Mark Naison: How a white boy came to study black history

Historian Mark Naison is Professor of African and African-American Studies and Director of the Urban Studies Program at Fordham University. He is the author of White Boy: A Memoir (Temple University Press, 2002), Communists in Harlem During the Depression (University of Illinois Press, 1983), co-author of The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1940-1984 (Rutgers University Press, 1986), and the author of several articles on African-American culture and contemporary urban issues, including"Outlaw Culture in Black Culture" (Reconstruction, Fall 1994). His study of Buffalo's African-American community appeared in the Urban League's anthology, African-Americans and the Rise of Buffalo's Post-Industrial City (1990) and he was one of the historians asked to contribute his story to Historians and Race: Autobiography and the Writing of History (1996). He is now working on a major study of the history of African-Americans in the Bronx, in collaboration with the Bronx Historical Society.

Besides being a dedicated teacher and scholar, Naison is a community activist, and very much involved in various interracial youth organizations. He is a founder of the Bronx Youth Employment Project,"Save a Generation," and an organizer and fund-raiser for the Bonnie Youth Club, the largest sand-lot baseball league in Brooklyn and the only one that is predominantly African-American.

In the Fall of 2002, I sat down with Naison and interviewed him about his life and career, and the relationship between his activism and his scholarship.

Gerald Zahavi: Mark, it's a pleasure to have you here.

Mark Naison: I am very glad to be here.

Zahavi: Well, let's start by being provocative. How did a 'white boy' like you ever get so involved with the study of African American culture and history?

Naison: I grew up in Crown Heights in the 1950's at the time that it was undergoing a very dramatic change in its racial composition, a change which really polarized the community. I grew up in the early 50's when there wasn't a visible race problem Crown Heights was a Jewish and Italian community. Perhaps one and two percent of the population was Black and the Jewish population, at least on the surface, was very racially tolerant. They welcomed the Jackie Robinson Dodgers. Racial epithets were not used in my presence. When people were talking about Blacks they used the term"Shvartza"; they actually went into Yiddish. I was there when integrated sports were capturing the imagination of the neighborhood. I was there when rock and roll was doing the same. But then, by the time I entered High School, the neighborhood became very tense. I went to a local high school which had about twenty percent of its students African American, many of them coming down by bus from Bedford Stuyvesant. There were fights outside the school; there were fights in the school. I got in a locker room fight with six black kids. It led me being knocked out cold. I ended up going to a school out of the district, and my parents who had not talked about race very much when I was eight, or nine, or ten--by the time I was thirteen or fourteen-- [were] becoming very visibly angry about the changing racial composition of the neighborhood and their anger came to a head for the first time when I was in High school and decided to participate in my first civil rights demonstration which was being organized by the Erasmus Hall High school Chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, which was joining Brooklyn CORE in picketing Ebinger's Bakery. This bakery chain refused to hire African Americans as truck drivers or [have] people working in the stores, even though many of their stores were being located in Black neighborhood. And when I went to this demonstration my parents hit the ceiling and said one, that I can get in trouble for going to a demonstration because in their era people lost lost their jobs because of this, but two, I should'nt be doing something to help black people; I should be doing something to help the Jews if I wanted to help somebody. It was clear that they saw African Americans as a treat to their neighborhood, their security -- in ways that upset me. So, when I went to college I also became involved in the chapter of CORE at Columbia. [I] was watching with great concern and dismay at the violence that greeted civil rights demonstrators in the South. [I] also was disturbed at how race played itself out in the Columbia campus. There were some Southern students at Columbia who were openly racist. Columbia itself had this very contemptuous attitude toward Harlem, had also displaced many people of color from the neighborhood. And so, I looked around me and saw an extension of the racial issues that I was seeing in my own neighborhood which seemed to really divide people, and of course was now dividing the whole country. So when I started taking history classes in American History, I decided to do my research papers on subjects relating to race. The first big research paper I did was on the disfranchisement of the Negro in Alabama in the early 20th century, when the Alabama Constitutional Convention was debating whether to overturn the Reconstruction actions which had placed African Americans in positions as voters and as office holders and basically eliminate them from politics and establish a formal segregation code. So that was my first research venture into the study of race and it was a fascinating experience. I loved going back into the past. It was, I think 1903, and I was living this. I was at the convention, and the issues seemed so alive to me that I said"well, this is the kind of history I wanted to do." And I got some encouragement from this. I mean, this was a time at Columbia there were no courses in African American History. I don't ever recall reading a book by an African American author, but I had professors who encouraged this interest, particularly Walter Metzger who really, you know, every time I took a course with him and wanted to do this kind of research, he encouraged it. So I was moving in this direction, based upon my experience in Brooklyn, based upon what I was seeing and experiencing at Columbia, based upon what I was watching in the news, but the thing that really pushed me into this was what happened to me when I was a senior at Columbia and I met an African American woman at a basketball team party at Columbia. We started dating and then I fell in love with her. When I told my parents, they reacted with a level of hysteria that just blew me away. They had no interest in this young woman's background, character, personality, accomplishments; just the fact that she was Black meant that they would have nothing to do with her. They basically told me she could never be part of our family, and they would see me but never with her, and basically said that I was destroying everything that they had worked for in their lives. Now this experience (and parenthetically I was adopted by her extended family of transplanted Southerners), that experience made me feel that race was the overwhelming issue in American society , that we as a nation was unable to deal with not only at the level of politics but at the level of folk culture mores. And as an intellectual, if I was going to do anything to make a difference it was to find the language, find the images, to try to understand the force of this in people's lives. So I said I've got a subject that will keep me busy for a lifetime. I mean I wish I didn't have the momentum and drive for this interest coming from this experience, but it did and it's something that's never left me. ...