Why We Must be Vigilant Against the Dangers of Historical Amnesia

It is not every day that you get a chance to reflect on where The New School stood during historical struggles for justice, but today is not like most days. This week, an exhibit called VOICES OF CRISIS: The American Race Crisis Lectures, The New School, 1964 opens in the Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries at Parsons, where many archival documents will be on display: audio and transcripts from many talks, pictures, media and press coverage, and some of the behind-the-scenes politics that influenced the events. The materials in this exhibit are a treasure trove for anyone teaching or learning about the 1960s.

 

This series of f15 talks featured many leading voices of the civil rights movement and covered topics from housing and poverty, to school desegregation and black nationalism. They included names like James Farmer, John O. Killens, Bayard Rustin, Louis Lomax, Ossie Davis and Roy Wilkins. Together, they offer a fascinating glimpse into the political history of The New School. Yet, this history was almost lost, filed away on paper or reel-to-reel tapes in our archives.

 

The archive is like a ghost of New School past that has returned to haunt us, bringing with it 50 years of repressed memories. As an educator and committed social justice activist, I encourage you to go and learn from, and about, our past. While the lectures took place 50 years ago, the issues are still relevant today—racial injustice, urban poverty, the crisis of education and police brutality.

Sadly, my experience as a college educator is that the civil rights struggle has been boiled down to “I Have A Dream” and not much else. These archives offer a chance for students to learn from our past struggles. They also provide educators a valuable resource to critically examine and explore, as they are a window into this tumultuous period of history. (Remember, this took place before the Civil Rights or Voting Rights Acts.) But, perhaps most importantly, the archive is a space for civil rights activists, and especially Blacks, to speak for themselves, rather than having an outsider tell their story. These archives are a valuable resource to anyone interested in civil rights scholarship and research.

Consider the following lines from John Killens’ talk “Black Man’s Burden,” which he gave on March 12, 1964. After defending Malcolm X and militant Black politics, he turned to the wider context of the civil rights struggle in the spring of 1964. “The tide of freedom is sweeping across the whole world, from Mississippi to Johannesburg, and we must take the current when it serves or lose our ventures. The important question that faces the country is not what are we gonna do about our downtrodden colored people. The question is—can we awake our country and bring her into the middle of the 20th century…This is the century when color prejudice and color privilege will be outmoded. This is the freedom century.”

 

Next month will be 50 years since Killens’ call for a “freedom century.” While recovering past struggles through archives like this will not by itself achieve racial justice, revisiting these historical documents have immense educational and political value. The civil rights struggle of 50 years ago was about education as much as it was about liberation—the two are intertwined. The more informed we become, the more we understand the true price of freedom.

 

Here is the challenge that Killens left us with fifty years ago when he spoke on campus: “As we fight the physically segregated institutions of America, we must wage this revolution to desegregate the textbooks, the history books, the literature, the minds of the American people…The Racial Crisis at The New School, this program at The New School, is a contribution in this direction. And now at this historical moment, we must call upon the white artist, writers, educators who love their country, the institutions, to join the revolution to unbrainwash the American people.”

 

Looking back at fifty years of New School history in these archives, I find myself wondering: Have we lived up to the challenge of joining the revolution, or are we still suffering from historical amnesia? To answer that question, we need to look at what we teach, how we teach, and who we teach.

 

Chris Crews is a PhD student in Politics at the New School for Social Research. He is also the student co-chair of the university Social Justice Committee.