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 Shelly Hanks
Johnnetta B. Cole launched her career as an educator and
activist at Washington State University in 1964. While in Pullman,
she taught anthropology, helped found the Black Studies
Program, and served as the program’s first director. In 1970
she was named Outstanding Faculty Member of the Year. After
leaving Pullman, she held a number of teaching and
administrative positions at several East Coast schools. In 1987 she
became the first African American woman to be president of Spelman
College, the country’s oldest college for African American women.
In 1992 Cole landed in the national spotlight as a cluster
coordinator on President-Elect Bill Clinton’s transition team for
education, labor, and the arts and humanities. She later moved to
Bennett College for Women, where she is now president emeritus and
chair of the board of directors of the Johnnetta B. Cole Global
Diversity and Inclusion Institute.
In December Cole returned to Pullman to deliver the fall 2007
commencement speech. She discussed the value of looking back in
order to go forward, and counseled that with education comes the
responsibility to be active in one’s community and in society.
During her visit, she sat down with Hannelore Sudermann to do some
of her own looking back, reflecting on what she learned at WSU in
the 1960s.
I GREW UP in the days of racial segregation, Jim Crow-ism. I
grew up fundamentally in the South in a black community. That time
in the 1960s in Pullman, Washington, black folk were hard
to find. And yet because it was a period of such activism, we
began to bring black students and other students of color to
WSU.
It was a time of heightened political activism, and I found
myself exactly in the middle of all that. At the same time that we
were activists, expressing our opposition to the war in
Vietnam, to the absence of diversity at WSU, I think we also had a
sense of what we wanted in a positive way. I remember very
often in the 1960s saying it’s one thing to be against
something, but what are you for?
In those days of the ’60s there really was a community that I
think stood for wanting a particular way for people to respect each
other, to cross the lines of diversity. Someone very
important to me in those early days was Elaine Zakarison, who at
that time was the head of the YWCA. Her husband, Russell, was a
farmer. For me growing up in the South, not having any
idea what a wheat farm would look like, to get to know that
family was indeed to cross all kinds of lines of difference. We
have remained friends over all of these years.
I also remember Al Crosby, a [former history] faculty member
here and former [WSU] president Lane Rawlins[, a young member of
the economics faculty at the time]. These are individuals that I
may not see for years and years, but the connectedness is still
there. I’m very proud of some of the students that I
worked with at WSU. I think about Ernest Thomas,
who everybody called “Stone.” He’s president of a community
college now. And Rutledge Dennis, who went on to find a career in
sociology. It wasn’t just a time of being in opposition, it was
also a time of being very, very clear [about] a dream that we
wanted to fulfill.
The coming of more black students had a natural influence on the
creation of black studies. As people are present, they want
history and herstory to, in some way, reflect who they are. Up
until the 1960s, the mid-’60s, the American curriculum,
certainly kindergarten through the 12th year and into
post-baccalaureate study, was what I like to call grounded in the
three W’s. The curriculum was fundamentally Western, it was
Womanless, and it was White. And so a movement was afoot, not only
to talk and to struggle for civil and human rights in the society
at large, but to say that the academy, the university, had a
contribution to make. To study not some of the world’s
people, but all of the world’s people.
This wasn’t something that the administration just said “Oh,
we’ve been sitting here waiting for you to come along, you faculty
and students, and just do it.” No. This was about struggle. This
was about convincing not just the administration, but the faculty
at large, that this had academic merit. That you could not teach
white students well if they were only learning about
themselves. Clearly the presence of more black students and
what was going on in the nation at large contributed to the
administration and faculty agreeing to do this.
I don’t have the exact history and herstory straight, but I do
know that WSU was one of the first universities in the United
states to begin a black studies program. What converged was
certainly what was going on in the larger society around issues of
civil rights and black power, and what was fermenting on a college
campus. As these came together, the point of connection was black
studies. It then began to influence the creation of Hispanic
studies, of women’s studies, of Asian studies, and Native
American studies. I think WSU should be pretty proud of its
contribution to all of that.
When I left Pullman I took away a deepened sense of what a
college and a university have a responsibility to do. It was my
first formal teaching job. It happened at a time when I was able to
see so much of the best and so much of the challenge of the
academy. I saw that while faculty are trained in the world of the
mind and should be open to new ideas . . . sometimes the
faculty is the least ready to change.
I was able to see, as I lived in this community, the possibility
of what Dr. King described as the “beloved community.” A place
where, regardless of the differences of race or gender or
religion or class, . . . individuals really could come to
respect and to celebrate each other. I was certainly able
to see that change can happen.
We were a small group, but we did make change. Yes, we did some
things that were sometimes, by the more conservative members of the
WSU community, considered radical. I went to jail with my students,
for example. While we may have been viewed as a bunch of
radical faculty and students, you have to ask yourself, where
would the academy be today if we had not spoken
up?
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