Born in 1946, I grew up in a red brick apartment building at the intersection of Lefferts and Kingston Avenues in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. Today Crown Heights is a national symbol of black-Jewish tensions, with Afro-Caribbeans and Hasidic Jews living in uneasy proximity. In the 1950s, it was a peaceful neighborhood populated largely by second- and third-generation Jews and Italians, with a sprinkling of Irish and African-American families. The absence of racial and religious conflict was not accidental. Cherishing the opportunity to retreat into private life after years of war and economic hardship, Crown Heights residents seemed...

The arrival of black students at Wingate High School dramatized population shifts that were rapidly changing the social geography of Brooklyn and other northeastern urban centers. Driven by collapsing agricultural economies and drawn by the hope of a better life, people of African descent, some from the South, some from the Caribbean, were arriving in Brooklyn by the tens of thousands in the 1950s. Most initially settled in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a predominantly African-American community in north central Brooklyn bordered on the north by the Brooklyn Navy Yard and on the south by Atlantic Avenue, Brooklynʹs largest and busiest east-west thoroughfare. But...

From my first day on the Columbia campus, I realized I had underestimated the university’s traditionalism and exaggerated its avant-garde spirit. In the early 1960s, Columbia described itself, without irony or humor, as a temple of Western culture, the “Acropolis on Morningside Heights.” Located on a cliff overlooking Harlem on Manhattanʹs Upper West Side, it was built around a huge open plaza, where concrete steps and manicured lawns were surrounded by buildings with Roman columns and elegant domes, and where the names of philosophers, poets, and theologians were inscribed in stone. The buildings’ equally grand interiors were embellished with rich...

Leon Trotsky once said, “You might not be interested in history, but history is interested in you.” Many young Americans discovered this, to their sorrow, when they were called to fight a war in a country they had never heard of against an enemy they could not see. I discovered it when I became romantically involved with an African-American woman and found myself violating one of the most powerful racial taboos in the United States. In the 1960s, interracial relationships were still illegal in many states, and many white Americans regarded them as immoral, and even horrifying. Nothing could prepare...

The Black Power movement began in 1966, with Stokely Carmichael’s speech at a June civil rights march in Mississippi, and it became one of the most controversial episodes in the history of the civil rights movement. When SNCC and CORE turned themselves into all-black organizations, asking long-time white activists to leave their ranks, their actions implied not only that integration was an idea whose time had passed, but that friendship and personal intimacy between blacks and whites had become obstacles to black liberation. Black nationalist sentiment had been steadily growing since the late 1950s, but its dramatic articulation by heroes...

Many scholars of postwar America have singled out 1968 as a defining moment in American political and cultural history. They cite war, assassinations, race riots, campus takeovers, gaping generational and racial divisions, and the fracturing of the Democratic Party as evidence of a political and cultural crisis that traumatized individuals and shattered families. That year my life was also in turmoil. I experienced my first arrest, the death of my father, and a traumatic separation from Ruthie during a building takeover at Columbia. Embittered by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the escalation of the war, and growing racial...

By the summer of 1968, defending interracial harmony, at least on the American left, often seemed a quixotic project. With the civil rights and antiwar movements dividing into black and white factions, it was difficult for political activists to extol the virtues of an integrated society without appearing to discourage self-assertion and self-discovery by African-Americans. While I publicly defended the right of African-Americans to control their own organizations and communities, I tried to locate my personal life within a racially diverse atmosphere while the nationalist firestorm ran its course. My social life, family activities, and recreation largely took place in...

During the fall of 1969, my closest friends in SDS became trapped in an ideological and emotional whirlwind. Adopting a dramatic new political strategy that assumed the possibility of a black-led revolution in the United States, they now called themselves Weatherman (after a line in Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”) and set about purging their lives of friendships and material comforts in order to match the sacrifices of African-American militants and Vietnamese revolutionaries. Within several months, through rapidly escalating acts of protest and communal intimidation, they formed an underground political organization that bombed government and corporate targets as their major...

When I was hired by Fordham University’s Institute of Afro-American Studies in the spring of 1970, I joined an educational experiment that was revolutionizing American campuses. The black-studies movement, which began in California in the mid-1960s, hit the New York metropolitan area with a vengeance in the spring of 1969. Black students at several area campuses took over buildings to demand the creation of degree-granting programs that offered courses on the black experience, promoted research in black history and culture, and used campus resources to help struggling local black communities and advance the cause of black liberation worldwide. The programs...

For faculty members in Fordham’s Institute of Afro-American Studies, the early 1970s were a heady time. Spurred by a final wave of sixties idealism, enrollments skyrocketed, reaching a peak of 345 students in the spring of 1972, over half of them white and Latino. On a campus where less than 6 percent of full-time undergraduates were black, Institute classes emerged as the most racially diverse in the university, places where students could study and discuss racial issues in a vibrant polyglot atmosphere. Inventing new courses each semester, our faculty created what amounted to a university within the university, a place...

A line from Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message”—“don’t push me, ‘cause I’m close to the edge”—does a good job of capturing my political outlook from the late seventies to the early nineties. I had a secure job and a happy family, but my ideas about race and politics seemed to have gone out of fashion. In a time of factory closings and government bankruptcies, bitter racial conflicts, and attacks on affirmative action, the prospects of uniting blacks, whites, and Latinos to fight for racial justice and a more equitable distribution of wealth appeared dim. Increasingly, my position at Fordham...