1/16/47

Dear Langston Hughes:
This is the sort of gesture which makes a person great. I just want you to know that I appreciate its simple truth and humility. If you're ever in new York give me a ring for lunch. Pauli m.

At long last I am on Broadway
with a bang. How does it feel? Swell.
To what do I owe it? The answer is
very simple—owe it to the people like
you who are reading this column now.
I owe it to all the readers of my books
over a long period of years, and to all
those who have bought and read my
poems or have come out to hear me
read them in public. I owe it to the
thousands of wonderful fan letters
readers have written me. You are the
people who kept me from giving up
writing altogether during those fre-
quent (and many) weeks and months
when I wondered where the rent was
coming from.

2

CHARLES L. KELLAR

COUNSELOR AT LAW
1660 FULTON STREET
BROOKLYN 13, N. Y.
---
PRESIDENT 4-0471

COURTENAY L. WILTSHIRE, JR.
ASSOCIATE

Home Address:

388 Chauncey Street
Brooklyn 33, N. Y.

February 17, 1948

Mr. Langston Hughes
C/o Common Ground
20 W. 40 Street
New York City

Dear Langston:

I read recently in the local press that you are
working on an anthology of Negro poetry for early publica-
tion by Doubleday Doran.

It occurred to me that you might like to look over
"Dark Testament" in its completed form, which I once sent
to you for comment. I'm too close to it to be objective
about it, but William Rose Benet and Mrs. Leonora Speyer
both liked it tremendously and thought it deserved publica-
tion in a volume.

I'm therefore submitting it to you for your consider-
ation. If you like it and decide you can use it, I will be
glad to send you one or two of my shorter things for variety's
sake.

Let me have your reaction. It's too bad all our
contact must be by letters and notes. Why don't you get in
touch with me sometime and lets have a chat?

February 21, 1948

Dear Pauli:

How nice to hear from you, and thank you very much
for sending me a copy of your poem, DARK TESTAMENT,
which I have always liked.

I am afraid that it is too long for our anthology, but
nevertheless, I am sending it along to Arna Bontemps,
Fisk University Library, Fisk University, Nashville 3,
Tennessee. Would you be willing to permit only a por-
tion of it to be used in case he should wish to do so?
If so, please write him to that effect, and also send
to him directly two or three of your shorter things, as
he is the final editor for the American section, and I
am in charge of the West Indian section we are having.

Also, another reason for sending the material to him is
that this is the very middle of my lecture season. I
am just in town for the day from a southern trip as far
down as Florida, and am leaving tomorrow for a Middle
Western trip, and in about two weeks I go to the Coast
to be gone until late spring. If you are here this sum-
mer, I hope that I shall have the pleasure of seeing
you. It has been a long time since we met.

All my good wishes to you.

Sincerely,

Miss Pauli Murray
388 Chauncey Street
Brooklyn 35, N. Y.

PAULI MURRAY

COUNSELOR AT LAW
SIX MAIDEN LANE
NEW YORK 7, N. Y.

RECTOR 2-3916

June 23, 1949

Dear Langston:

I had hoped to type the inclosed poems so that you
would have fresh copy, but life is so complicated
I just can't get to it..

I send you two poems from a cycle called "No Greener
Spring"; the first poem of the cycle was "Without Name"
which you published in your anthology. In addition, there
is a cycle called "Memo in Bronze" containing five poems,
and poems entitled, "Time," "Paradox", "Ruth" and "To
Poets Who Have Rebelled."

You may select and edit in any way you see fit. These
are from my manuscript and I doubt whether I have copies
of them so I know you'll take care of them and see that
they get back safely.

Thanks so much for inviting me to contribute to VOICES.
I hope some of these will make the grade.

Mr. Langston Hughes
20 E. 127th Street
New York 35, New York

June 24, 1949

Miss Pauli Murray
Six Maiden Lane
New York 7, New York

Dear Miss Murray:

Langston Hughes has asked me to thank you for so promptly submitting some of your poems for his consideration for the special issue of *VOICES*, A Quarterly of Poetry, which, as you know, is to be published in the fall.

He is holding for further consideration the poems:

* PARADOX
* TIME
* TO POETS WHO HAVE REBELLED

He is herein returning to you your other manuscripts in case you might wish to submit them elsewhere.

NVWs
Enclosures

June 10, 1954

Dear Pauli:

I was certainly to miss finding you at Lincoln,
but I did not get back to the Guest House until
3:00 A.M., when I saw your note lying on the
table. And by the time I got up the next day
and went around to the old Guest House looking
for you, they said you had gone.

After the Commencement and Reception, a young
lady told me that you were in the house. But
with all the confusion, I never got to locate
you there either. But Dr. Bond told me about
the very excellent book which you are doing,
and showed me some of the maps and material
which he has in his office.

I certainly hope that I will have the pleasure
of seeing you sometime soon. Meanwhile, all
good wishes to you as ever.

Miss Pauli Murray

October 20, 1956

Dear Pauli,

I love your book, as you can see from my enclosed DEFENDER column due out week after next.

With so many colored life stories coming out this fall, I thought it might be fun to have a combined autographing party, and Mr. Michaux has answered the enclosed letter in the affirmative, the date probably to be in late November, or maybe a bit earlier to fit in as many authors as possible. Billy Holiday and Marian Anderson, it seems, will be out, but Henry Armstrong may be in town, so there'd be five of us. How does the idea strike you, and would you participate? Let me know.

Miss Lawrence was kind enough to give me your phone numbers some days ago, but I can't catch you in, so I drop this note instead.

It would certainly be nice to see you again. I'm delighted with the reviews of your book so far, and wish you the best of luck with it.

Cordial regards, as ever,

Thanksgiving Day

Dear Langston:

I haven't had a chance to tell you what a thoughtful idea the Autographing Party was and how much I appreciated it. Meanwhile, my "I Wonder as I Wander" never turned up, nor has your publisher sent me the autographed copy as promised. Will you take care of this before you go off to California (I'm pinch hitting for you at an NAACP meeting on Dec. 9th because you will be out of town?)

Just mailed in my order for Pictorial History of the Negro in America. The flyer looks very impressive.

Much warm greetings, and you can reach me during business hours at Murray Hill 8-5600.

575 MADISON AVENUE
(12TH FLOOR)
NEW YORK 22, N.Y.

May 22, 1959

Dear Langston:

I am transmitting a manuscript entitled "A Tale of Friendship in Rime" which was handed by the author to Mrs. Daisy Bates of Little Rock. The author was very anxious to have her read it and tell him whether or not it was publishable. Mrs. Bates, feeling that she had no critical competence in matters of poetry, asked me if I would forward the manuscript to you and prevail upon you to glance through it and give the author the benefit of your comments.

This is one time that I am retreating behind my legal fortress, because I do not think the material contained in the manuscript lends itself to poetry.

However, since, obviously, Mr. Poncelli spent many hours of labor on his manuscript, please write him and make some suggestions.

Sorry to burden you with this, but I know you won't mind seriously.

You will be pleased to know that I got three poems accepted recently, to appear in a coming issue of VOICES.

Mr. Langston Hughes
20 East 127th Street
New York 35, N.Y.

PAUL, WEISS, RIFKIND, WHARTON & GARRISON

575 MADISON AVENUE, NEW YORK 22, N.Y.

MURRAY HILL 8-5600

CABLE: LONGSIGHT, N.Y.

IN WASHINGTON, D.C.
STEVENSON, PAUL, RIFKIND,
WHARTON & GARRISON
1614 EYE STREET, N.W.

IN CHICAGO
STEVENSON, RIFKIND & WIRTZ
135 SOUTH LA SALLE STREET

December 11, 1959

Dear Langston:

In response to your further request, I enclose three stages of revision of a poem called *Psalm of Deliverance*, inspired by the Poplarville Lynching. You may be interested to see how the poem developed. The first draft was written in the Depression days back in 1937 while I was on WPA. The second draft was written at MacDowell Colony. The third draft was a revision after returning to New York. The poem is still incomplete and has not yet been submitted for publication.

In connection with your project to send books to Ghana, perhaps you could be helpful in one which Lloyd K. Garrison and I have in mind. The Ghana School of Law has very little material on American legal institutions. Its English textbooks are also limited. Mr. J.H.A. Lang, Principal of the School of Law and Director of Legal Education in Ghana, the man under whom I will be working, has written me "Any legal material about American law would be most welcome."

Accordingly, Mr. Garrison and I have discussed the possibility of having American law firms and law schools contribute materials for the stockpiling of the law library of the law school in Ghana. We have felt that we should enlist the support of a tax-exempt organization in handling the shipment of such books.

Would this be the kind of project your Committee could undertake in addition to the one you're already doing? If not, could you make some suggestions which we might follow through on. Mr. Garrison is very harried around this time of the year, so I'd appreciate your getting in touch with me by telephone or note as promptly as possible. I can then do the leg work on the project before I go. It's hard to catch me, but you can try me at home (GL 3-9468) or leave a message for me and a telephone number to call with Mrs. Fries of my office.

Let me hear from you.

On April 17, 1960, I was a brand new 17.

Yale Law School
New Haven, Conn.

July 10, 1962

Hello Langston -

When are you and what are you doing? We seemed to have just missed one another in Nigeria. Drop me a card or a note in enclosed envelope.

NOTE:

This letter combines a travelogue and progress report to my family and friends with an appeal for financial aid in an emergency. If you are rushed, read Part III first!

I

My affectionate greetings and apologies to all of you who have not heard from me since the last letter from Ghana of May 15, 1960. The Round Robins were discontinued, partly because of the international crisis involving the Congo and its repercussions in Ghana which made resident Americans there more tight-lipped than formerly, and partly because of the efforts which went into developing materials for the first course in Constitutional and Administrative Law to be taught at the newly-established Ghana School of Law and pressure of deadlines for publication of the first textbook in the new series, Law in Africa. [See Rubin & Murray, *The Constitution and Government of Government of Ghana; Law in Africa*, Number 1; London: Sweet & Maxwell, Ltd., 1961; $7.00.] My co-author, Dr. Leslie Rubin, formerly of South Africa now teaching law in Dublin, will be Professor of Government at Howard University as of September, 1962.

I returned to the United States in the summer of 1961, having given notice of resignation from my post as Senior Lecturer in the Ghana School of Law. The decision not to return to Ghana at the end of summer leave was motivated, among other things, by having had several attacks of

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malaria which I seemed unable to throw off and by having received a
Graduate Fellowship to study at Yale Law School in 1961-62. My year of
graduate residence at Yale has just been completed and I am now working
on my thesis for the J.S.D. (Doctor of the Science of Jurisprudence)
degree.

In addition to the Yale Fellowship which continues for the next school
year, two very exciting appointments have come my way. The first, a
voluntary post, is membership on the Political and Civil Rights committee
of the President's Commission on the Status of Women. Those of you who
recall earlier skirmishes with "Jane Crow" can appreciate the significance
of this appointment to me. The second, a staff position, is that I will be a
Tutor of Law at Yale for the school year 1962-63 while continuing graduate
research. As Aunt Sallie (of Proud Shoes) would have said, I am as ex-
cited about all this as "a puppy with two tails."

Smokey, my Shelty who is now almost eleven years old, and I have
settled into a "space capsule" at 11 Dixwell Avenue, New Haven, in a
small integrated apartment house conveniently located only five minutes
from the law school, next door to the Yale athletic club and Gym where a
member of the Yale family can go swimming on weekday afternoons during
most of the summer, over a bar and grill, and overlooking two all-night
filling stations athwart the busiest six-street intersection of New Haven.
The apartment is called a space capsule because, it was necessary to stuff
the personal effects of six large rooms in Ghana into two small rooms.
The capsule combines the equipment of a law office, library, recreation
room, kitchen, bath and master bedroom in the space allotment of a thirty-
foot boat.

My experiences in Ghana contributed heavily to addiction to the do-
-it-yourself craze. With the aid of various friends, some tools, a few cans
of paint and much elbow grease, we have turned a rather drab establish-
ment into a cheerful nook. Ghana materials have added to its efficiency.
The uncured mahoghany packing cases used to ship my belongings back to
the United States were taken apart and are now thirty bookshelves on metal
wall strips and brackets. (I will not go into the horrendous details of the
many holes we made in the plaster until we found the studs to which we
could fasten the metal strips!) The desk doubles as dining room table,
and one can now entertain as many as a dozen people so long as they stand
up close together. These efforts have produced a new slogan to replace
the long outmoded phrase which has always irritated me. The new one is
more universal: "Be a credit to your space!"

Smokey weathered the Ghana heat in stride and developed no com-
plexes more serious than ferocious barking at Africans in flowing robes
who walked the roads, at motorcycle policemen (President Nkrumah's
escort included about two dozen) and toll bridge officials. When I cut his

hair short to relieve him from the heat and ticks, he promptly contracted
pneumonia, so I learned not to tamper with his insulation system. Here
in the capsule, he selected as his private "office" the corner of the library
used for my graduate research, so I have now had to build more book-
shelves to prevent further jurisdictional disputes. Although he screams
when the telephone rings and I have had to install a chime instead of a bell,
from the looks of some of my long distance telephone bills I suspect him of
using the phone surreptitiously when I am not at home.

Those of you who visited me in Ghana will recall the strato-blue
English-model Karmann-Ghia VW which had the happy faculty of landing in
all the drain ditches and carrying many long-legged and ample visitors (plus
their luggage) in the emergency seat. They usually needed a can opener to
get in and out! The mistaken notion that for $100 one could get the steering
gear moved from right to left for motoring in the United States led me to
bring the car home. The cost of conversion, however, proved prohibitive,
and so the Karmann Ghia now has a blue-and-white "Caution" sign to match
its Connecticut plates perched on its rear like a lady's bustle. Having ob-
served the burdens and skills of African women, it wears a luggage rack on
its brow to transport desks, tables, typewriters, boats or any other truck-
ing; and a converted hamburger outdoor grill attached to a two-foot ruler
(a cross between a spade and a long-handled collection plate) has solved the
problem of paying tolls from the wrong seat. Toll officials on bridges and
parkways are startled, then amused, by the home-made, black-taped me-
chanical arm which passes out the money from what appears to be a driver-
less car. The "bug" in this new invention, of course, is that it cannot pick
up money from a check cashed at the drive-in window of my bank.

II

In retrospect, my eighteen months in Ghana were exciting, astringent,
challenging and rewarding: exciting, because we were close to many of the
traumatic events of an awakening, volcanic continent; astringent, because I
had never lived outside of the United States and was unprepared for the blow-
hot, blow-cold, mercurial political stance toward my country and the some-
times calculated rudeness toward American diplomatic officials and repre-
sentatives; challenging, because it put every intellectual, technical and
spiritual resource I possessed to rigorous test; rewarding, because I was
part of what I believe will become a great pioneering effort on the part of the
United States and its nationals to assist in the development of the emergent
African countries.

Accra, Ghana, was a crossroads: a gateway to Africa South of the
Sahara; the nerve center of African nationalism, and it reflected every
tremor on the continent. It had the attributes of a capital city -- rumors,
counter-rumors, and intense politics - and the intimacies of a small town.

As a member of the American Colony, one rubbed shoulders with most of
the distinguished American visitors who passed through. Meeting Amer-
icans from all walks of life and seeing them depart at the airport was a
favorite pastime, taking the place of baseball for the American expatri-
ates.

International crises became part of personal experience. For ex-
ample, I was in Leopoldville on government business five days before
Independence in 1960; watched the attempts to form a new government,
talked with the medical missionary who later flew out so many refugees,
saw the crisis in the making without having the language facility or knowl-
edge to pinpoint it; and flew out on one of the Europe-bound Belgian planes
overloaded with fleeing mothers and hysterical small children and babies.
My seatmate, an American missionary from Angola returning home on
leave and I were the only English-speaking passengers. My good friend,
Connie Stone, USIA Regional Librarian for West Africa, seemed fated to
bump into a crisis everytime she made a field trip. She landed in Leopold-
ville one night and had to be evacuated almost the next day, or as soon as
the U.S. military planes could set down. She arrived in Nigeria shortly
before the disturbances following Lumumba's death which resulted in the
stoning of the new USIA building in Lagos.

When the airlift of UN troops to the Congo began, I could stand in my
yard and watch the huge USAF globemasters, barely airborne, lumber over
my house and turn southward over the Guinea Gulf. When the late Dag
Hammarskjold made the first jet trip to Accra (in a plane furnished by
President Eisenhower), a stopover for refueling and talk with President
Nkrumah on his way to the Congo crisis, we watched the plane come in for
a landing on the unfinished jet strip. It stopped twenty feet from the end
of the runway.

When Mr. Hammarskjold cut short his mission to the Union of South
Africa in January, 1961 to return to UN headquarters because of the Lu-
mumba crisis, the Pan American jet which carried him and his aide (who
was later killed with him in the plane crash) stopped at Accra to take on
such passengers as Judge William H. Hastie who had lectured to my law
classes and the local Bar Association and Dr. Horace Mann Bond, member
of the international commission on the University of Ghana. While the
plane was on the runway revving up for the takeoff, the most violent elec-
trical tropical storm I have ever witnessed broke suddenly over us and
raged for more than an hour. That storm has symbolized for me the
closing months of Dag Hammarskjold's life. A Ghanaian said of it, "The
Gods are angry!"

Several days after the Ethiopian uprising took place, Elsie Austin,
a friend of USIA in Lagos, Nigeria, who had been attending a woman's
conference in Addis Ababa, landed in Accra because of a fog over Lagos,

carrying in her purse two deadly bullets which had lodged in the wall of her hotel bedroom while she lay flat on the floor during much of the battle. For a while during my early days in Accra, Michael Scott, the ascetic English priest who led a band of war resisters to the edge of the Sahara desert to protest the French testing of nuclear bombs, was my next door neighbor.

Then, of course, Accra was the site of many international projects and conferences, and usually one came in contact with the delegates or attended the public meetings and felt the "winds of change" first-hand. With such cross currents and indirect involvement with international crises as a steady diet, one looked out over the Atlantic thinking of the United States with nostalgia as a really loveable elderly, humorous, relaxed Uncle Sam - until one was jolted by such things as Kruschev's visit to UN, the overturning of the Freedom Riders bus or the U-2 incident.

For a change of pace and climate, I spent my 1961 spring vacation in Europe, flying to Holland to meet my friends, Gardiner Means and Caroline Ware, husband-wife team returning from a lecture tour of Yugoslavia. My reaction to Europe after thirteen months in homogeneous West Africa, if looked at in the mass, is interesting. Aside from a re-union with the north temperate zone in the spring, the pink faces of Europeans made me feel as if I were coming home. I realized how bound we are to our own cultures even when we are unaware of it and how ac-customed are Americans to a heterogeneous population.

Traveling with Dr. and Mrs. Means is like taking a graduate seminar in the humanities on the hoof, an unrehearsed busman's holiday in which business and pleasure are blended with the magic of split-second timing. Although we didn't do "Europe on Five Dollars a Day" as my former colleague, Art Frommer, suggests, I did tour The Hague, Amsterdam, a bit of the Netherlands countryside, London, the Midlands, Shakespeare country, the Downs and cliffs of Southern England (this with Helen Lockwood, retired from Vassar), Paris and Rome.

I was privileged to meet Professor and Mrs. J. M. Romein in Holland. Professor Romein is Dr. Ware's colleague in the twentieth century volume of the UNESCO history, *The Scientific and Cultural Development of Mankind*. Mrs. Romein was the one to whom the finder of Anne Frank's diary came for advice and who had some hand in bringing it to public attention.

My arrival at The Hague as weekend guest of the Jessups permitted me to meet a number of the justices of the International Court of Justice and their wives, to visit the International Flower Festival with Lois Jessup, to witness the swearing in of Philip Jessup as American judge on the court, to be a little fly on the wall and hear Dean Acheson give a delightful account of his visit to Chancellor Adenauer, and to hear the opening jurisdictional

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arguments of the litigation between Cambodia and Thailand in their dispute over ownership of an ancient temple. It is interesting to compare the formal dress of international lawyers before that tribunal. The American counsel for the respective litigants, Dean Acheson and James Hyde, wore tails and striped pants. The French advocates wore elaborate red robes with little white jabots at the neck and throat. The English barristers wore their traditional black robes and little blond wigs. The ICJ justices wore black gowns with lovely white jabots.

Riding along the Dutch countryside and seeing the traditional windmills was great fun, as were the boat rides on the canals in Amsterdam and on the Thames and the Seine. In London, while Gardiner and Caroline caught up with her publisher and indexer, I delivered the first half of the manuscript of the Rubin and Murray textbook to Sweet & Maxwell and worked out the details of publication. We then did London in two days flat; such things as hearing a criminal appeal before the Lord Chief Justice's bench and seeing the remarkable feat of an oral judgment (opinion) rendered flawlessly from the bench within a few minutes of the close of the arguments and in impeccable Queen's English; of wandering through the Inns of Court and Temple Inn, walking unannounced into a lawyer's chambers which had some of the atmosphere of Dickens' England and having a chat; of happening at Buckingham Palace Gate at the precise moment of the changing of the Guard and getting a wonderful color shot of the red-coated Queen's Horse Guard; of seeing the Speaker's procession in the House of Commons; of sitting in the balcony reserved for members of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association in the House of Lords and witnessing the investiture of a new Peer, done with all the pageantry of British tradition which so fascinates all shirt-sleeved Americans.

Other highlights of my trip were: getting the one remaining ticket for Hamlet at the Shakespeare Royal Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon, visiting Warwickshire Castle and one of the Tudor manorial houses; walking through Westminster Abbey and standing on the tombs of some of the greatest writers of English literature; seeing the house Tom Paine lived in when he was in southern England; taking in the magnificent South African musical, King Kong, and the London theatre version of Three Blind Mice which has run for nine years and so cleverly done I did not recognize it until the closing moments of the play; being delighted to see so many women lawyers in the halls of the courthouse in Paris; having lunch in a wonderful little restaurant at the edge of Bois Woods; doing the historical spots of Paris with the aid of a Michelin Guide and Caroline Ware's fluency in French; walking into Notre Dame cathedral just as the monks were having mass; flying out of Orly airport a few hours before a bomb exploded there in the Algerian struggle; seeing the government workers of Paris on strike and the mobilization of the Paris police; standing at St. Peter's Tomb in Rome and wandering through the Colosseum thinking of the torture of the early Christians on that spot nearly two thousand years ago.

de Boulanger

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When I tell you that all of this happened in a spur-of-moment, two-week trip without advance reservations, you will appreciate what I meant by the magic of split-second timing.

III

My closing months in Ghana were full of bustle and excitement. Luckily, Keith Highet (Harvard Law School, 1960), on grant from The Maxwell School Asia-African Program, Syracuse University, joined me in early 1961, and carried the laboring oar of the Constitutional Law classes while I hurried to complete (with Leslie Rubin) the writing of the textbook. Before coming to Ghana, I was working with Lloyd K. Garrison on a project for a gift of law books to the library of the law school. The project materialized, a gift from an anonymous source to the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) made possible, with the technical assistance of Mrs. Edna Abeles, librarian at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the purchase and shipment of nearly two thousand volumes of carefully selected American legal texts and federal court reports. I looked forward to seeing the empty library shelves filled before my departure. Ironically, I never got to see the books on the shelves. They arrived by boat several days before I left, but the spring rainstorms had so battered the Ghana coast, shipping backed up. Unloading shipments in bad weather in Accra's surf harbor is a slow business; all unloading must be done by little canoes, each manned by a half-dozen oarsmen. So, the books were presented to the Ghana School of Law Library by the then U.S. Ambassador Francis Russell two weeks after I had returned to the United States.

I left Ghana June 22, 1961, with mixed emotions: relief to be coming home to my own culture, family and friends; anguish over the thought of the vast needs left behind and the sadness of some of my students to see me depart; apprehension over the political situation. The accumulated tradition of several generations of dedicated school teachers in my family warred with recognition of a need for further training and retooling on my part in an attempt to understand and cope with the complex world in which we now live.

Because of this latter need, the past year at Yale has been one of the most satisfying of an up-and-down, often hectic, career. It took sometime of course, to rub off the rust of absence from the academic world for many years. However, the stimulation of studying with some of the best legal minds of twenty-odd countries and of sitting under such scholars as Dean Eugene V. Rostow, Professors Myres S. MacDougal, F. S. C. Northrop, Telford Taylor, Thomas Emerson, Boris Bittker, Leon Lipson and others has made it a year of literally stretching one's mind on tiptoe. And, of course, my friend Fowler V. Harper, who, while in Ghana, encouraged me to come to Yale, has always been available for guidance and support.

In fact, it is as if my Guiding Star led me to Yale. I could not know
in early 1960, when I arrived in Ghana as the first American lawyer, so
far as I know, to teach law in one of the emergent Commonwealth African
countries - you might say an advance scout for the Peace Corps - that
within less than two years the leading American Law Schools would be
deeply involved in African legal education and that Yale would be one of the
foremost of these pioneers. Much credit for my going goes to Professor
Arthur E. Sutherland at Harvard Law School and Lloyd K. Garrison
(classmate of the late Charles Houston) who encouraged me to go and
helped pave the way. I enclose an excerpt from Yale Law Report - not
exactly an act of gratitude toward Harvard - telling a little of the story
and some of my experiences during my first term of teaching in Ghana.

There is much more to be told. Three of the students who received
their LL. M. degrees from Yale this year were from Sierra Leone, Ghana
and Nigeria respectively. Increasingly, African students of law are look-
ing toward the United States. The Peace Corps is developing a program
under which American lawyers will serve as assistants to governmental
officials and as teachers of law in emergent countries which request their
services. All of this has vast implications for the extension of the rule of
law and of constitutionalism.

During the coming year, I shall be assisting Miss Mary Ellen Cald-
well, Assistant Dean Charles Runyon and others in expanding the orienta-
tion program for foreign students. In addition, I will be giving tutorial
assistance to those foreign students who, in the opinion of their faculty
advisors, are having difficulties with the mechanics of writing their theses
because of language problems. This will be particularly relevant for
African and Asian students trained under the English tutorial system.
What we hope to achieve is the kind of custom-made program which will
cause our foreign visitors to look back upon Yale (and thus the United
States) as one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives. More-
over, the two-way program of gaining knowledge of and insights into the
cultures and objectives of other people by teaching law in the emergent
countries, and of returning to develop relevant library materials and
courses related to the problems which foreign students will face upon re-
turning to their own countries is an undertaking of major significance. I
am privileged to be part of it.

One finds that the challenge of Africa humbles us as individuals be-
cause, when our puny efforts are measured against the massive needs, we
know that the combined effect of American public and private assistance to
African countries amounts to little more than a ground-breaking and seed-
planting operation, leaving the harvest to future generations. The rewards
of working in Africa, however, are great: a deepening appreciation for the
richness of our own American heritage and the fact that its vitality comes
from the blending of many cultures and the whole spectrum of the family of

man; the personal satisfaction of being wholly, not partially, used in a
vast effort; the gratitude and devotion of African peoples when they are
made to feel that you are responsive to their passion for self-improve-
ment and respect their dignity as individuals.

Because of this challenge and the great works to be performed, those
of us who have lived, worked, and traveled in Africa find ourselves com-
mitted to do everything possible to open opportunities for further training
of young Africans who will shoulder the major responsibilities in their
countries during the next few decades. I am, therefore, unashamed to end
this report with a personal appeal. (How my good friend Maida Springer,
whose efforts on behalf of African students and leaders have inspired me,
will chortle with "I-told-you-so" glee when she reads this!)

Happily, three of my former students at the Ghana School of Law
have won fellowships for a year of special study at Harvard, Yale and
Northwestern respectively. Unhappily, the Northwestern fellowship did
not provide for transportation to the United States. The student involved,
Mr. Kwaku Baah, is in the frustrating position of having been granted a
fellowship here but having no funds to get here. Both he and I have written
letters to numerous agencies involved in African education and affairs with-
out success to date.

I wish I could tell you the story of Kwaku Baah whom I observed
closely for eighteen months, but it must await a more propitious time.
He was, among other things, my most devoted student assistant. To me
he symbolizes the courage, stamina, level-headedness and tenacity which
I hope will flourish in Ghana and other African countries. As one American
law professor put it, he is the kind of "gutsy civil libertarian" so badly
needed in Africa if the rule of law is to prevail over violence and turmoil.

His boat fare to the United States and bus fare to Chicago will cost approximately $400. He will need an additional $100 as a minimum for incidental expenses until he can register at Northwestern and qualify for his fellowship. Since the time is late and he leaves Ghana on August 13 to get here in time, I have written to the Black Star Lines, Ltd., underwriting his boat passage out of funds from my own summer fellowship. I am now undertaking to raise $500 by August 13 from my relatives and close friends.

Your investment in Kwaku Baah is an investment in the future of
Africa. It will pay you rich dividends, if not of the coupons-clipping
variety. I am sure I can count on you to help. No amount is too small.
Checks or money orders should be made to *Pauli Murray, Trustee*, as I
have opened a special account for this purpose with the first contribution.
In the event an agency already appealed to should respond before August 13,

may I have your permission to retain your contribution in the trustee ac-
count earmarked for Mr. Baah's return to Ghana after his year of study,
or for a similar emergency in connection with some other African law
student?

Thank you for your indulgence in listening to me, and I hope to hear
from you soon. With love and good wishes,

Sincerely,

P.S. One member of the faculty here at the law school who read this letter in draft has put up $50.00, so only $450.00 remains to be raised.