For me, one crucial moment on the path of a more or less nationalist politics came while T was watching a black program that had been pro- duced by students at Howarcl. In the film, a student, happily dating a white co-ed, comes to see the error of his ways after a campus visit by Maulana Ron Karenga. Karenga was brown bald head, African robes, dark sunglasses. Of course T knew what an Uncle Tom was, but even Uncle Tom was still part of the extended family. No one ever talked about banishing him from the tribe before this but this was a new day.
Systematic repression has a curious way of hampering the evolution of a movement.
Dr. King was killed. People like Huey Newton were imprisoned. People as unlike as Elijah Mohammed and Vernon Jordan, Jesse Jackson, and my new compatriots at Yale were being invited to integrate a newly expanded American upper middle class. Somehow, in the late sixties, in the aftermath of the King assassina- tion, what was held to be authentically black began to change. We wanted to be real, to be down with the people to be successful, yes, but to be black at the same time.