Other states, other lives, other souls

Thanks to today’s internet of all things and Google’s ability to sort through billions of key words, it’s possible to follow the life of a person known only in one’s youth to the end of their natural life. That is, provided the person is had enough achievements worth recording in print, and eventually, digitally.  It results in a kind of digital travel through time and a DIY biography.

On our most recent quick trip away from endless winter to the southwest desert early this spring, I stumbled onto the life story of someone I knew back when I was 20.  Now that I am 77 and married to a wonderful man for 40 odd years, we often find ourselves at meals either reminiscing or searching for information from Google to answer questions that come up in conversation.  This time, while eating a mediocre dinner at a Las Vegas hotel and casino, we wandered conversationally from our love of Sweet Honey in the Rock to the SNCC leader James Forman, and then to the time in 1966 when I joined other college students to help MLK and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the Fair Housing Campaign in Chicago.  One of the young Chicago SCLC leaders involved in the campaign caught my attention and my eye.  He was a handsome, enthusiastic march leader. I saw him for about a month in the summer at weekend rallies and a march in Marquette Park, a “white ethnic” neighborhood notorious for segregated housing, vicious racism and neo-Nazi organizing. I was mesmerized. He had a catchy name that was easy to remember, and he seemed to me to be bound for glory. I have left out his name, which the reader will understand later.

Sometime after Google’s search engine was launched in 1998, I put in his name to see what had happened to him. After attending Antioch College, an innovative self-study program, he moved to the African continent and attended the university of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania. Well, that was a coincidence, because I had applied to the Peace Corps to go to Tanzania in 1969. I suppose we were both fans of the anti-colonial leader and president Julius Nyerere. He got there, but I didn’t, because Nyerere threw the Peace Corps out of the country that year and for the next decade.

This was what had happened to him in the next 30 years:

In 1970 he worked for the American Committee on Africa where he organized anti- apartheid groups in the Midwest. In 1978 he was named director of the Africa Project at the Institute of Policy Studies, Washington, D.C. and in 1979, became the program director and research secretary at the World Council of Churches, Geneva, Switzerland.

In 1986, … returned to Chicago to continue his work as a labor organizer. In 1986, then Chicago mayor Harold Washington named him as a special aide and in 1987, the Mozambique government appointed him consultant to represent the country and its interests in the United States, Canada, and Europe, remaining in the post until 1992. In 1993, he served as the senior program officer with the Program on Peace and International Cooperation with the MacArthur Foundation, a position he held until 1996. (Source: Explore Chicago Collections)

Pretty impressive, no?

That was the last time I checked in on his trajectory until March, 2023. During his next thirty years there were dozens of laudatory pieces by various schools and universities, interviews, and biographies.  Suddenly in 2022 there appeared a MeToo moment: a Change.org petition demanding that he be fired from his faculty position, for “harassment, misconduct, and sexually explicit language”. Then any references to it disappeared from Google.  What’s a feminist like me to think?  I ask my readers:  what is your first thought?  Second thoughts?  Here are mine:

1. If allegations are true, does a lifetime of achievement in human rights mean nothing if in one’s dotage, a man takes advantage of his status?
2. Should the unspecified charges necessarily lead to the academic death penalty? The man is revered by many students, if not most.
3. I would not trust Change.org as a reliable source, as I have seen over the years that they do not vet the accuracy of the charges in petitions. Anyone can go after someone. Anyone who doubts that should read The Circle, by Dave Eggers.
4. I feel sad that, if true, such behavior tends to appear often in old men, whose minds and judgments get cloudier and moral constraints loosen. The man is 79 years old.  Maybe it’s time to be counseled out of employment and into a well-earned retirement.
5. It appears that the university reviewed the charges and found they did not violate its Title IX policy. It appears that the man was given a temporary leave, without explanation, due to privacy in personnel actions.
6. Since the alleged victims did not get what they wanted, they were free to up the ante and publicly defame this man via Change.org.
7. Are a few women’s charges of abuse always correct?  In my youth (the 80s) I worked both in the battered women’s movement and child sexual abuse prevention.  At the time, the mantras were that “women never lie” and “children never lie.”  That was later found not to be true, for a number of reasons.  My answer to #7 is still no.  I do not even trust my own perceptions and labels of offense without some triangulation and examination of my assignments of intention. None of us is completely objective or blameless without some investigation. Any white woman who does not know the sad history of false claims of rape by white women against black men in the south during Jim Crow and the horrific results, should read and learn.

So began and ended a light-hearted exploration of a former colleague’s trajectory through life on an otherwise simple little winter getaway.