The MailThe Kilson Letter: 'A Contemptuous Disregard'

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The Harvard intellectual community has yet to acknowledge Dr. W.E.B. DuBois as a brilliant black scholar. Harvard ignored him during his attendance, during his life-time as a crusader against racial injustice, and has yet to fully recognize his achievements.

We must agree with Professors Kilson, Nwafor, Patterson, and others that all publicly announced meetings or lectures sponsored by any department in the University should not exclude any portion of the University community. The incident concerning the lecture given by Mrs. DuBois sponsored by the Afro-American Studies Department which excluded whites was unfortunate. Perhaps lectures of this nature need not take place at Harvard but rather within the larger black community.

However, in reference to the thrust of Professor Kilson's letter to the CRIMSON of January 27, what must be recognized is his use of this occurrence at Sanders Theatre as a springboard to attack Black Studies once again.

Professor Kilson, the "rat-sniffer," is disgustingly reminiscent of Ralph Ellison's Dr. Bledose. He has, consciously or unconsciously, become the blackguard of the Harvard Faculty on the subject of Afro-American Studies.

Poor Martin's blackguardism indicates that he has a contemptuous disregard for people and ideas that fail to adhere to the myopic Southern conservative nature of his convictions.

Some history of the ideological growth of Professor Kilson illustrates this point clearly:

Mr. Kilson on the black students' protest in the Fall of 1968: "The racially bigoted and disgustingly anti-intellectual assumptions underlying their criticism were utterly predictable.

"Blissfully unaware that their bigoted and paranoid outlook makes shambles of scholarship and learning, the black critics of Soc Sci 5 seek to reduce the course to a platform for black nationalist propaganda."

And to the Harvard Faculty: "Surely no scholar worth his salt would give a minute's notice to assisting these critics of Soc Sci 5 in their quest."

Professor Kilson has continually attacked the "legitimacy" of Black Studies. At the August 1969 NAACP National Convention, he proclaimed. "We are now in the era of fashionable movements. Advocates of fashionable movements act as if what they have embraced, was never recognized as worthy or important until they came along.... Many of the advocates of the Black Studies movement today prefer that the study of the Negro in colleges be organized in terms of one's prejudices and hates...."

The self-exiled Agnewesque stance evident in these statements was again brought forth by Professor Kilson in his most recent letter of January 27:

"One needs little familiarity with a university to know that students, with rare exceptions indeed, have no capacity to exercise scholarly authority. If they had, they would not be students: it is as simple as that."

The growth of any departmental discipline in this University requires innovative criticism and constructive suggestions from its student concentrators. And so it should be with the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard. It needs a chance to expand and mature. But even though the Department is embryonic, Afro-American Studies on this campus would be aborted should the existing Department be dissolved and the Rosovsky recommendations for a joint departmental major be adopted in its place, just as Kilson advocates in his letter to the CRIMSON.

Kilson has opposed the Department since its conception. The essentiality of Afro-American Studies as a rigorous academic pursuit has eluded Professor Kilson. The boundless examples of calculated slurring and ignorant misinterpretation of the struggles and contributions in the making of this country exemplify the need for us to follow the example set by Dr. W.E.B. DuBois so that we and the black children of tomorrow may have a plausible alternative to the Styrons and Toynbees of the future.

It is regrettable that blacks must engage in verbal conflict in a predominately white communicative arena of this sort. However, Mr. Kilson's words of negative criticism demand a response lest they be accepted as valid.