Word: teaches
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...audience to decide. Yet these are some of the same people who tell us today that we do not need Afro-American literature courses, that the quality of Afro-American literature cannot be compared with that of Euro-American literature, and further, that if a man decides to teach the literature of his people, he is not a serious scholar. That in fact if he were a serious scholar he would teach and study the works of Pirandello or Beckett, Shakespeare or Dante, Milton or Chaucer...
This, of course, brings me to another question--not the what or why I teach, but the where. In Afro-American studies the where seems always to take precedence over all other questions. At each moment of my academic life. I find myself having to explain why I teach in the "refuse heap of academia." Sometimes, overwhelmed by evidences of the most "objective" kind. I, like Aime Cesaire, am forced to "declare my crimes" and confess that "the expanse of my perversity confounds me." Yet, I must make a further confession. I must confess that I love my people...
More specifically, I teach Afro-American literature because I like to believe that I bring to my students life-giving thoughts. I teach them to hate the shameful exploitation of man by man and the man-hating ideology or racial exclusiveness. I teach my students that life is the highest principle and therefore should not be bought or sold for even the choicest pieces of silver...
...teach Afro-American Literature because I believe that when one removes the iron armor of racial identity, all that one finds beneath is man: puny yet powerful; fragile yet fecund; humble yet humane. Man in all of his wonderous and multifarious beauty. Afro-American man shares in this brotherhood of man and so it is that through a statement of our images, metaphors, symbols, and the subtle nuances that have been the province of literature from time immemorial we express the peculiar and distinctive nuances of our humanity...
...counsel of the coach, is the crucial factor. Howard Johnson '81 remarks, "He's inspiring because he's such a stable Rock-of Gibraltar person." Hap Porter '79 sums up the crew's relationship with the coach: I trust him--totally. It's easy to have a winner teach you how to be a winner...