Friday, February 15, 2008
When Randal Jelks was seven years old, the city of New Orleans closed the community swimming pool near his boyhood home. The pool’s dry, cracked concrete was Jelks’ daily reminder of the divided world he lived in. Jelks’ skin was too dark to swim in that pool.
“Six years,” Jelks said. “They didn’t want black kids swimming in the pool.”
Jelks, the Langston Hughes visiting professor of American studies at the University of Kansas, presents the 2008 Langston Hughes Lecture. Jelks’ lecture ‑ which takes place at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday in the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics ‑ center on Benjamin Elijah Mays, a predecessor to the American civil rights movement.
“Martin Luther King Jr. said Mays was one of his spiritual and intellectual mentors,” Jelks said.
Mays, who served as president of Morehouse College, is also the subject of Jelks’ second book, “Benjamin Elijah Mays: A Religious Rebel in the Jim Crow South.”
Growing up in the 1960s in a racially-charged New Orleans, Jelks said his interest in the American civil rights and black history started at a young age.
“New Orleans oozed with history,” Jelks said. “I would always ask my grandmother, ‘Well, what was this like, or what was that like?’”
Jelks said his childhood also shed light on some harsh realities.
Schools were segregated. The elementary school just blocks from his house was for white children only.
“In 1962 and 1963, people were still protesting so black students could go to a school where they lived by,” Jelks said.
Jelks’ childhood in New Orleans was a cultural mosaic, and he embraced it.
“I saw people from around the world, I saw people had different stories to tell, and that’s what formed me,” Jelks said.
At age 14, he left New Orleans and moved to Chicago.
“When I got to Chicago, I asked my mama if it was Christmas,” Jelks said. “My mom said, ‘Christmas? What’s wrong with you? It’s August.’”
People moved so fast in Chicago they reminded a 14-year-old Jelks of last-minute Christmas shoppers.
Chicago’s crowded streets weren’t the only thing Jelks noticed.
“It was so intensely ethnically divided,” Jelks said.
He said his time in New Orleans and Chicago molded his worldview.
“He’s about standing up for the equality of people,” William E. Van Vugt said. Van Vugt is a professor and the chairman of the department of history at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., a school Jelks worked at for the last 15 years.
Van Vugt said Jelks had a provocative side.
“He was highly visible on campus, someone who was never hesitant to voice his opinion,” Van Vugt said
Langston’s Legacy
A short time after coming to Kansas, Jelks heard a story about Langston Hughes — the Harlem Renaissance poet who spent his childhood years in Lawrence.
“Langston Hughes comes up to the hill when he’s a little kid,” Jelks said, retelling the story. “And standing up on the hill, Hughes said that was the first time he wanted to travel and see the world, because he could see all-around.”
Having Langston Hughes’ name in his job title does have a special meaning, Jelks said.
He called Hughes a person who helped other people to be creative in their own work.
“Tell me one other person who lived in Lawrence who’s internationally known,” Jelks said.
Jelks said his adjustment to a new University had so far been enjoyable, even if he was slowly coming around to the University’s sports teams. Right now, he’s still a Michigan Wolverine. “I’m in Jayhawk territory, but I still bleed maize and blue,” Jelks, who graduated from the University of Michigan, said.
Jelks is teaching two American studies courses this semester: “African American Views of the African Continent” and a graduate seminar on “African American Religion and American Civil Rights Movement.”
Jelks — like his book subject, Benjamin Elijah Mays — is an ordained minister. He served a church in Grand Rapids, Mich., for seven years before working at Calvin College.
At the moment, Mays isn’t far from Jelks’ thoughts.
“Everybody talks about a Martin Luther King Jr. as though he had no predecessors,” Jelks said. “Heroes aren’t always the big giants, but some times they are these other people who are playing these roles of teaching and instructing.”
— Edited by Patrick De Oliveira
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