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Black at Yale: Then, Now, and Tomorrow
July/August 2005
by Llewellyn Miller '70

I had the privilege of hosting the African American table at a novel AYA-sponsored event in Los Angeles in early April. The lunch session of this all-day affair featured tables reserved for “shared-interest groups”—Latinos; Asian Americans and African Americans; entertainment industry; and gay/lesbian—with a lot of hopping among tables.

One of my responsibilities as host was to introduce the ORD Leadership Forum at Yale—named in honor of Don Ogilvie '68, Armistead Robinson '68, and Glenn DeChabert '70, all now deceased. They were highly regarded student leaders in the late 1960s and major figures in the founding of the Black Student Alliance, the Black Studies Program, and the Afro-American Cultural Center. I was challenged to recall the rapid evolution of Black Yale and explain it to alumni from later decades. Most of them did not know who these three were or the circumstances under which these institutions were launched.

Retelling what made the racial politics of the sixties so distinct, without romanticizing, forced me to address what was truly unique about that period. The most obvious aspect of the story involves the numbers. From 1964 to 1970, the number of black freshmen trended upward impressively. The Class of 1964 (entering in fall 1960) had ten African American matriculants, and the Class of 1974, which entered in the fall of 1970, had 82.

As black high school students, we had also made, in most cases, a conscious choice to come to an elite white institution over other options we had. Our transition to adulthood was taking place while figures such as Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King Jr. were still alive and telling us that it was our responsibility to point out social injustices when we saw them and exercise any authority we achieved to correct them. I believe that is the charge that Ogilvie, Robinson, and DeChabert, among others, so nobly fulfilled back then.

Later generations of African Americans face other circumstances—a less clear sense of mission, a more subtle form of institutional resistance to their demands, and less guilt. The ORD Leadership program seeks to rejuvenate the missions of 40 years ago by taking a deliberately multicultural approach to the issues confronting today’s active leaders. The emphasis of the ORD program is on actual solutions to challenges today. Though named for founders, the focus is not on exalting the figures of the past, but on promoting leadership for the future.

One lesson I emphasized in my discussion in LA is that harmony and unanimity were never part of the great movements in history. Conflicts in ideology and personality tend to get minimized in the retelling, but they were real factors in the formative years of our republic, the labor movement, and the student civil rights struggle as well. It is constructive for all generations to be aware that progress often comes through conflict, in order to realize that no generation is uniquely prepared for its challenges. Our tribute to the past will succeed to the extent that it encourages students of all races at Yale to recognize that today’s issues are in their hands.

More immediately, the AYA-sponsored event in Los Angeles could very well be a beginning for a growing body of black alumni, relatively far from New Haven, to establish much better communication among ourselves and with the Yale Club. Southern California’s geography discourages regular meetings, but the April conference let us attach faces to e-mail addresses. The Yale network can be a powerful connection for all of us.

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