 Hello, and welcome to Senior Moment. My name is David Refson. I am your host for the show. Senior Moment is about seniors and four seniors. I am very pleased to have as my guest today Professor John Bracey, who works in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts. He has also been involved in the Civil Rights Movement during the 60s and beyond. So Professor Bracey, welcome to the show. Glad to be here. Glad to be here. Before we go in any further, tell me about the wonderful outfit that you're wearing. Oh, I do my shopping at the conventions I go to. So I got this last year at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and it's a combination I think of a Shantae and an Algerian form. So I really don't pay attention. I buy them for the aesthetics and that for the symbolic. It's very handsome. If it looks good enough, I'm happy. I understand. So tell me a little bit about yourself, about kind of the early years you're growing up. Tell me a little bit about where it was and what was going on in your family. Okay. Yeah, I was very fortunate to grow up in a family that consisted of the two major kind of development trends in the African American community after the emancipation. My father's family were railway workers. My grandfather was a mechanic on the Atlantic coastline. My father was a dining car waiter. Railway workers were some of the highest paid people in the black community. So that's a kind of economic base on the working class, solid black working class that enabled my family or my father's side to go to college. My mother's side of the family is one of those typical kind of southern plantation families where my great grandmother was the mistress of a Dabney who owned the largest plantations in the Mississippi Delta. And he acknowledged his offspring and therefore my grandparents and great aunts and uncles got to go to school. So from the late 19th century on, my mother and her and all of my great uncles and aunts all went to college. And so I come around my mother's side on the family of educators. They went to school and they went back to teaching. So I have like four generations of teachers in my family, including a couple of college presidents. And so you have the economic base on one side and then you have the education on the other side. So I grew up in what people consider to be a kind of black bourgeois family. My mother's from Mississippi. I was born in Chicago. Half of Mississippi lives in Chicago anyway. And so my sister was born in Arkansas where my grandfather lived. He had to leave Mississippi because he didn't get the rights that his wife had. The women got to move around without Jim Crow, but the men didn't. So if you married into the Dabney family, it didn't mean a thing. But if you were a boomer, if you were my great aunts and so forth, they didn't suffer Jim Crow at all. They could go anywhere they wanted. But the men they married couldn't. So in fact, my grandfather, William Harris, moved over right across from, not just up north, right below Memphis. He moved over into Helena, Arkansas. My sister was born in Helena, Arkansas in 1948. My mother moved to Chicago. And I was born in Chicago in 1941. Were your folks involved in politics during those times? You know, I didn't know that until later. How would I know? When I stayed in World War II in my grandfather's house in Sanford, Florida, you know, the Sanford of Trayvon. There was a constant coming and going of people. But I didn't learn too much later when I was a grown-up scholar that my grandfather was active in the NAACP in Florida. And there's some of the people coming into the house were people like Harry Tumor who got blown up with dynamite by the Klan. And yet my grandfather was active in negotiating Jackie Robinson playing the first integrated game because the Montreal Royals were based in, you know, Dodgers' Farm Team, Triple-A Farm Team, were based in Sanford. And the first integrated game I ever went to was the first integrated game in baseball. You know, Jackie Robinson playing for the Montreal Royals. Right there, I forget that, I was five years old. I mean, up until then I thought baseball was Negro Leagues, you know, satchel page and all like that. I'll tell you, I've seen a lot of information about the Negro Leagues. They had some of the greatest baseball players. That was baseball. I didn't think white people could play baseball. I was very surprised that they thought that white people were better than them. And Jackie Robinson was not an outstanding Negro League player. He was okay, but he wasn't like the best. And when he went to the major leagues and became rookie of the year, I said like, Jackie Robinson can make it like everybody ought to go, right? On the other hand, it destroyed the Negro Leagues. Which was really unfortunate because they had a real big following in the 40s and 50s. Yeah, yeah. No, I went to games with my father at Comiskey Park, you know, Double Headed, the stands were packed. They'd have a band between the games. So they'd put a platform out in the infield and they'd be like Count Basie or some combo. And people would have a little dance between the first game and the second game. You know, Negro League Double Headed lasted like eight hours. It was like an all day event, yeah. It's fantastic to say the least. Yeah, wonderful, wonderful play. It's Kansas City Monarchs. I saw satchel page pitched with the Monarchs and then later with Cleveland Indians when I was living in Chicago with my mother. He was quite something, Mr. Pages. Amazing decision. I know. And it's amazing to me that before Jackie Robinson came in that the world did not recognize the incredible players that were in the Negro League. And only because of him, once he opened the door up, the door started to be open. Well actually, the players knew. The white players knew about the Negro League. Because they had, during the all season, they played in Latin America. You had a Mexican League and then you had the Dominican Trujillo to dictate a setup of the League of the Dominican Republic in order to make himself look good. So he paid these huge salaries to Negro League players to come down and play in the Dominican Republic in the late 30s, early 40s. And so if you ask white players, the honest ones, they would say, we got to get these guys up here. Like, this is Dean said that about satchel page. He said if you signed him, we'd win the penalty by July and go fishing until the World Series. He's the greatest pressure I ever saw. Ted Williams advocated for Negro League players to come into the Hall of Fame. And he said, yeah, you know, Ted Williams was Mexican. They ducked his middle name. But he advocated, he said, no, no, these are the best guys. He said, you should get them in. I don't care if they didn't make it to the major leagues, it wasn't their fault. Well it proved to be true, because once the door got open. They came right in. You're full brass. Yeah, full brass. I mean, it really was. And Willie Mays was my idol. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so was he. He was like, he was pretty amazing. Along with, I mean, you got Don Newcomb, Rick Hanella. I mean, there's so many. I saw all of them. They all came up because the Dodgers played exhibitions for the Senators in Washington, D.C. So Roy Campagnolo, Don Newcomb, all of them. Let me ask you this. You had mentioned that you, as you got older, you were involved in the Civil Rights Movement yourself. Can you talk a little bit about that? In my pre, you know, kind of growing up, my family tended to walk into places anyway. Before they had a movement, we would just walk into a store or sit down somewhere. If it was segregated, just to do that. I mean, never occurred to me. There's a big thing about that. They weren't part of a movement or such. Just the way we acted about the world in which we lived. You didn't accept segregation. I mean, big things, you know, police and all that, you couldn't deal with. But the daily life things you would challenge when you had an opportunity to do that. So I grew up with that kind of mentality. And I grew up on the campus of Howard University at the same time that the law school was developing the Brown case. And my junior high school history teacher, Ann Ruth Houston, was the cousin of Charles Houston, who outlined the strategy to attack Plessy versus Ferguson. So you're surrounded by people who are engaged in knocking down Jim Crow. Howard Law School is where they had the mock courts, where you could see Sturgeon Marsha play a southern law, you know, just, you know, funny accent law. So I grew up in a world of motion and service. It didn't matter how much money you had. What are you going to do? What are you going to do for your people? You got a million dollars. Give half of it back. You don't need a million dollars. You have some people that don't have anything. If you have a brain, what are you going to do with it? Make money with it or help people with it. And so I grew up in a family where the primary obligation and the people you looked at as the most important were young people, children, all the way up. You know, my mother taught at elementary school, all the way up through, she directed a student teaching at Howard University. You know, taught Tony Morrison, Roberta Flack and, you know, Mary Baraka, Lee Roy Jones. Before they were famous, they had to have a job. They took student teaching just in case, you know. But you took your brain and you passed it on. You took your passion for education and passed it on. My mother taught at school, she was 13 years old. Wow. Yeah. The minute you learned something, you taught it to the people below you. You know, you finish, you know, can't through, you know, sixth grade. You get to seventh grade and you teach to kindergarten. Now, these were in segregated schools at the time, of course. Yeah. Brown versus Board of Education came up in 1954, came up in the Supreme Court. And for those who don't know and had ruled that separate but equals unconstitutional at the time, I think what's really, really unfortunate, it took many, many, many years, even though the decision had been made in 1954, for schools particularly in the South to allow that to happen. But it's a mixed, it's a mixed bag. I was in Washington, D.C. And the greatest high school in Washington, D.C., was done by high school, or black high school, had been a school training, a talented tenant for almost 100 years. My sister went to Dunbar High School and she finished 25th in her class and got a four-year scholarship to Oberlin. Wow. And we were, like, very depressed because we hadn't heard of Oberlin. We thought she should have gone to, like, Smith or someplace like that. And so we kind of, like, well, Oberlin was okay. She went to college and she was 15 years old. Wow. Yeah. My mother went to college and she was 15 years old. You don't need white people to make you smart. No, you didn't. So you didn't, the issue was not our inferiority at all. The issue, I had never in my, for a second in my life believed that. What the issue was that there were people that thought you were inferior and had things that were rightfully yours and you should go get them. Right. But in the meantime, you build up within your community the most powerful, you know, successful, strong organization so you can sustain yourself, like all black schools and all black communities. And so within the Jim Crow world, we did tons of stuff. We went to every concert. We went to, you know, we went to the Constitution Hall. We went to the Old Vic Theater. We did Shakespeare. We did all that. By the time I got to the sixth grade, I had been in every museum in Washington D.C., Folder Shakespeare Library, all that stuff, National Portrait Gallery, all that. Every Smithsonian you could get into, we went to. We were not locked in a cage somewhere, you know. And that's what was lost with integration. I had to go to Integrated High School in 1956, Roosevelt High School. I went to Roosevelt College. But Roosevelt High School was 20% black when I came in in the 10th grade. It was 80% black when I left. It was a little flat out of there. And it wasn't because we were inferior. When they did school-wide tests, we were better than the white kids. That's why they stopped giving the tests. We were number one. I was number one in my high school in physics. I don't even like physics. I like to take the tests because our teachers on the Jim Crow prepared us for biased tests. It never occurred to us that the tests would be fair. So that, that wasn't even an issue. Of course the tests were not fair. White people made it. Why would they make it fair for us? So you just learned it. You know, you stopped in the middle of the spring. You said, OK, got to take these tests in two weeks. And we stopped. And we do a test prep. And you go back to the real curriculum later. The curriculum wasn't a test. A test of some foolishness somebody made up. You know, they're talking about Robert Frost. We go back to Langston Hughes at Paul and I's Dunbar. You know, we do Robert Frost. That's on the test. But what we loved was Paul and I's Dunbar. You know, an angel robed in spotless white went down to kiss the sleeping knight. Woke to a brush. The sprite was gone. Then saw the brush and called it down. That's Paul and I's Dunbar. I had to learn that in the second grade. Still got to do it. I can say I'm glad you did. Yeah, yeah. Now that's, that was not a world of backwardness. It was a world where we had inadequate resources. Right. But you had, that meant that you had in your classroom at Bannocker Junior High School, people with master's degrees in science, teaching mathematics and science. People with doctorates who couldn't get a job at an institution who were teaching high school and junior high school. So, you know, we didn't have all we had and we didn't have anywhere near what we were entitled to. But we were not sitting around just feeling sorry for ourselves. We were building and preparing to take on that larger world. And that's the world I came out of. What happened in the sixties? Obviously there was a heavy civil rights movement going on in the sixties. No question about it. Certainly with Dr. King and others there was a lot of differences between him and Malcolm X and a bunch of other folks. What was your kind of involvement in that during that time? You know, if you're a young person, you don't much care about the fights at the top. Right? What you cared about was where's the action. Right? And people don't quite understand it, but there's no better feeling than being able to get up and participate in something that you know is right. You know, that right is on your side to take on an oppression and win. Right? And to do it with people like yourself. You know? And to do it with a sense of courage and enthusiasm that's similar to being on a ball team or being a great performer and a player, whatever. And you did that because you wanted to get that out of the way. It never occurred to us it would take, you know, 50 years to get integration. We thought you could do that in a couple of years and we could go back and play, you know, go back, play cards, hang out, whatever. The only reason you had to have a civil rights movement is that after the Brown case, just a nine-oh-case, nobody opposed, you know, the Brown case. We thought that meant therefore we could go anywhere we wanted because we had won. Sure. It didn't happen. 1955 you had, well, they can take all the deliberate speed. That meant that they didn't really mean it. So it means, okay, we got to do this the hard way. That's the civil rights movement. Okay. We won all paper. Right. You say now you got to do it. And you say, oh, okay. So we had a slogan, free by 63. So we figured 10 years, 1954, 1963, probably wrapped up. 1963, not wrapped up. No. Not wrapped up. And so you realize it's going to be a long, long time. And that's when the older people come and talk to you. They say, I know you got a lot of energy, but we were fighting this thing a long time ago and you're not going to win it in five years. You may not win it in 10 years. But the fight is what's important. You know, you do what you can do in your time. And that's the attitude I adopted by the time I was like 20 years old. It's like, okay, my summers are gone. My spare time is gone. You know, they had it on the beach. Can't do that as much as I'd like to. I didn't go to a Final Four basketball game because of a demonstration. You know, God had tickets. You know, you come down to Atlanta and see, I love basketball. I said, no, man, we got this rally. You know, and I didn't even thought about it. I didn't even blink an eye. You know, if none have occurred to me to stop and go to a basketball game, whatever basketball, anybody's basketball, if there was movement activity going on. And so for the, I went to Howard for a year after graduating from Roosevelt High School. Got a scholarship, but I was surrounded by people that knew me, you know, the faculty, they knew me since I was a little kid. And you never ever want to be in that environment because they still think you're five years old. You know, so whatever you did was okay. I don't know whether I knew anything or not because they wouldn't give me a fair evaluation. So I had to go somewhere. And that's when I got, but before that, I hated the kind of strictness of middle-class life before the movement developed. To grow up in a very tight middle-class environment required a lot of social behavior. I didn't care about parties and, you know, wearing ties and, you know, kind of being kind of stuffy. I didn't like that. It just was not my personality. And so I didn't like a lot of the stuff in Howard, you know, fraternity life, all that business. You know, so I kind of dropped out for a year. That's when I went to work as a mail clerk at the Pentagon. And as I mentioned earlier in that previous conversation, my favorite moment when I was working out at the Arlington Hall Station, the Singlet Engineering Agency, was I had top-secret clearance. I mean, I could never get it today, because Donald Trump got it for me. But I carried my most important task during the fall was to get the World Series bets down for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And I actually interrupted a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to get Admiral Limnitzer, who's the head of Joint Chiefs, to get down his bet before the ball game began. You had to put your money down before the game started. So I'm running around like 12 o'clock and the game started at 1, and they're meeting. And there's literally a meeting at Big Room Joint Chiefs of Staff. And I have to talk my way in because the secretary is looking at me, like I'm a young black guy, and I'm saying I have to talk to Admiral Limnitzer. I got to talk to her. It's really important. She's like, who are you? Just tell them John Brace is out here. So I get invited into the meeting and the joint. She's got huge football-long table with all the maps and all this stuff. And they stop. And I walk up like it's really important. And under my top-secret folder is the World Series pool, right? And then who you got? I said, I like your Dodgers. You know, I'm cool. You know, I said, OK, Dodgers. And he slides this $50 bill up under there. And I give him a nice little ready-to-go, ready to go and walk on out. And people thought this is the most important thing in the world happening in its World Series pool. That's the Pentagon. A whole lot of just that and the other underneath is not a lot going on. And then I went to Roosevelt. That's when I got in the Civil Rights Act. In Roosevelt College or University? In Chicago, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a great school. The school that was started, I'm only 15 years old when I got there. It started because of discrimination in the Central YMCA College. They had a quota on blacks and Jews. So the faculty walked out and formed Roosevelt University. And so we had a reverse kind of situation. 30% black, 30% Jewish. And he would sit and those other people. So it was a activist school. The demonstrations against everything. In the cafeteria, a table like this, this might be the Yipso table. You got Bernie Sanders, he was around there too. He's in Chicago. Then you had the Communist Party kids, Young Communist League over here. Then you had the Socialist Workers Party. Then we had our black history table, the Negro History Club. They called us the black bit of Bolsheviks. And we wouldn't let you sit at the table unless you had good politics. Look how smart you were. You could sit around the table, but not at the table. And we argued and debate and read all the time. Nobody told us what to read. We read what we wanted to read. So somebody said, oh, you got to read this book. We'd all go get it. Whether it's in the class or not. Well, if you were taking the class that had better books in our class, we'd go sit in on your class. And you could do that at Roosevelt. You just wander around the hallway and say, what's happening? Oh, they got a great guest speaker, let's go. And so you literally walk out of the hallway into a lecture hall and sit in there back in here, guest speaker from another class. Nobody stops you. It's a wonderful education. The faculty got locked up. A good chunk of the faculty were hired because they got fired somewhere else. Chuck Hamilton got fired at Tuskegee. Charles Hamilton did. Black Power was stoked to come back there. He got fired from Tuskegee, taught at Roosevelt, George Iggis, a great European historian, got fired at Philander Smith, China-organized black cafeteria workers in Arkansas now. Why you wouldn't do that? I do not know. And they gave him 24 hours to go. So where's yet Roosevelt? Christopher Lass, Jesse Davis, start and land all taught at Roosevelt. And they couldn't get a job anywhere else. I want to talk before we're going to, I guess we could talk about these topics probably until next week. So all of a sudden you came to UMass. Now you've been a professor of African-American studies for a very long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And can you talk a little bit about that? It wasn't a plan. People keep asking about my career. I don't have a career. I had a job 45 years. When I went to school, there wasn't any such thing as black studies. It didn't exist. There were people who wanted to study black people, but there were very few classes except for historically black institutions. I don't think there were five courses on black people in white schools in the whole country. But I was going to do that anyway. In Roosevelt I studied with Sinclair Drake, Lorenzo Dow, Turner, the founder of African-American Linguistics, Brilliant Man. Sinclair Drake who did black metropolis, and again the leading black sociologist, living black sociologist at that point. And so I was studying black people all along anyway. And growing up on Howard's campus, I'm surrounded by people who wrote books, so they gave me their books. I got all this stuff anyway. When the movement starts off, it's, you know, we're in core, we have, you know, demonstrations. We get locked up trying to integrate schools. We shut down the expressway. We pick up construction sites, organized street gangs and all. So when I finished up Roosevelt, you had to leave finally. They finally kind of pushed me out. You have to graduate. So I found, I didn't have a major. I just took classes. I was just, you know, ducking to Vietnam War. So I just kept taking classes and said, you have to, you have to graduate. And I said, like, okay, but what do I do? And they said, well, pick something. So they literally grabbed me out of the hall and said, take one of these, your history major. Take two of these, your sociology. Take three of these, your geography. I enjoyed going to school and I enjoyed the movement activity that came out of the school. I get to Northwestern. And I'm getting paid to read books on African history. I'm really cool. This is really nice. I get a fellowship. I'm sitting around. I'm enjoying life. Black students in Northwestern turned the place upside down. And they come and get me to help them because in 1963, I had led a charge to run Mayor Daley off the platform in Grand Park. So I'd been on the front page of every newspaper in Chicago. So people knew me, but I didn't think about myself as somebody that people knew. And so I think I'm anonymously reading books in the library. And all these kids say, that's the guy that led the demonstration. He can help us. And the next thing I know, I'm helping lead a takeover at Northwestern. And we had the fifth anniversary last year of a takeover that they celebrated. 100 kids took over the building. And they got, you know, black studies and so forth. It's at this point after the King riots, when large numbers of black kids are coming into predominantly white institutions, that black studies appears. Nobody thinks this is going to last. No school wanted it. Black kids came in not as integrating the place, but as making the place like them. So they weren't happy being at Northwestern. They said, how come Northwestern is all messed up? Not, I'm glad to be here, but the food in their cafeteria sucks, you know? And how come they don't talk about black people in any of the classes? So that's where the demand came from. Well, I'm already doing this. I know how to do this. I've been reading this stuff. I had a Negro History Club with Sterling Stuckey called the Armistad Society, which is based in the community. You know, we had all this stuff going on. And so students are demanding that the history and culture of black people be taught at colleges. And so I'm a grad student. I'm getting job offers once a week. You know, somebody's taking over a building. Can you come out here and teach a class? I said, no. You know, like, I might go for the interview just to see what it looks like. But I finally took a job in Northeastern Illinois State that Teddy Wilson, who was a war chief for the vice laws, was at the job interview. And I got the job because Ted said he knew me in the interview. He said, well, you hire. I taught at Northern Illinois University because they had the most amazingly talented radical faculty anywhere in the country. There were a whole bunch of guys that came out of the left and they head out in Northern Illinois Normal College in the 1950s during the McCarthy period out in the middle of a cornfield when the thing grew into a university. And so I walk out there and get my really radical speech because I didn't want to work out in the cornfields and they start a party. There's a whole bunch of white guys sharing, you know, arms struggle and, you know, black power. And I said, who are these people? He said, we just wanted for some Americans. Like, there's a left thing. So that's, so we got black history there and black studies there. Then I got invited to University of Rochester with the, it was going to be a black and white left coalition there by Eugene Genevase and Herbert Guthrie. But they fought all the time. I didn't like that. Then I got a call from Mike Delwaugh. Mike I knew from Howard, when I was a freshman. Mike later was very active in SNCC and then he came up to Massachusetts, you know, with Julius Chubeski and Sid Kaplan because he was trying to get thrown out of the country because he was making immigrant. He had to be in school. So they get a student visa. He got to be a student. So he ended up at UMass. Students demanded black studies here and they moved from the English department over to the New Africa House after the takeover in 1969. And Mike says, come help me. We started at the department. And so I came in in 1972. I've been here ever since. We unfortunately have to stop here and it may be pertinent to have you back again at some time because we didn't cover a lot of things I wanted to cover. Yeah, yeah. So I want to really thank you, sir, for being on the show. I want to thank Amherst Media for sponsoring the show and hope that you will tune in again for our next episode. Again, thanks to Professor Bracey for being on the show. You were really terrific. Thank you and have a good day.