Inspired by Holmes’s memory, I made it a point of tracking down that book–“An Education in Georgia,” by Calvin Trillin, written in 1964. I had not remembered the title nor the author, but I remembered the book’s effect on me at the time I had first read it, back in the late ’60s when I was an impressionable teenager, living in a Los Angeles suburb.
It’s worth examining the impact this book and these two people had in my life now that we are once again at a point of monstrous racial division. The book helped me recall how deeply the civil-rights movement of the ’60s inspired me. It spoke to me–white, female, a teenager from a family of modest means-about overcoming odds and about individual worth, about personal striving and aiming high. The message was as much moral as racial. Cast in those universal human terms, the movement offered a transcendent message that changed hearts and minds about black people, that race did not matter, and lifted us all to a higher place. That was how the movement eventually swept a nation. Hunter-Gault and Holmes were my idols.
Today, aggravated by the Simpson verdicts and by Farrakhan’s Million Man March, many middle-class-Americans, including myself, are aghast at the state of race relations. And rightly so, because the cause of civil rights has lost its moral high ground. Black leaders have lost their way. We all have. We have jettisoned the importance of the individual, making a person’s racial category utterly controlling. Now “color” alone fatuously gives one license, entree and advantage, even insulation from normal standards and scrutiny. We have confused the easy bestowal of awards, status, promotions, admissions, with the harder business of genuine individual development. Antisocial behavior is accepted as a legitimate cultural difference.
Hamilton Holmes came of age in legally segregated times. Yet in 1961 he wasn’t asking for favors; he was asking to be recognized for what he was, which was eminently qualified. Hunter-Gault told Lehrer in the interview that Holmes today would have been considered a “real race man” in that he always excelled beyond measure, making sure that slurs of inferiority could not be leveled at him. Then, the University of Georgia despised Holmes for one reason: he was black. By the time of his graduation in 1963, it despised him for another: he was too damn smart. At graduation, the university was forced by his exemplary scholarship to give Holmes – whose admission was ordered by federal court and aided by armed guards his first year – a Phi Beta Kappa key. Holmes went on to become the first black student to attend the esteemed Emory School of Medicine and an accomplished orthopedic surgeon in Atlanta.
As the O.J. verdicts rang out last year, another news item coincided. It was reported that the number of young black males across the nation under supervision by the criminal-justice system jumped in 1995 from one fourth to one third that of the overall population. Who among black leaders is blaming anything but racism for this frightful statistic? The Million Man March was rife with the claims by official speakers that all white America can think to do with black men is incarcerate them. The rationalizations for black failure routinely implicate whites, not blacks. The message to the next generation of blacks is that the American system is rigged against you, so don’t even try. How dare black leaders– mature people speaking from secure perches– sell young lives short and so dishonestly.
My imagination was captured in the ’60s with the energy and vitality of black people who were hankering to defy racist notions about themselves. Their personal striving, extraordinary effort and courage captivated a country. Although the nation has vastly changed–not perfectly and not without racial incident; it is now a place where individual merit surely counts – the message from portions of the black community unmistakably is that to try is futile. Spike Lee’s speech to athletes in “Hoop Dreams” was don’t play the white man’s game. I prefer to remember a different lesson from the movie– shown on a banner in the high-school gym where basketball great Isaiah Thomas got his start: “He conquers who labors.”
There is a lone luminous voice of hope, whose ideals are an antidote to the quagmire in which public dialogue on these topics currently resides. He comes not from political circles (where self-interest in perpetuating a helpless underclass is obvious) but from the arts. Wynton Marsalis recently published a book based on his acclaimed PBS series about teaching children music. He offers 12 rules that are “a strong lesson in a slovenly age,” as The New York Times put it. Marsalis counsels children to “play with expression. . . Do everything with the proper type of attitude. Give yourself over to what you’re doing. Don’t be a cynic and think you’re too hip to be a part of something. . . [participate] and try to do your best.”
Hamilton Holmes knew where he wanted to go and set about getting there. He got there not to be white, and not because he was black. He went as far as his strength of character and extraordinary effort and intellect could carry him: to the top. If we cannot preach this honest message to our children we will not move forward to fulfill the rich destiny that is this great nation.
