A very interesting man died a few months ago.
Charles Hamilton died November 18th at the age of 94. It wasn’t announced until this week because Hamilton was a very private man.
He was a college professor who coauthored a very important book in 1967. Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael wrote “Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America,” one of the more misunderstood books of the time. The “power” in the title was about people taking control of their own lives and not being victimized.
Too many white people saw the title as something frightening.
“Black Power” was outside the moderate civil rights mainstream, and Carmichael was seen by many as a scary radical. But Hamilton and Carmichael were far less scary or radical than the modern Trumpanzees and Christian Nationalists.
I was very fortunate to attend a lecture by Hamilton in the Fall of 1968 at the University of Virginia. I was a member of the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society, and we had him in for a lecture. It was 56 years ago, and I hope I can be excused for remembering very little of what I heard as an 18-year-old.
I do remember one exchange that was memorable in an odd sort of way. After Hamilton’s lecture, he took questions from the audience. One of the first ones came from a Southern gentleman white boy looking to put him on the spot.
“Dr. Hamilton, would you like to be white?”
“That’s insulting. Next question.”
I’m not sure he could have handled that question any other way given the place and time, but thinking about it years later, I think he missed an opportunity.
Consider this is a possible answer:
“I am very happy to be who and what I am, and while it would certainly make life easier not to have to deal with racism, I can’t think of anything that would make me want to be of a different race than God made me.”
Interesting times.