but I was more relieved than happy. The last year of transferring to and doing coursework at Carnegie Mellon had taken a toll on me. For the first time ever, I found myself actually hating classes and school in general. Sure, there were individual teachers and professors I despised. Dr. Demontravel. David Wolf. Estelle Abel. Dick Ostreicher. But not the formal process of classroom learning itself. It took a year of redundant courses at CMU at the insistence of the powers that were to steal that immutable joy of learning from me. At least, temporarily.

I thought about it the next day. My first day of kindergarten was September 8, ’74, which meant that I had experienced twenty school years between the ages of four and twenty-four. For virtually all of my life, I’d been a student, from kindergarten to PhD, between Presidents Nixon and Ford and Bill Clinton. I had done several thousand assignments, hundreds of exams, and dozens of papers and essays. Combining undergrad and grad school, I’d taken fifty-eight (58) courses. It’s a wonder I hadn’t tired of listening to mercurial professors any sooner.

Keep Calm and Hate School poster, May 9, 2014. (http://keepcalmstudios.com).

Keep Calm and Hate School poster, May 9, 2014. (http://keepcalmstudio.com).

I spent the next few days doing something I normally didn’t have time for. I slept in late, took lots of naps, and watched my Knicks play and struggle with the Jordan-less Bulls in the NBA’s second round of playoffs. It would be the most rest I’d have for the rest of ’94.

Two decades later, and I’ve taught nearly as many courses as I took to earn my bachelors, masters and doctorate. I do like the view of a classroom — in-person or virtual — from the instructor’s perspective. But I learned so much about being a teacher, too, from what to do and what not to do, long before my final semesters at Carnegie Mellon. Ms. Griffin, Mrs. Shannon, Mrs. O’Daniel, Mrs. Bryant, Harold Meltzer were great counterbalances to the teachers/professors who were as inspiring as watching paint dry in a desert.

When Nightmares Go Nuclear

03 Saturday May 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, earth, wind & fire, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, High Rise Buildings, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, music, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, Youth

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"99 Luftballons" (1983), Dreams, Ebony Pictorial History of Black America (1974), Lerone Bennett, Mrs. O'Daniel, Nena, Nightmares, Nuclear Annihilation, Nuclear War, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, Subliminal Messages, Terminator 2 (1991), Textbooks, The Day After (1983), Whiteness

Color version of mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, Japan, August 9, 1945. (http://www.mphpa.org via US Army Air Force). In public domain.

I find myself seeing bright orange, yellow and white lights filling the sky and obscuring everything around me. It doesn’t matter whether I’m above ground, at home, at school or work, or on a Subway platform underground in New York. Once these lights hit, it’s over. I find myself no longer in my body, for it no longer exists. Yet I still have eyes with which to witness. Through a purple haze, the intense heat, literally searing, melting and vaporizing flesh and bone. A shock wave, crushing and churning the world all at once. Spirits once safely in bodies are now on the same plane of this new existence with me, all watching as the light, the heat and the supersonic shock wave tear into our former world. Where do we go from here, as the world is no more?

That’s a milder version of a nightmare that has been with me now off and on for thirty-four years. I’m sure that I was among the hundreds of millions of folks in the West whom dreamt often of a nuclear nightmare. It was during the final phase of the Cold War, with Soviet and American aggressions, Reagan’s presidency, and a renewed arms race. All made the prospect of “99 Luftballons” (1983) and the launch of 1,000 nuclear tipped ICBMs and SLBMs and one billion or more dead a dreadful, gnawing fact that I couldn’t do a damn thing about.

Screen shot from The Day After (November 1983) ABC movie, presumably suburban Kansas City, MO/KS, October 21, 2007. (Stout/NY Times).

The very first time I fully understood the dangerous and fatal that defined this world was toward the end of fifth grade, in May ’80. It was an early May Thursday in Mrs. O’Daniel’s classroom at William H. Holmes Elementary in Mount Vernon, New York, a bright, sunny spring day. We were in independent reading mode, and Mrs. O’Daniel had given me permission to read ahead in our social studies textbook, which focused on American history.

We had left off with the Great Depression and all of the suffering that came with it. Of course, this was a collective history, one which didn’t even have the special sufferings of people of color or women in blue boxes — yet. So Whites represented all Americans. This wasn’t something I picked up on in ’80, at least consciously. But luckily, between Lerone Bennett’s edited three-volume Ebony Pictorial History of Black America (1974) at home and Mrs. O’Daniel constantly supplementing our knowledge at school, I was more aware of the deficiencies of textbooks long before I could articulate them.

As I turned the pages and read about the great battles of World War II, the horrors of Pearl Harbor and the gathering of the righteous power of the US to win the war, I suddenly saw something that shook me to my core. It was the picture of the atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud hovering over Nagasaki like death itself. It was in full color, bright and yellow and white, and obviously hot and broiling. The camera shot had managed to capture some of the landscape below, the area surrounding Nagasaki an August summer green. As I read about the 70,000 killed instantly at Hiroshima, an area the size of Mount Vernon completely flattened by a bomb that at its core had only a few pounds of weapons-grade uranium, I was frightened. I could be dead at a moment’s notice, or worse, suffer from radiation burns and sickness, in which case I’d truly be among the walking dead.

But this was only one phase of my nightmare. As things at 616 went from stable to completely out of control, my nuclear nightmares became more frequent. It seemed like there was a nuke for every day of the week during my last year as a Hebrew-Israelite. Watching The Day After on ABC in November ’83 didn’t help matters, but I also couldn’t help myself. I was both repulsed by and attracted to the idea of nuclear annihilation and survival. Maybe because I was already living through one hell of a disaster at 616.

Cropped screen shot of Los Angeles at beginning of nuclear strike, from Terminator 2 (1991), May 3, 2014. (http://youtube.com).

My nuclear nightmares continued at nearly daily pace until after I saw Terminator 2 in June ’91. At that point, I realized that my nightmares weren’t so much about the plausibility of surviving a nuclear holocaust as they were about surviving my own preteen and teenage years. It occurred to me there are worse things in life than dying, and like surviving nuclear war, surviving a violent and unstable childhood like mine has significant side effects. I could be occasionally be up, I was much more frequently down, I could occasionally fly into a rage. And I could have recurring nightmares of me murdering my now dead ex-stepfather. All signs of PTSD.

Realizing this, I took control over my dream world, and managed to push my plutonium-tipped dreams into a box, along with so many things from my decade of evangelistically twisted fire and brimstone from two religions. I still watch end-of-the-world movies, though without the extreme fervor of dream-based certainty of suffering a lingering death. Though I do often find it funny how White fears permeate these movies.

Why I Waited 9 Months to Watch 12 Years A Slave

20 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Movies, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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12 Years A Slave (2013), African American History, Black Heritage, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Father-Son Relationships, Growing Pains, Growing Up, Inhumanity, Late Bloomer, Learning About Race, Lupita Nyong'o, Michael Fassbender, Slavery, Solomon Northrup, Steve McQueen, US History

Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years A Slave (2013) screen shot, January 17, 2014. (http://blog.sfgate.com/). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws — it illustrates subject of piece.

I’m usually late to the game. That’s been a running theme in my life since the early ’80s, when, as a result of my Hebrew-Israelite years, I found myself often years behind on pop culture trends. New books, new music, new dance moves, new colloquialisms, new movies. I might as well declared myself as an adult in April ’81, at least as far as the ’80s were concerned. Yet I did catch up, sometimes taking as long as a decade to get a punchline to a joke that my nemesis and classmate Alex made in seventh grade.

But not following the herd has its benefits, too. For one, I’ve gotten to look at things from a fresh perspective (some would even say as an outsider — that’s accurate as well), without succumbing to hype or groupthink about a piece of culture. Waiting also has meant that I’ve often read reviews of movies but managed to miss content-based details and that I’ve read books without forming an opinion based on its popularity ahead of my read (it’s also true about my path to Christianity). Being forced by circumstance to wait has meant that I am less apt to make sweeping declarations like “I grew up on hip-hop” when I in fact grew up with it, not on it like a drug.

Kunta Kinte being whipped, Roots (1977) screenshot, July 6, 2012. (http://irvine.wikis.gdc.georgetown.edu). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of screenshot’s low resolution.

With 12 Years A Slave (2013), though, I wanted to see it even before it came out here in the DC area in August. I’d heard about this film for months even before it was out in “select cities” in the US. Between Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael Fassbender — two supreme British actors — I knew the film would be good. And depressing. And sad. And anger-inducing. And stomach churning. It would be an emotional roller-coaster-ride akin to my introduction to Roots on ABC in February ’77, when I was only seven years old.

So what stopped me from seeing it? My ten-year-old son. I wanted him to see the film with me. But I also knew that he would have a lot of questions. Outside of family and his visits to watch me teach my American and World History classes, my son has had little exposure to race in popular culture in an obvious sense. Most of his friends in our suburban, middle-class Silver-Spring-world are White, and his other Black friends have even less exposure to race than our deliberate injections (or inoculations) for our son.

I decided not to take him to see 12 Years A Slave because it would’ve been two hours of questions in a crowded theater, with those sitting around us ready to strangle us for ruining their watching experience. But I did queue it via Netflix weeks before it came out on DVD, with the expectation that we would watch it during his Spring Break, Easter Week.

As soon as I told my son that we were watching 12 Years A Slave last week, he became whiny and upset. Whiny because his time away from anime and Disney shows would be interrupted with parenting. Upset because of the movie title and its implications. As my son said to me when he was upset, “You made me watch Roots last year!” Well, we watched three hours of it, enough for him to see the sequence of kidnapping, the Middle Passage, slave auctions, running away, rape, whippings, and Kunta Kinte’s foot cut off. I guess the message of slavery and history really did stick with him!

Noah trying to look cool at The Gap store, Chevy Chase, MD, March 28, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

We finally sat down and watched 12 Years A Slave Thursday evening. And yes, Noah did have a ton of questions, about Solomon Northrup, about free Blacks, kidnapping, mistreatment and the concept of property, about race, sexual attraction and rape, and about the rule of law. But I was more surprised about two things. One, my son sat through most of the two-and-a-quarter hour film, and only got up twice. Two, he paid serious attention in a way that he hadn’t appeared to in watching serious films before.

Still, my son was more than happy to return to his Nintendo 3DS and the land of Disney shows before bedtime that evening. The fact that he fell asleep right after bedtime, though, made it obvious, at least to me, that we’d given him more thought for food about history, race, and his own heritage.

And though I don’t think the movie was as epic as the hype-meisters have presented it to be, it was a great film, with great acting — I’m not sure if todays American actors could’ve pulled off Ejiofor’s, Fassbender’s or Lupita Nyong’o’s roles. 12 Years A Slave is also an important film, at least in terms of interrogating the meaning of race and inhumanity in this world. I just hope that those messages made it into my son’s conscious thinking. Time will tell, but enlightenment is a journey, not a race.

On My Mother’s Side – Meeting The Gill Family

05 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, Religion, Youth

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AERA, Basketball, Bruce Anthony Jones, Continental Airlines, Extended Family, Family, Family Stories, Final Four 1994, Genealogy, Houston Texas, New Orleans, Poverty, Remembrance, Sports, The Gill Family, Third Ward, Travel, Uncle Darryl, Uncle George, Uncle Robert

Continental Airlines ticket stubs/itinerary, Pittsburgh to New Orleans (with Houston layover), April 2-10, 1994. (Donald Earl Collins).

This weekend marks twenty years since visiting my extended family on my mother’s side for the first time. It was Final Four weekend ’94 when I hopped on a Continental Airlines flight from Pittsburgh to Houston. To think that until April 2 ’94, I hadn’t been farther west than Atlanta or been in any other time zone seems far-fetched now that I’ve crisscrossed this country enough times to earn hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles. To think that for years I never felt I had a family to talk about at all or that what I did have wasn’t worth talking about. That all changed that weekend.

A conference presentation proposal I put together with Bruce Anthony Jones — my unofficial advisor in the School of Education at Pitt — had successfully made it through the difficult American Educational Research Association’s review process. So me, Bruce, and two other School of Education grad students were headed to the Big Easy to take in the sights and the serious scholarship that would be discussed, ad nauseum, the first full week of April. I managed to get a layover in Houston, all so that I’d have the chance to meet my extended family for the first time. Between the letter I sent to my Uncle Robert and my first adult conversation with a Gill relative other than my mother or Uncle Sam, I hoped that someone would be at the airport in Houston to meet me.

I landed in Houston around 9 am local time. I slept well on the flight, but I had only had about five hours total sleep before arriving in Bush country. I expected a dump of an airport, but the George H.W. Bush Intercontinental Airport (it wasn’t call that at the time I think) was as modern as Pittsburgh’s then two-year-old airport. I got down to baggage claim, and there they were. Uncle George and Uncle Darryl were there, grinning and smiling as if they could see me from a mile away. “I knew it was you, with that Gill nose,” he said as he walked toward me and gave me a big hug.

Historic Third Ward, Houston, Texas, March 2012 (not the part I got to visit). (Nelson Bowman III; http://www.myhbcuinterview.com)

We got in George’s car, stopped by a gas station near downtown Houston first, to get gas and to get me something to eat and drink. Then they immediately went to the Third Ward to hang out with friends and play basketball. They only let me take three shots, and I missed all three, tired as I was. “We need real ballers out here,” my Uncle George said.

My uncles were good, but given the amount of time they spent on the court, they should’ve been. They both played basketball in high school in Bradley, Arkansas. Heck, all of the Gill boys played at least two sports growing up. My Uncle Sam played four — basketball, football, baseball, and track — and all of the others at least played basketball and football. George at thirty-two and Darryl at twenty-eight (neither of them liked me calling them “Uncle,” with me being twenty-four at the time) were still in pretty good shape, though Darryl complained about his midsection. They kept asking me, “Are you sure you’re a Gill?,” based on three shots I missed, including two that rimmed out.

Eventually I’d meet my Uncle Robert, his wife and sons, my Uncle Darryl’s girlfriend and eventual wife, and a few of Uncle George’s friends that weekend. Of all of the family meetings that took place, none was more meaningful than me sitting down to dinner that Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon with three of my uncles at one time. They grilled me with more questions than I’d get from my dissertation committee some five months later. “How big sis [my Mom] doin’?” “Do any of the kids play sports?” “What’s it like livin’ in the big city?” Even though my mother had been on welfare for eleven years, and living in poverty for some thirteen — working or not — they still thought that we were doing better than they were living in the middle of Texas. I tried, but failed, to convince them that our poverty was real.

It was a weird conversation, seeing that it was happening in the dining and living rooms of my Uncle Robert’s ranch-style house, a four-bedroom, two-bath home with a carport, backyard and decent front yard in suburban Houston. They owned four cars, and a leaky boat that needed some repairs. Pretty good for a man with a high school diploma and someone who was a shift supervisor for a local trucking company. Uncle Robert was the man, a six-five rail-thin man who looked almost like he could be his brother Sam’s twin instead of his slightly younger brother at forty-four years old. But Uncle Robert and the rest of them all assumed that since my mother hadn’t come running back to Texas or Arkansas for help that things were all right. They weren’t, as they’d learn a year later when the 616 fire left my mother and younger siblings homeless.

My Uncle, Robert Gill, Houston, Texas, received April 3, 1994. (Robert Gill/Donald Earl Collins).

Beyond that, I learned a lot about the family. I confirmed some of the stories that my mother had told me over the years, including the one about my half-Irish, half Choctaw/Black great-great grandmother who was born in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in 1880. I also learned that my grandmother Beulah was originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, that I really did have a great-grand aunt in Seattle, apparently New Edition lead singer Johnny Gill’s grandmother or great-grandmother, making all of us related.

That my uncles were and remained close was heartening, and that they managed to get decent and good-paying jobs was encouraging. It also gave me some sense of reassurance, if not pride, in the fact that they had put their lives together in Houston without any real guidance from family. By the time I boarded my flight to New Orleans that Sunday evening, I felt like I knew enough to talk about my family, mother’s and father’s side, for the first time.

Bow Down to Isabel Wilkerson

27 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Academic Writing, Black Migration, Book Review, Creative Nonfiction Writing, Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson, Joe William Trotter Jr., Proletarianization Thesis, The Warmth of Other Suns (2011)

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, front cover (2011), Random House.

I’ve finally read Isabel Wilkerson’s book The Warmth of Other Suns (2011) this month, just as I finished teaching a mini-course in post-1865 African American history. If I ever have the opportunity again to choose my own books for a survey-level course in African American history, this would be one of my cornerstone books. I know I stand at the back of a very long list when I say this, but this is a wonderfully powerful and insightful book, with language and a writing style equally as tender.

This was what I wrote regarding my first impressions on Goodreads.com:

My God – this book is a masterpiece! Wilkerson has done what historians and writers as diverse and groundbreaking as Kenneth Kusmer, David Levering Lewis, Joe William Trotter, Jr., Nicholas Lemann, Thomas Sugrue and James Grossman couldn’t (and in a couple of cases, wouldn’t) do. She put flesh, blood and bones on the Black individuals and families who migrated “up North” and out West throughout the bulk of the twentieth century. She didn’t distract with neo-Marxist, post-modern, post-structural, proletarian, or other overly academic theories for understanding the “hows” and “whys” behind Black migration between 1915 and the 1970s.

Reading Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns (2011) was like reading into my own family’s pasts (my mother and father came to New York City — specifically, the Bronx (Pelham Parkway and Wakefield) — during the 1960s from Arkansas and Georgia/Florida before moving to Mount Vernon). She captured so well the aspirations, the inspirations and the trepidations of the people who migrated, and the things they faced upon arrival. Wilkerson, most of all, grounded herself in the scholarly, but weaved it into a story that was nothing less than literary. If you’re a US or African American historian, a Black Studies, Black Women’s Studies or American Studies scholar, you must incorporate in your curriculum if you haven’t already. If you’re a writer who aspires to tell an important story — one that educates as it entertains — then The Warmth of Other Suns is a great place to start and Wilkerson a great writer to emulate.

Wilkerson called the Great Migration one of the great events of the twentieth century. But it was more than that. It was one of the great events in American history, a silent and gradual revolution on par with westward expansion and more significant than the second wave of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe to the US between 1870 and 1914. I and millions of others like me should know. I wouldn’t be writing at all if I wasn’t a child of two Black migrants who left farms in the South for New York City.

Carnegie Mellon Stamp of Approval

17 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Advice, Barbara Lazarus, Book Reviews, CMU, Coursework, Doctoral Completion, Graduate School, Hazing, Joe William Trotter Jr., John Modell, Oral Comprehensive Exams, PhD, Pitt, Politics of Academia, Prayer, Stamp of Approval, Steve Schlossman, Sycophants, Torture

Approved rubbed stamp in green, March 17, 2014. (http://depositphotos.com).

Two decades ago on this date, I took my oral PhD comprehensive exam. It was on a cloudy Thursday, a day after a late afternoon shower had left a rainbow over the otherwise dreary campus. Like the day after that rainbow, the exam was anticlimactic, more indicative of what I’d learned in two years as a grad student at Pitt than in my two semesters at Carnegie Mellon.

Getting to this exam was sheer torture. Not because I didn’t understand historiography, or hadn’t read at least 230 books and countless articles since my first day of grad school. No, it was torturous because the powers that were had insisted to make my schedule more like the one of a first-semester grad student the previous fall.

I ended up with two courses that I didn’t want and didn’t need, especially since the History Department at CMU had told me that they had accepted all of my master’s and PhD credits from the University of Pittsburgh. Though I had taken four grad seminars in US history (not to mention CMU Professor Joe Trotter’s grad seminar in African American history the year before), I was taking a first-year student’s grad seminar in US history – again! I also had to take comparative working-class history seminar with a combination of anti-race Marxists and brown-nosing sycophants more interested in an A than in actual evidence-based historical interpretation.

Prostate exam from Family Guy (1999-2003, 2005-present) screen shot, July 17, 2013. (http://chattanoogaradiotv.com).

That, and being broke for most of the ’93-’94 school year — I took what amounted to a $2,000 stipend cut in my transfer from Pitt to CMU — made me pretty cranky my first six months at the home of elitist lily-Whiteness. There were days in those courses where I wanted to literally strangle some of my fellow grad students for being so dense (in the case of first-years) or for being so obviously fake in their praise of a given professor’s argument (in the case of two sycophants in particular). Only the late Barbara Lazarus and Trotter kept me grounded enough so that I didn’t spend every moment of Fall ’93 making voodoo dolls out of Steve Schlossman and John Modell for putting me through the hazing process.

Somewhere around the beginning of November ’93 — after some much-needed time in prayer — I began to realize a few things. One, that I’d already done so much reading on topics like immigration, industrialization, slavery and the connections between race and class (and race, class and gender). So much so that unless it was an author of major interest, I could skim or skip the reading, or even find a few book reviews and compare them to my extensive library of notes on the other authors in a given subfield or field.

Two, that my time outside of class was still my time. I knew that I wanted to do multiculturalism as a dissertation topic, and that I wanted to do it in the context of Black Washington, DC. So I began ordering microfilm of Black weekly newspapers like the Washington Tribune and Washington Bee (going back as far as 1915) to look at as much material as possible. It calmed me to know that I was working on my dissertation topic nearly a year before Trotter and my committee would official approve it.

Three, I knew by January ’94 that Schlossman, et al. had agreed that the Spring ’94 semester would be my last one in coursework. I still had to take Modell’s goofy Historical Methodologies course, but having to do things like my oral comprehensives made going to class just bearable enough.

Acting a part quotes from actors, March 17, 2014. (http://thepeopleproject.com/actors/quotes).

Finally, I took out a loan. I’d only taken out one student loan since finishing undergrad in ’91, but it was obvious I couldn’t live off of a $7,500-per-year stipend. Really, no one could, not without rooming with another student or having a spouse with a real income. The money came in at the beginning of March, making my march to become ABD that year that much easier.

By the time I walked into the second-floor conference room in Baker Hall to take my orals, I knew there wasn’t a question about what I knew and how well I knew it. It was about whether I could show the folks at CMU that I could play along with them in their version of grad school, which wasn’t any different from any other history doctoral program’s version. And I did play along, for two hours, more than long enough to move on to the dissertation proposal round.

When I said years later to my friend Laurell that Humanities and Mount Vernon High School had prepared me more for grad school than it did for undergrad at Pitt, this was what I meant!