An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted on 11/18/2024
(one year to the day, after Hamilton's passing)
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"We went to school. It was called a school of slavery and a school of segregation. And the lessons were very clear: You hate yourself. You are supposed to hate yourself because you are a, quote, 'minority,' you are different. You are lazy, apathetic, and so forth. And you pass out of this school and pass those lessons to the extent that you believe this, you see."
Everybody pour one out for academic activist and political scientist Charles Vernon Hamilton, who we lost exactly one year ago, today (though as befit his quiet and unassuming nature, we didn't actually learn about his passing until February of this year). Born in 1929 Oklahoma, Hamilton's family later moved to Chicago. Originally inspired to be a journalist, Hamilton instead pivoted to an interest in government and civil service. After a brief period in the military, he graduated from Roosevelt University, and then attained his Master's at the University of Chicago in 1957. A year later he joined the faculty at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), but was invited to leave less than two years later for his "incendiary" stance on civil rights (i.e., his association with the nascent SNCC and teaching students how to march, protest, and contact Congress).
Far from being the end, an impressive teaching career followed, taking Hamilton to Rutgers, Lincoln University, and even his own beloved Roosevelt before landing a prestigious appointment to Columbia in 1969 --one of the first Black scholars to chair a department at an Ivy League school. Over the course of this career he cultivated a partnership with Kwame Ture, neé Stokely Carmichael (see Lesson #71 in this series); together they published the controversial Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, which in many ways remains the definitive work on the Black Power movement. In the text, Hamilton coins the phrase 'institutional racism,' concluding that the best method to stand against such baked-in premises lay not in being divided recipients, but united participants. After the book's publication Hamilton continued to work to publicly frame the Black Power movement as a developmental process, not an end in and of itself.
In 1976 Hamilton worked with the Democratic Party as a strategist, suggesting that while it might be acceptable for presidential candidates to sidestep racial politics during a campaign, it was critical that they dealt decisively with issues that affected the black community once they were elected; that no matter how sympathetic a candidate might be to Black causes, that they could do nothing to help if they ultimately alienated their still mostly-conservative electoral base. (Sound familiar?) Later in 1991 Hamilton published another seminal work, a biography of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., titled The Political Biography of an American Dilemma. Hamilton retired from the Columbia faculty in 1998 and moved back to Chicago in 2015.
"From Muskogee to Morningside Heights" by Wilbur Rich for Columbia magazine, April 2004
Charles V. Hamilton, an Apostle of "Black Power," Dies at 94 - New York Times, Feb 21, 2024
Next lesson - Lesson 166: Evelyn Thomas Butts