Day 4

Name: Julius Wayne Dudley

Profession: Harvard University Mentor

Location: In line to see President Barack Obama speak at Northeastern University

Question: Why are you here?

Answer: To be a part of something bigger than myself.

“The Harvard Graduate School of Education contacted me and asked me if I would lead with the incoming students, the graduate students—the master students and also the doctoral students—and they want me to serve as a resource to these students. Help them make a transition into the university setting. To act and serve as a resource, a job opportunist—although that wasn’t stated—and I was assigned three students and several others who wanted me to work with them. There were several individuals who asked to serve in the SAIM program. We meet regularly with students. We stay in touch with them. For those students who are assigned us, they sit down and they want to know a lot of information, or they have questions, sometimes we can be very helpful. Sometimes, less so. But there’s a way to explore ways that one can give assistance—giving encouragement, sometimes a telephone call, how to find resources, especially if you’re from out of the state. My mentors are from out of state. I have three. They call by telephone. We meet as a formal meeting on January the eighth at our Gutman Library at Harvard at the campus on Cambridge. And there’s usually food served. There’s a person who makes a presentation. I can tell that it’s a social network.

“One of my students is blind—not exactly legally blind, but he’s coming close; he has a cane—who’s Italian. He married a black woman, an African American woman, and has a child. He’s doing research on racism, coming up with a new paradigm on racism. That’s probably one of the reasons why he selected me. There were several. They have an opportunity to pick and choose the, you know, the mentor. He’s writing a book, a publication, he’s working with the Harvard Business School to pull together a business plan, but he needs information about race and racial paradigms, and he took down the fact that I had taught African American History and that I’m African American—seven generations—and that I took part in the Civil Rights movement.

“At the time I was born, African Americans were lynched, literally, across trees less than fifty miles from my birthplace. I was born. 1944. There was a lynching that took place. A woman was pregnant. She had a fetus. Her and another couple were killed by a couple of officers. This doesn’t sound like ancient history to me. This is real. In 1954, you had the Emmitt Till case. I was about ten or eleven years old. The lynching took place in Mississippi. It spread the pages of all the black newspapers. The Jet magazine, the Ebony magazine. It was real to us. One day, my mother and father, all my sisters and brothers—I was one of nine children—we went off to Atlanta and we moved to some other Georgia rural hick town. We left the comforts of the city and we walked to school. My mother walked us to school for less than about ten minutes. A self-contained community. And we would walk three, sometimes four miles to the school designated for black children. What a change, walking through a hostile area because we had to walk through the white neighborhoods. At least, people could see they were white neighborhoods.

“One day, we walked through all the white neighborhoods on our way to the home. To the place we called home. There were two white men who trailed us for about a mile. They wanted to know why we were walking through the community. They already knew; we gathered that much. They encouraged my younger sister and brother to get in the car with them. I being the oldest, and I being told by my mother that you’re in charge, and I took that very seriously, I turned around and saw them walking towards the car. We children obeyed older people. Or we were told to. And so I looked around and I saw the man, probably aged twenty four, twenty five, had his pants open and showed his penis. I looked around and my younger sister, aged five, and my younger brother, aged seven, were walking towards the car, fired up. I told them, ‘Follow me! Those men are nasty!’ That was something. That was unheard of. We didn’t see that. I was about eleven years old. I had never seen that. I had never seen older people behave that way. That was nasty. We thought that was nasty. They showed their private parts. It was nasty! And I didn’t know what they were going to do to my sister and brother, I told them to walk closer to me. And so we walked and the car slinked slowly behind us, slowly behind us. Followed us for a half mile, if not longer. And at some point we were so afraid, I told my little sister, ‘Let’s run…’ And we were in an area of about three hundred acres of land. A dirt road. You might see a car or truck driving in the area once every five minutes. It’s a different world. I was afraid, too, because I couldn’t handle two old men. Two adults in their twenties. I was very small—no more than a hundred and ten pounds. Very skinny. I said, ‘Oh, this is crazy.’ I went and told my mother about it and she was horrified.

“We lived on land owned by a Klansman. My father had worked for this Roper family, who were the Klan leaders of the state of Georgia. They had enormous influence, and my father knew it. They liked him, my father. He was very nice, they trusted him. My mother, who worked as a maid, now a housewife, who had worked for a local family for more than fifteen, twenty years, said she needed another job in the city to raise a family, they made it possible. They needed a job. And then at some point, when the family grew so large, we had one bedroom for five, seven children. My father told the Ropers. They said, ‘Oh. We have a four-room shack in a place up in Atlanta.’ They said, ‘You want to pay the rent? Keep the roads clean, and we’ll look out for your best interest.’ Well, once we told our parents what had happened, my mother was so distraught.

“This was in 1955, ’56. The Supreme Court had voted on the ordinance of the Brown v. Board of Education. Southern white resentment was climbing at a fever pitch. Emmett Till’s murder, lynching. There were a lot of mean things going on. And my mother said to my father, ‘We’ve got to leave this place. I know we can save money with a home up in Atlanta, but this is putting our children at risk and we have got to leave. Next year, Wayne is going off to high school, and the people from the wooded area can just walk in and I feel so vulnerable.’ What we had to ask ourselves was also—we all started hoping the Ropers might protect us. But they might not make it here in time. They could put out the word to leave us all alone. They could say that. They could give the word and the lower Klansman would listen. They could tell them what to do. It was a very interesting world in which to live. It was difficult.

“Oh, yeah. We had to move. My mother suffered, and rightfully so. We were afraid, too! …We had to study by kerosene lanterns—lights—and instead of one bedroom we had two. No running water. Well water. Personally, I thought it was a wonderful life. My mother could make us think that, uh, that vinegar was lemonade. We could grow our own vegetables. We had our own chicken. Lived a good, country life. And all that was true, but we didn’t know what else was coming along the way. Best of all, we were no longer plastered to the TV. We had a TV, but we didn’t have any electricity. And it gave us time to spend as a family, to get to know each other. We largely depended on each other. Every source of enjoyment.

“I remember my mother found this old—I don’t know where we found this old Look magazine. Around then, Look was a real popular magazine from the white people’s media. I saw a picture of Henry VIII and his wives, and I was fascinated. I said, ‘Whoa!’ I could barely read. I could read certain portions of it, but what stuck with me was the king of England had beheaded two of his wives. I said, ‘What a man!’ [Laughs] In my childhood state, I said, ‘This is unheard of!’ I begged my mother to read the rest of the article. Fortunately, my mother could read in write. My father never read a word in his life. He had no formal education. My mother had several years of formal training and she could spell. She still spells. She’s eighty nine years old and she can probably out-spell you. And she read the article, and I found out that his name was not The Eighth, but Henry Tudor! I said, ‘These people had names!’ I was fascinated. I begged my mother to take me to the library so I could read more! Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth the Great! I said to myself, ‘There’s a larger world out there.’ People lived four or five hundred years ago, having all these troubles about having a male child and all this stuff. I said, ‘I never knew that people who were so powerful, and so influential, and had so much money, had so many personal problems!’ And I began to think about my problems.

“I was eleven years old and I said, ‘I really don’t have a future in this life.’ I ran into the woods sometimes three, sometimes four times and cried. I said, ‘I really don’t have a future!’ I stuttered so badly I could barely say ‘hello’ over the telephone. I said, ‘No one will ever listen to me.’ I said to myself, ‘My best opportunity in life is to become a garbage collector and I will live an introverted life, hope and pray that no one asks me a question.’ I looked back and said, ‘Maybe I won’t have a male child. Maybe I won’t have any children!’ By the end of the day, I had some serious problems! [Laughs] And I said, ‘Lo and behold. There must be a better life out there, someplace,’ not knowing I was finding a life there.

“When I went to school, I went for a couple of days, and Mrs. Cook, my seventh or eighth grade teacher, she was a riot. Beautiful Afro-American woman—well, all my teachers were African American. I mean, black school, black education. A world of segregation. From cradle to grave. From the time I was born, I was listed as one of the colored children born on October 29^th. Next list: White people born on October 29^th. From cradle to grave. And I could just see white jobs, black jobs. If I get married, I’m going to have difficulty saying ‘I do.’ I was a childish man who stuttered. I found out, though, that Moses stuttered, too! I said, ‘Maybe God talks to stutterers! [Laughs] Maybe I’m not so bad off after all!’ And so I said, ‘There must be a better life’ not knowing I had found a better life.

“Went to school with Mrs. Cook—see, I got a little sidetracked. I’m sorry. Mrs. Cook, who had a mean swing. And I know I’m digressing once again. Then it was okay to whip a child. Some of the young boys enjoyed getting whipped by her because she had such a way of doing it! She would say, ‘Put your head on the table!’ Whoopsh! [Laughs] And she had beautiful hips and she smelled good. [Laughs] Childish mind, boy’s mind! But I didn’t want to be whipped by her. No, no, no. I would never open my mouth. If she said, ‘Wayne, do you know…,’ I would run and hide! No! Don’t call on me! I don’t want to embarrass myself! And it was so funny. She was talking about history of England and those kings. And I raised my hand and she probably—her jaw probably hit the floor! ‘Do you have something to say?’ And I said, ‘Yeah! King Henry VIII, who ruled England, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, he had a daughter who ruled England from 1553 to 1603. Mary Tudor, her daughter, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, and Anne Boleyn, the second wife.’ She looked right at me and said, ‘Oh! We have a scholar in the class! I said, “I-I-I r-r-read in the L-L-L-Look magazine.” And the students looked at me like ‘Wow. Maybe he’s not as dumb as we thought he was! Maybe he has a brain or two!’”

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Blogger’s Note: Dr. Dudley went on to tell me about his unique experiences marching with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his attendance at Dr. King’s funeral, furthering his education (as well as his woes for being targeted by the FBI for doing so), his experiences teaching in Georgia, Florida, Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts, and his efforts in supplying billions of books to Africa and countless vitamins and supplements to third world countries. He was at the campaign that day because he had volunteered for both Kerry’s and Obama’s campaigns in Florida, and “because Obama wanted me here.” In addition to what I have included here, Dr. Dudley spent about an hour and a half speaking about his desire to repay his forefathers, namely W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, as well as to facilitate a change he believed in. His life philosophy? Use your gifts and your experiences to help those who weren’t allowed as much. More information on Dr. Dudley can be found at http://m.vg.no/artikkel.php?artId=590619 or http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/biography.asp?bioindex=516&category=EducationMakers&occupation=Educator%20%26%20Activist&name=Julius%20Wayne%20Dudley