Well, there was always my father. I told you about my high school
teacher. I can't at the moment remember anyone particularly. Although
I'd have to say that the sort of life one lives as a teacher, a scholar,
unless the person is unusual, makes for him a great many colleagues who
feed him and build him up. I just can't remember
them all. There were so many. For example, I mentioned Buck. Well, I
never had a lot of contact with Buck, but Buck was an inspiration to me.
Both of us did a rather large amount of work for the Southern Regional
Education Board in the '60s. The last time I saw Buck was in North
Carolina. This sort of thing. You get to know a person pretty well. The
SREB, the Southern Regional Education Board, had elected a group of
scholars and writers at a little school, a nice little school, in
western North Carolina near Asheville named Warren Wilson College in the
summer time to write a book. Well, I'd never heard of a book being
written by committee, and I said to myself, "Oh, this is crazy." But you
know, it turned out well. The book, which is a small book, did get
written. What they did was we divided up, two of us to a chapter, and
we'd meet in the morning. Then we'd divide into these pairs and go away
and work. In the evening we'd get together and talk some more. Bullock
was there, and that was the last time I saw him.
At Fisk, of course, there was Arna himself. I had a very fine department
head, a woman from New England, a New England spinster, if you want to
call it. She'd never married but she was a fine woman, Doris Garry. She
was white. The man who was to become president for Fisk for some years,
James R. Lawson, he grew up with me in Louisville. He was a little
younger than I was, but he was there at Fisk when I went there, as a
professor of physics. He headed the department of physics. He had
succeeded, for his time, a rather famous Dr. Imes. And Lawson and I were
virtually inseparable. We had a foursome there as a matter of fact, not that I think about it. Lawson and Herman Long, a
person whose luster I need not commend to you—Long was to become
president of Talledega and then to die an untimely death because he was
too young. He died in the '60s. All of a sudden they discovered he had
cancer, and it was too late, and he died. And the fourth member was
another person who came to a tragic end. We were all Michigan Ph.D.s. He
was a Michigan Ph.D. in sociology. Let's see, Long was a Ph.D. in
sociology too, and, of course, Lawson was a Ph.D. is physics. But the
fourth person, I haven't given his name yet, was Nelson Palmer, and we
were there together. Oh, we'd spend the first part of each evening after
dinner, from say about 7:30 or 8:00, we'd spend it—we were all great
talkers, and we'd meet at a place called the Waikiki, a restaurant. The
two streets that run along through Fisk, going north and south, are 17th
Avenue and 18th Avenue, and just about a block or so east of 17th Avenue
was the Waikiki Restaurant. It was used by students at Fisk and Meharry,
but we'd meet there after our work was over in the evening. This was our
equivalent of the tavern in Chaucer. We were all great talkers, as I
said, and, of course, we settled all the problems of the world. [Laughter] One member of our group was
white. Lee Lloyd, he was a mathematician. Among his other achievements
he managed to get very much in trouble with the House Unamerican
Activities Committee, [Laughter] and
finally had to leave Fisk because of that, really. And he ended up at a
Canadian university. So I've named Lawson and Long. Two other persons
that I haven't named that I should put in this group—one was someone who became extremely and deservingly
prominent in Negro higher education because he was the president of
Clark, thought of so highly some years ago, Vivian Henderson. He died,
far too young, in his fifties. And the other person I haven't mentioned
was, at the time, dean of the med school at Meharry, Bill Allen. So
there we were. I had very close contact with all of them, Bill Allen,
Viv Henderson, Herman Long, Jim Lawson. I also got to know very well at
the time, what I would suppose we can call a most distinguished Negro
artist of his generation, Aaron Douglas, because Douglas and I, we
rented an apartment from the same landladies. There were two sisters
there named Stone. They were ladies who had done very well as
beauticians. I don't think they ever did a Negro woman's hair in their
lives. They had a beauty parlor down in the heart of downtown Nashville,
white Nashville, and so they did very well. I think I should tell you
one other thing about these ladies to be sure you know who they were.
Their names were Stone, that was their maiden name. They were sisters to
the woman, who incidentally lived only a block or so from us, who was
married—Walter White had a brother in Nashville in the postal service.
I'm talking about the Walter White, the NAACP Walter White. And this
brother was married to these Stone sisters' sister. They all were just
as white as Walter White, all of them. The Stones were just as white as
Walter White. I taught their sister's daughter. She had a daughter who
was at Fisk when I went there, very brilliant student. I don't know what
happened to that girl. I think she eventually got a doctorate herself. I
think he ended up in some place like Wisconsin.
I'm not sure. But I had the Stones there. I would walk up, see, my
apartment was upstairs over the Stones in the house in which they lived.
And then the Stones owned a house next door, and Doug's apartment, as we
called it, there were numbers that were on the—I can't remember if it
was on the first floor or second floor. But his was on one floor of that
house, and then Grace Jones, Bishop Jones's—we call it the white
Methodist Church and the white Methodist Church had two Negro bishops.
One of them was named Jones. R.E. Jones, the bishop, his brother was for
years and years the president of Bennett. You may have heard of the
Jones, David Jones, Methodist bishop. Well, David Jones' brother had
some children, and Grace Jones was his daughter. She was Bennett's
president's niece. Grace lived in one apartment in this other building
owned by the Stone sisters, and Aaron lived in the other. Actually, I
don't want to get started because when you start, I would just about end
up having to tell you that everybody at Fisk was my close friend, on the
faculty, and it would not be far from the truth.