Keeping Watch

FROM THE TOP FLOOR of the Parker House one evening last month, Boston looked placid. Seen from that angle, the just budding green of the Common was painted brightly against the John Hancock lower. If you'd looked out over downtown that night, you might well have thought yourself in a windy city of brotherly love.

But it you had looked behind you, at the people gathered to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education--the epoch-making decision that outlawed "separate but equal" public services and that would help fuel the Civil-Rights movement of the 60s--you remembered where you were quite suddenly. This was Boston. And this polite company was a group of battle-scarred activists who have once again taken up the fight against racism, this time chasing the disease to where it now lies--in the subtleties and nuances of Northern discrimination. Said one chagrinned former Black undergraduate: "I've never seen so many Black people together like this in one room in Boston."

Thirty years after Brown, the group did not have to confront the anathema of legislated discrimination. In its place, however, were issues that continue to concern--and sometimes divide--civil rights activists; affirmative action, charges of separatism and, most of all education.

The evening's keynote speaker was Dr. Kenneth Clark, the author of the influential report cited by the Supreme Court Justice in the Brown decision. But though Clark called up images of controversies that many like to pretend are over, he was far from nostalgic. At the time of Brown. Clark recalls, he was proud of the decision and his role in it, but also troubled, when the Court cited his study of the effects of segregation on Black and white children, the Justices had entirely deleted the section discussing the effects of segregation on white children, almost as if the policy only hurt the minority group. The omission angered Clark then, and it continues to anger him as the oversight is perpetuated by the Northern educational system, which he feels has concentrated desegregation efforts too strongly on the Black children. "Aren't there any inferior white children?" he asks "30 years after Brown," he added. "Brown has been repealed."

Not surprisingly, then, the focus of Clark's work since Brown has been the issues of diversity and desegregation. Since the decision, Clark, an "inveterate integrationist," has run a consulting agency in New York specializing in race relations and affirmative action. His primary concern has been maintaining the dream of Brown, even though many of his colleagues have abandoned the cause. And it was this hope that integration can be seen as a primary value that he brought to Boston two weeks ago.

To reporters beforehand, and during the speech. Clark was somewhat patient, somewhat ironical: now fingering a Marlboro, now complaining of the television light. An old warrior returned.

At times, however, the civil rights veteran hit an angry note, saying, "If I was running this event. I wouldn't invite me. I'd invite someone who planned to make the American people feel better about what they're doing to their children." And Clark spoke disparagingly of Northern efforts to desegregate, saying they have been confined to technical discussions of affirmative action numbers and special programs to push a "special chance" on Black children, not meaningful efforts to think in terms of the educational value of diversity.

"Diversity is as necessary as vaccinations," he said, adding, "We don't let Jehovah's Witnesses avoid vaccinations and the same should hold for diversity. Unfortunately, students in America have to wait until they take anthropology to realize that the world is not made up of middle-class, white Americans. The stark fact is that two-thirds of the world is non-white." And Clark said he had come North to try and raise interest in the question of how to use diversity. "I do not believe," he said, "that the North has faced up to the challenge of desegregation. What happens with a desegregated school? Laissez-Faire? How do you use diversity?"

Clark spoke briefly on the question that is now being asked by Harvard Black education, the question of the Black students' need for Black teachers. He spoke of his own education; his teachers had been the likes of W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Burche and others--educators, whom, he noted ironically, were never hired by other institutions when they were in their prime. "Harvard," he said, "sort of led the way in terms of diversity of the student body, but what happened with hiring?" Educational institutions are places where you expect human beings to have their perspectives broadened. A university that does not by its image reflect the fact of diversity will have a hard time affecting reality.

"But of course," he added, "Harvard has to balance that image with an image of elitism." Harvard did not offer appointments to himself, Bunche and DuBois, among others, until it was too late.

In some ways, Clark's vision appeared simplistic. Separatism of all kinds was anathema to Clark; he viewed all separatist movements as racism, and racism as "ignorant superstition." His vision only included desegregation and the affirmation of the importance of diversity--he had no tactics planned. When asked what he wanted educators to do. Clark answered in a tired voice, "I don't know, that's why I'm here."

Yet Clark praised publicizing the issues unequivocally. On Jesse Jackson, Clark remarked, "obviously a Black who does not know his place; he has been very effective in projecting civil rights into a new arena." A theorist by trade, he praised Thurgood Marshall's dictum quoting that judge as saying "'We must use racism to combat racism.' If white children are considered more important than Black children by their communities, [we should] expose them to the real world, to the real community.

LIKE CLARK, the other speakers pledged to continue the good fight, Mayor Flynn, now favored by many of the group despite a past opposition to busing, opened his talk by quipping, "I know that many of you probably supported another candidate for mayor, William Bulger." But Flynn went on to stress the seriousness of the struggle still to be continued. Dr. M. Robert Coles '50, professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities, once a student of sorts to Clark himself--much of his research on Children of Crisis was made possible by Clark's knowledge--spoke about a Black child who had integrated a Southern school virtually on her own. And although there was disagreement in the audience about which one of the two principal speakers had rambled and which one was right on the mark, each received standing ovations--Clark's with the special fervor due a hero.

One left the event with more than theories, more than the effete guilt-ridden, liberalism that followed Birmingham and preceded busing. Guilt comes too cheaply when there is work left to be done--not marches, but the still harder work of integrating truth into a society that has never been good at learning is quickly. And gathered with the determined group of activists seemed to be an almost historic sense of hope and common purpose; it seemed clear that though these people had a fight on their hands, they were determined not to let America return to superstition.