Brush With Racism Turns Student Into Activist

Robert L. Hall '69 was planning on being a Romance Languages and Literature concentrator until he visited the department office.

As he waited, a professor he admired walked in and told the secretary, "See if you can figure out what this colored boy wants."

"I told him to 'kiss my ass' and left," Hall says.

Because of this incident, Hall sought a degree in African history and became a leading member in the student movement for an African-American studies department at Harvard. Today, Hall is a professor of Afro-American studies and a historian an at Northeastern University.

Although he was not one of the visible protest leaders, Hall became an active member of the Association of African and African and African-American Students at Harvard (AAAAS) and was elected executive secretary in his junior year. AAAAS, founded in 1963, was the forerunner of the Black Students Association.

"For me, my involvement in the Afro-American struggle was directly linked to my concentration," Hall says. "There were no history courses that focused mainly on the African-American experience, none."

Hall says he confronted the department's notion that African studies belonged only to the field of anthropology. "The idea was that Africa doesn't have a history. Anthropology was the history of the history-less, the tribal, non-literate people."

When he went to declare his concentration, Hall told the head tutor's assistant that he wanted to specialize in Africa. "Then her countenance drooped," Hall remembers, "and she said, 'Oh, if it's Africa you best go to the Peabody Museum.'"

Hall says he then started speaking in "Black-dialect, characterized by a different conjugation of to be."

"I said 'scuse me, you must be didn't hear me..I said I want to major in history and the kind of history that I want to study is the history of Africa. You all believe Africa has a history, don't you?" Hall recalls saying.

To satisfy his academic interest, Hall says he tried to take every course at the College that involved Africa. Hall became an active member of the AAAAS Committee on Negro Studies. The Committee worked to introduce more Afro-American studies classes into the curriculum and to hire more Black faculty.

"Now it seems obvious, I hope, that a course labeled American this or American that, in which the Negro receives little or no treatment, is not an intellectually valid course," he says.

Black students began to feel they had to "get off the dime," he says. "[They] felt they were irrelevant sitting around in common rooms."

Hall says he stressed to his fellow students the importance of their own education. "I said, 'Don't be stupid, we need doctors, too, and lawyers and urban planners."'

Leslie Griffin '70, former president of AAAAS, says. Hall was a historian even during his student days.

"He walked around with a wealth of knowledge about what was going on in Africa and other parts of the world," Griffin says. "He was a more quiet person, not into rabble rousing speeches."

Hall says he joined the ad-hoc committee of 17 Black students who contributed to the report by the nine-member Rosovsky committee which assessed the AAAAS demands and recommended how the University should respond.

Hall was one of the three students on the six-member search committee, created from the Rosovsky committee's report, to review candidates to chair the new Afro-America studies program.

He says he was chosen because of his involvement in a volunteer program in which he created an Afro-American studies curriculum to teach weekly to inmates in a Massachusetts prison.

The prison program was a "put your money where your mouth is" challenge, says Hall.

This was the opportunity I had been searching for, that became the source of my seriousness and purpose for the remainder of my undergraduate career at Harvard."

Hall describes himself as a noticeable presence on campus, "letting [his] hair grow into a bushy afro, running around sidewalks spouting off about Africa."

Skipping class to prepare for his prison pupils, Hall says he began to realize the lack of Afro-American history materials available at Harvard.

"[It] devastated me," he says. "There were no courses, no curriculum to prepare me for what I was teaching."

During the seizure of University Hall in April of 1969, Hall he was a "sympathetic" witness "that got too close to the action" as the building was being cleared by the police riot force.

He was standing on the steps of a freshman dorm when he was "accosted by some five or six riot police holding 'Nigger sticks'...poised and raised for the downward swing," he says.

"I balled myself up in the fetal 'civil rights position'--protect your head and genital area," he says, "and then I spoke somewhat forcefully and said 'gentlemen, please don't hit me. If you will allow me to get to my feet, I will leave the premises,' and miracle of miracles, they ceased and desisted."

He says they probably thought he was a "movement plant," strategically placed to goad the police into beating him up.

Hall was a member of the Dean's List his senior year and upon graduation received the Ames award--"the best all-around-guy award," he says.

Hall says his years of student activism have influenced how he interacts with his own students. "I am not frightened by students that speak up and organize themselves," he says. "I often encourage it."

In addition to recruiting undergraduates at local colleges to replicate his prison course at other correctional institution in Massachusetts, Hall continues to teach African-American history to inmates and encourages his own students to get involved.