Free America Behind the Color Line by Henry Louis Gates Page A

Thanksgiving and Christmas, it bothered me, because a chasm had developed between us, and I raised it with the young woman who ran with me for vice president of the student body at DePauw University. I wrote her and I said, what have I done? What’s wrong? It’s not the same with me and my buddies anymore. She wrote me back and she said, you’re walking with kings and you’ve lost the common touch, and I wrote her back a one-sentence letter. I said, “Dear Ethel, kiss my ass!” Because here I was the only black in my class, running twice as fast to stay even, and she’s telling me I’m walking with kings, I’ve lost the common touch.
    The answer to that, I believe, is that we have to work at giving our kids enough self-confidence and enough perseverance and fortitude to press on. You really cannot let other people create tensions for you in life; you have to create your own. Dr. Evans Crawford, at Rankin in 1958, preached that sermon, and I never forgot it, what he said about creating your own tension. I believe that we have to somehow ingrain that in the hearts and minds and souls of young black people, that they will create their own tensions and not be tempted by the tensions of others. Now, that’s very difficult because the social pressure is difficult, but if in fact these individual kids are interested in achievement, then they have to create their own tensions, and that is true whether it’s Michael Jordan or Vernon Jordan or whether it’s Tiger Woods or Deval Patrick. They have to create their own tensions, and that transcends race.
    You do not get to be a distinguished professor or public servant or successful entrepreneur letting other people create tensions for you. You have to create your own. When I gave the commencement at Tougaloo, I tried to make four points to these young people. First, you are what you are today because you stand on somebody’s shoulders, and wherever you are going tomorrow, you cannot get there by yourself. That’s point number one. Number two, if in fact you stand on other people’s shoulders, you have a reciprocal responsibility to live your life in such a way that people can stand on your shoulders. Third, if in fact you have that responsibility to live your life in a way that others are going to stand on your shoulders, then you have to be prepared. You have to be committed to excellence and hard work and sacrifice. And fourth, if you do those three, then you have to have some moral and ethical boundaries and standards for your behavior. As Churchill said, you have to march in the ranks of honor. I believe that, and I think that those four principles have helped me in my own life.
    I remember when my parents took me to college. They stayed that weekend, and I remember my father shaking my hand to tell me good-bye, but he didn’t say good-bye; he said, you can’t come home. I said, what do you mean? He said, the college counselor says your reading scores are far lower than those of your classmates, which means when they’re in chapter six you’d be trying to get out of the preface. He said, these kids up here, these white kids went to fine township high schools and private schools and you went to this old dilapidated, segregated, ill-equipped, double-sessioned, overcrowded school, he said, but you can’t come home. And so I said, well, what am I supposed to do, Dad? And he said, read, boy, read, and he drove away.
    Well, I was stunned. Four years later at graduation, the graduation is over and you go to say hello to your parents. My father, with the same expression that he had four years before, walked to me and shook my hand. He didn’t say, congratulations; he said, you can come home now. It’s absolutely true. He said, you can come home now. And in a book of eulogies that contains the one I wrote for him, I tell the story about you can come home now. And then I say that there was another conversation between a father and son, a conversation between Dad and God,