My Political Awakening at Hamilton College

Living Legend C. Christine Johnson

Last week, upon the request of several alumni and administrators of my alma mater Hamilton College, I gave a virtual address, “American Identity: An Omni-American Alternative.” The presence of classmates I hadn’t seen in decades plus current friends and associates such as Aeon Cummings ’85, my band mate Joe Duffus ’84, and Michael Richman ’83, was heart-warming. 

Gratifying too was the presence of my first anthropology professor, Doug Raybeck, who sparked my love of culture, and of literature professor Vincent Odamtten, who we’ll mention again at the close of this essay. 

After a few opening remarks and acknowledgements, I said:

I’m honored to share my thoughts tonight because I’ve been forming some of the perspectives that you’ll hear since my days at Hamilton from the summer of 1981 as a pre-freshman in the HEOP—Higher Education Opportunity Program—to my graduating in May 1985. I’m also honored because it gives me a chance to publicly acknowledge the profound influence of C. Christine Johnson, the founding director of Hamilton’s HEOP program, on me, one of the 500 graduates of the HEOP and Scholars programs. 

The last time I was on campus, in 2019, I saw a video of a short interview that her successor Phyllis Breland, ’80, taped with Ms. J. When I got up to speak in her honor, in the very room in the Kirner-Johnson building that I would play first alto sax during rehearsal with jazz bands, I was overcome with emotion. Reading her interview in the just-released special issue of Hamilton Magazine with the theme “We Are Hamilton” had me in tears again. From making sure I had airfare to and from NYC in December 1981 after my mother was assaulted, and directing me to get counseling on campus, to, in my last semester as a senior, making sure that I had enough credits to graduate, Christine Johnson was like a guardian angel to me, a strong support system, and a font of guidance and wisdom. 

Getting Conscious at Hamilton and Columbia

Last June, I interviewed Hamilton College President David Wippman about the Covid pandemic and the social reckoning racking the nation and our college. Six months ago I related to readers of this blog a life-altering and soul-expanding experience of mine at Hamilton College in April 1984: playing with trumpet grandmaster Clark Terry. That was a musical awakening via a transcendent moment of bliss; now I’ll share how my racial and political awareness was awakened at Hamilton College too.

The seeds were planted in the late seventies by the startling television series based on Alex Haley’s Roots. In 1980, a hip, unorthodox Irish social studies teacher at Tottenville High School assigned Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, watering the soil of my consciousness. Achebe’s tale of a tragic clash between Christianity and traditional African religion moved me as no dry historical account had before. 

In 1981 I began attending preppy Hamilton, the alma mater of civil rights legend Bob Moses and Drew Days III, the first Black American to head the civil rights division of the Justice Department. In fact, I was soon to discover, Alex Haley wrote the first drafts of Roots as a visiting professor at Hamilton in 1967, two years after his best-selling as-told-to autobiography of Malcolm X.

Student government elections were held in the beginning of the first semester. Seven or eight freshmen ran to fill the two allotted seats. I approached one of my competitors, a Greek student also named Greg, to suggest that we run as a ticket under the slogan "Vote for Greg Thomas and Greg Theoharides. We're Doubly Gregarious!" That slogan gave us enough name recognition to win. Thereafter, I served in student government for three years. I also became active in the Black and Latin Student Union, a haven for the Black and Hispanic students who composed only 5 per cent of Hamilton's student population. 

But in my junior year, like a spook at the door, I came across some information that pulled my coat to just how elitist Hamilton was back then. As chairperson of the Academic Chamber, which had student reps on the tenure, admissions, library, and curriculum committees, I had access to committee records. I was startled by a Memo to the Faculty from the Curriculum Commission titled "Working Paper on a Curricular Plan," which held that the curriculum had been, and should remain, focused on "the teaching of the values embodied in cultural and social elites." 

From Cognitive Dissonance to Taking Political Action

Coming from a working-class background and aware that my ancestors had been enslaved by such elites, I experienced, to put it mildly, cognitive dissonance. The commission, however, did express the need to broaden its focus: "The college must ensure that students can explore the history and culture of ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups previously ignored because they were left outside of the great traditions" (emphasis mine). At the time of this memo, Hamilton had programs in Asian Studies, Women's Studies, and Latin American Studies, but not Black or Africana Studies. The following sentence left an especially bitter taste:

"The Commission is divided over the feasibility of providing any significant coverage of the range of African cultures."

Smacked in the face by reality, I decided to spend the first semester of my senior year at Columbia, where I took a literature course with Amiri Baraka, who assigned W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Cane by Jean Toomer. There I encountered the Coalition for a Free South Africa, which was about to bust wide open the university divestment movement. Also during that semester, my hangin' partner Ron Haynes, a former Muslim minister, introduced me to Ron Jackson, an avid student of science, technology, and military affairs who had been an activist at Port Richmond High School and UC Irvine in the early '70s. 

Like my father, I’ve always been entrepreneurial. The two Rons and me opened a small retail store in the St. George section of Staten Island in the fall of 1984. In that printing and photo shop on Victory Boulevard, we’d rap for hours on end about the harsh realities of race, politics, and economics in America--about how the war in Vietnam had undercut Johnson’s War on Poverty, about COINTELPRO and U.S.-supported dictators, about Black self-loathing and trauma, about television shows such as Like It Is and Tony Brown's Journal, about the Democratic Party's deplorable handling of Jesse Jackson's presidential run. 

When I returned to Hamilton in January 1985, rather than focusing on student government and my GPA I honed in on a battle for African American Studies and South African divestiture. One snowy night soon after my return, I walked from McEwen dining hall with my friend from South Africa, Paul Ngobeni, several years older than most Hamilton students. Paul, schooled in the struggle, had an incisive mind and biting analytical ability to tell you why your argument was full of holes.

A year or so before we were at McEwen, shooting the breeze about some issue or another. Paul was a new International student. He hadn’t said much to that point. He'd sit quietly at the dining room table, observing, sizing up our political awareness. During this particular meal, he listened carefully, laying in the cut. Danny Garcia ‘84, who would go on to became a very successful restaurateur and caterer in New York City, was the first victim. Seemingly out of nowhere, Paul said: “You. Are. Wrrongg! One! [a decimation of naive assumptions]; Two! [a brilliant historical and political exegesis], and Three! [a more mature assessment of the problems and potential solutions].

We were all stunned into silence.

So after giving me the rundown on the previous semester, with his pronounced South African accent, Paul said: 

Greg! Ever since you have left, everything has gone to shit! We should start a petition for African American Studies.

Paul’s well-placed ploy to my ego worked. We launched a Black Studies petition drive: several hundred of Hamilton's 1600 students signed. I devised a strategy and held weekly meetings with BLSU members to go over tactics and timetables. We structured the student teams based on my knowledge of the student government structure of the Academic Chamber: two student reps per department. They were tasked with speaking with department heads about the paucity of African American course content and faculty of color; in addition, each week, a different student penned an opinion piece published in the school newspaper, The Spectator. We also spoke about our campaign for greater diversity and inclusion on the college radio station, WHCL, where for years I’d hosted a jazz radio show. 

By then I had been reading Molefi Asante's Afrocentricity and listening to bootleg copies of speeches by Louis Farrakhan—whose version of black nationalism I’d strongly reject by the time of the Million Man March in 1995. I wrote the final essay, which criticized Hamilton for not living up to its espoused ideals, and displayed a graphic of Afro-American Studies courses at competing colleges such as Bates, Bowdoin, Amherst, Swarthmore, and Colgate. In 1987, two years after I graduated and almost two decades after the formal inception of Black Studies in the academy, Hamilton initiated its own Africana Studies program. In 1994 it became a concentration. Vincent Odamtten, the first Africana Studies hire, is still teaching literature on campus today and serves as Department Chair. 

Professor Vincent Odamtten

Progress? Yes. Finish Line? No.

Hamilton has come a long way in terms of overall diversity and inclusion on the faculty, administration, and student body. Almost 50% of students are women, and nearly the same percentage are female faculty. After decades of dismal numbers, 25% of students are “people of color.” Nearly the same percentage holds for faculty of color. The college has greatly succeeded in terms of geographic diversity: almost all 50 states are represented in the student body.

When I was on campus, I loved taking music courses with the late Sam Pellman and Robert Hopkins; for almost 30 years students have in addition had access to the ingenious, pun-filled Black American professor of music, “Doctuh” Michael Woods, composer of over 700 compositions in a wide range of musical styles. In my day, Professor Robert Simon was a favorite philosophy professor of mine and many others. Today, students can take classes with—and be advised by—Todd Franklin, a brilliant Black American philosopher and teacher. One of my favorite professors, Dan Chambliss in the Sociology department, now has as a colleague Alex Manning, a Black American assistant professor. 

Josie Collier ’97, P’14, is the President of the Alumni Council. Sharon Madison ’84 and my music mate through high school and college, Mason Ashe ’85, serve as Charter Trustees. Though the Black American student population hovers around 5% still, the overall representation of Black Americans as essential parts of Hamilton’s legacy is strong. 

The reckoning amid the pandemic after George Floyd’s murder has caused all American institutions to grapple with issues of lingering injustice and numerical disparities with under-represented and historically sidelined groups most harmed a necessary focus. Acknowledging progress is fair and appropriate. 

So is admitting that we still have a long way to go to fulfill the promises and potential of our democratic social contract. 

A luta continua.