Breaching Jericho's Walls

Allen B. Ballard

Description

A rich narrative recounting the life story of award-winning African American historian and novelist Allen B. Ballard, Breaching Jericho's Walls takes its readers on an exciting journey from a segregated Philadelphia community in the 1930s to mid-century Paris, Moscow, Cambridge, and Manhattan. The author reflects on his own pioneering role as he expands his horizons, as one of the first African American students at Ohio's Kenyon College, studying abroad in France and sharing a café table with Richard Wright and James Baldwin, serving in the military in the American South and attending graduate school at Harvard University. Becoming one of the nation's first black Russian specialists, Ballard studies in post-Stalinist Russia for a year, where, among other adventures, he spends a month with Michael Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, on a Soviet farm. Though he tells his own personal story within Breaching Jericho's Walls, Ballard also portrays the experiences of those northern African-Americans whose generations bridged the gap from the legacy of slavery to the breakdown of the segregated system in the 1950s and 1960s while revealing the crucial role that individuals like civil rights leader Paul Robeson, Olympic athletes Jesse Owens and Long John Woodruff, and scholar Alain Locke played in inspiring the hopes of an oppressed and downtrodden race. A memoir filled with entertaining anecdotes and insightful reflection, Breaching Jericho's Walls offers Ballard's compelling personal story and reveals how, brick by brick, African Americans built the road that led to the election of President Obama in 2008.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Chapter I

2. Chapter II

3. Chapter III

4. Chapter IV

5. Chapter V

6. Chapter VI

7. Chapter VII

8. Chapter VIII

9. Chapter IX

10. Chapter X

11. Chapter XI

12. Chapter XII

13. Chapter XIII

14. Chapter XIV

15. Chapter XV

16. Chapter XVI

17. Chapter XVII

18. Chapter XVIII

19. Chapter XIX

20. Chapter XX

21. Chapter XXI

22. Chapter XXII

23. Chapter XXIII

24. Chapter XXIV

25. Chapter XXV

Epilogue
Notes

Sujets

• USA
• United States of America
• Memoir
• History of the Americas
• Education
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438436241
• Langue: English

Extrait

Breaching Jericho's Walls

A Twentieth-Century African American Life
ALLEN B. BALLARD

Published by
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS
A LBANY
© 2011 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production and book design Laurie Searl Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ballard, Allen B.
  Breaching Jericho's walls : a twentieth-century African American life / Allen B. Ballard.
      p. cm.
  ISBN 978-1-4384-3623-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Ballard, Allen B.—Childhood and youth. 2. Ballard, Allen B.—Family. 3. African Americans—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—Biography. 4. Philadelphia (Pa.)—Race relations. 5. Philadelphia (Pa.)—Biography. I. Title.
  F158.9.N4B338 2011
  305.896'073074811—dc22
2010031916
10     9     8     7     6     5     4     3     2     1

For my dear friends and treasured colleagues, Celia Gibson, Gardenia Hobbes, and Helen Simmons, with my sincere thanks and deep gratitude for all the support and love they gave me when I needed it the most.
Illustrations
 
Illustrations follow page
1    The Ballard family in 1944.
2    The author's mother, Olive, at age thirteen in 1920.
3    The author's father, Allen, as a police inspector in 1958.
4    The author's maternal grandmother, Evelyn Grimes Robinson.
5    Alice Dorsey Marshall, the author's Aunt Alice.
6    Nellie Bright, principal of the Joseph E. Hill School, circa 1944.
7    Father Thomas in a wedding picture at St. Barnabas Church, mid-1940s.
8    The Philadelphia Piano Ensemble, with its founder, the author's Aunt Burt, circa 1945.
9    The author's best friend in high school, Wilbert “Sonny” Lancaster, receiving one of his many track awards, circa 1948.
10    The author's best friend in college, Stan “Stanjack” Jackson, in 1951.
11    Mu Omega Chapter, Omega Psi Phi, circa 1953, with Allen B. Ballard Sr.
12    Mirabelle Paulsen, in 1955, the year that the author met her in Paris.
13    The author at age thirty.
Acknowledgments
 
I would like to thank Irene Andrea, Suzanne Lance, Greta Petry, Leonard Slade, Larry Wittner, Stan Jackson, Chuck and Pat Leach, and Velma Cousins for having read earlier versions of this work and giving me invaluable feedback both on style and content. I thank too my longtime editor, Renni Browne, and her assistant, Shannon Roberts for their dedicated and skillful help in shaping this book. I thank Dana Foote for her copyediting, and Larin McLaughlin and Laurie Searl of SUNY Press for shepherding the manuscript into print.
I would like to express also my eternal gratitude to three buddies of mine, all gone on home, who saw me through the most stormy period of my life back in the early seventies—Dean Harrison of the Grad Center at CUNY, Jose Hayles, my longtime neighbor on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and Dean Leslie Berger of CUNY, the first director of SEEK. Professors Alan Fiellin and Bernie Sohmer of CCNY who were my comrades along with Dean Berger in creating the SEEK program are long treasured friends. And to Andrea and to Sandy, I thank you for your love and ask your forgiveness wherever you may be. I was blind, could not see, and did stumble along the way. And I'd like to thank my present closest buddies, Deacon Ernest Williams and Dean Carson Carr for being there through thick and thin over the years I've been here in Albany. Too, I'd like to thank my sailing partner, Fred Bloom, for his help and friendship over the years and for the innumerable scrapes with boats and trailers he's managed to extricate me from.
My church family at Mt. Calvary Baptist Church and its pastor and first lady, Reverend Robert W. Dixon and Georgia Dixon, have been my rock and strong shield over the past twenty-five years and I thank them for their love and steadfastness
I could not have asked for better colleagues, both among the professoriate and the supporting secretarial staff, than I have had both here at SUNY-Albany and in my years at CCNY and CUNY Central. You are all my dear friends whose kindness sustained me over this long, sometimes difficult, but never boring fifty year journey in academia! The chairs of both the Africana Studies Department and the History Department at SUNY, Marcia Sutherland and Richard Hamm, have always been in my corner and I thank them.
And could I possibly forget the thousands of my students who year by year gave me the great privilege of learning from them even as I shared in their never ending optimism, exuberance, and joy in life. Thanks to you all!
My brothers, Forrest and Walter, and their wives, Filly and Marcia, and my son, John, have been great supporters of my work and I thank them too. And I shall never forget the love and help that the late Geraldine Ballard gave to me over the years.
Brief excerpts from this work have appeared in Claudia Ricci's MyStoryLives Blog and in the Philadelphia Inquirer and I thank them for their permissions. Stan Jackson and Sonny Lancaster, my two best friends from younger days, cooperated in many ways in my putting this book together, not the least of which was to grant permission to use their photographs. The photographs of the Ballard family, Nellie Bright, Father Thomas, my father, the Philadelphia Piano Ensemble, and the Mu Omega Chapter of Omega Psi Phi all come from the John Mosely Photographic Collection at the Charles L. Blockson Collection, Temple University and are used with permission thereof. I thank my long time friend, Diane Turner, director of the Center and her associates, Aslaku Berhanu, and Leslie Willis-Lowry for their enthusiastic help in finding these rare photographs. Mirabelle Paulsen shared in the reading of parts of the manuscript and provided her picture with permission. She knows how much that meant to me and that she is forever in my heart. All of the other photos are from my personal collection.
I
 
In 1939, my mother took me and my younger brother, Jerry, from Philadelphia to Wildwood, New Jersey, for a week's stay at Mother White's hotel. Mrs. White was a cheerful woman who made the very best ice cream in the world. The smell of her lightly crusted waffles with crisp bacon layered over them could make a dawdling child leap out of bed in the morning.
After breakfast my mother would take us down to the “colored” area of Wildwood's beach. We didn't think about that. We'd make sand castles and see them washed out to sea, dig deep holes in the hope of tunneling all the way to China. Those were happy days—the ocean before us, small sailboats out on the water, clean white sand beneath our feet. What more could two little kids want?
I knew how to swim, though not very well, and one morning I waded out into the water to play. I waited, jumping up and down until the moment before a breaking wave crested, then I'd plunge into the foaming white mass and emerge into the bright sunshine on the other side. I'd stand up, beat my chest like Tarzan, throw the sea a challenging shout, then start the game again.
I'd been doing this for about fifteen minutes or so when a really, really big wave suddenly loomed, crashed down, and tossed me on my side. I tried to stand but was knocked down by another wave. Great fun, but this time I was pulled into the sea's grasp by an undertow.
I tried to use the swimming technique I'd learned up at summer camp, twisting and turning my body in a desperate effort to make it back to shallow water. But my nine-year-old strokes were too weak. My feet touched the bottom for a fleeting second, but another wave engulfed me and I found myself thrown downward. I managed to stand up one more time. I was facing the beach and could have raised my hands and shouted.
I heard my father, five years earlier, shouting at me as I sobbed and begged to get out of the shallow end of a recreational center pool he'd tossed me in stark naked to learn how to swim: “Shut up, shut up, I'm ashamed of you! Ballard men don't cry!” In that split second I decided I'd drown before I'd yell for help.
Another wave struck me. It turned me over on my back—I was lost. I squeezed my eyes shut …
A strong hand grabbed me by the wrist, an arm grasped me around the chest, and I found myself being pulled to shore. It was a white man, lots of hair on his chest, wearing a black bathing suit. At the shore I was met by the unobservant lifeguard, my weeping mother, and a terrified little brother. My mom thanked my rescuer profusely, then wrapped her arms tightly around me, rocking back and forth.
“Thank the Lord, thank the Lord! Praise His Holy Name!”
Swimming was a sport, and I was an African American male in Philadelphia. While all its inhabitant