I arrived at Northwestern University’s ivy-covered Willard Hall in June 1968. It was three months after Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis, and the same month that Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles.
Northwestern was whiter than Christmas on a snowy day. I was excited by the privilege of being there ; I was overwhelmed by not only the beauty of the campus but the presence of so many white people. I had gone to an all-Black elementary and high school. Our teachers were mostly white, but the student bodies Black. Northwestern was a shock to my system. NuCap, the program of Black and white students the university instituted to acclimate us to the white world and the university’s mission, only served to make me consciously Black. By mid-July I had washed my hair and my cousin Willie Mae cut it into a stylish Afro.
I had every intention of becoming a doctor. I do not know if I had started writing in my blue-gray notebook of poems then as a carryover of the poems I had written in high school or not. I just know that by the spring of freshman year I had announced myself as a poet by reading a poem in public at an FMO (For Members Only)—the Black student organization—event. That poem appeared in the Northwestern yearbook in 1969. It had been submitted by one of the members of FMO’s Central Committee.
In 1997, at a reading in Chicago with the late Mari Evans, who had been one of my professors at Northwestern, I talked about an idea that had come to me in a flash, an idea that is old news now but no less true. Mine is the last generation to experience firsthand de jure segregation.
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Angela Jackson talks at “The Black Arts Movement in the Broader Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement,” Northwestern University, 2007.