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

the father of us all. And Dad said to God, not long ago, I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith, and God said to Daddy, you can come home now. I like that.
    But it was a mandate. My dad was telling me what I had to do, and he had accepted the fact that I was going to college and that it was a challenge. I remember at the end of my sophomore year writing home, I think I’ve had enough of this; maybe I’m going to transfer. My mother wrote me back and she said, there will be no transfer. It was like that passage that says, woe be unto him who puts his hand upon the plough and turns back. That would have been turning back; no way. And she was absolutely right. I’m going next Saturday to my forty-fifth college reunion. It seems like yesterday I was the only black in my class, only five in the student body. So I’m going back. I spoke at the twenty-fifth. You have to go to the forty-fifth just in case you don’t make the fiftieth.
    What was so clear to me in my early life was that there was a structure, there was a family unit, home, there was school. There was the Gate City Day Nursery, there was the Butler Street YMCA on Saturday, and there was St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church on Sunday, and every Monday and Friday at five o’clock I knew that we were going to choir rehearsal at St. Paul. I knew at five o’clock on Wednesday I was going to be at Boy Scouts, and I knew on Saturday that I was going to be at the Butler Street YMCA swimming. There was structure, and there was no doubt about it.
    I think that my mother, as compared to my father, was a woman ahead of her time, and my father was a man of his time. So that if I had finished high school, got a job in the post office, married a nice girl, got a little white house with green shutters and a white picket fence, kept my car washed, my grass cut, my hair trimmed, my shoes shined, went to work every day, went to church every Sunday, listened to the news, read the news, and voted, my father would have said that was a good life, and he was not wrong about that. It is a good life.
    On the other hand, my mother believed that was not enough, that there were other things beyond that I could do. And she pushed me. I had an extraordinary mother who was president of the PTA at every school I attended through high school. And when I was at one high school and my younger brother was at another elementary school, she was president of both PTAs. Unlearned and unlettered though she was, she understood, based on her own deprivation, the value of education. The value of going to the PTA meetings. The value of trying to make those segregated, dilapidated, ill-equipped schools that I attended as good for me as they possibly could be. Somehow she knew the importance of relationships with the teachers, relationships with the principals, relationships with the communities. How, why, I do not know. But intuitively she knew. So there was never any doubt in my mind.
    I did not really get involved in the economic aspect of black people’s lives until I came to the National Urban League, where I in effect took the baton from Whitney Young. He had the concept of a master plan for the inner cities, and I don’t think he was wrong about that. It never happened, but he was the first to articulate it. I did not follow up on that; I talked about things in other ways. But I had come to understand some fundamental economics not from studying in college, but from my mother, who had a very successful catering business in Atlanta. My brother Windsor and I worked for her at the parties she catered and were paid as though we were her employees. Her business was also how I got my first exposure to lawyers. But when I went away to college, my mother wrote me every day for seven years. Every day. Some letters were short, some were long, some were sad, some were glad, some were angry, depending on what was going on, and they were always newsy about the church,