The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black (1996)

• Report rights infringement
• published: 15 May 2014
• views: 127545

Gregory Howard Williams was the 27th President of the University of Cincinnati until his resignation for personal reasons on August 21st, 2012. He had assumed the presidency on November 1, 2009. He earned his J.D. and Ph.D. from George Washington University. Williams previously served as the 11th President of the City College of New York whose term started in August 2001. He wrote an autobiography, Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black. The book was named Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times in 1995. Books 1995. Life on the Color Line : the true story of a white boy who discovered he was black. New York, N.Y. : Dutton. ISBN 0-525-93850-8 1986. The Iowa Guide to Search and Seizure, Iowa City : University of Iowa. ISBN 0-87414-044-7 1984. The Law and Politics of Police Discretion, Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-24070-1 Articles A Line Through a Nation's Soul'', Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2003 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Howard_Williams The term color line was originally used as a reference to the racial segregation that existed in the United States after the abolition of slavery. An article by Frederick Douglass entitled "The Color Line" was published in the North American Review in 1881. The phrase gained fame after W. E. B. Du Bois' repeated use of it in his book The Souls of Black Folk. Both the quote and the phrase can be found in numerous texts of the last century, both academic and non-academic alike. Langston Hughes uses the phrase in his autobiography, writing: "In Cleveland, a liberal city, the color-line began to be drawn tighter and tighter. Theaters and restaurants in the downtown area began to refuse to accommodate colored people. Landlords doubled and tripled their rent at the approach of a dark tenant."[3] Closer to the end of the twentieth century, Karla F. C. Holloway, a professor of English at Duke University, centered her Keynote Address to the National Conference of Researchers of English around this sentence, saying: "Perhaps while sitting in his den or maybe in the midst of academic clutter at his university of office, DuBois penned the epic words that will center my reflections in this essay --"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line."[4] It is important to note that in much of the general usage of the quote, the "problem of the color-line" is implied as only a problem in the United States. However, in Du Bois' initial writing, he extended the problem across much of the world to "Asia" "Africa" and "the islands of the sea". Du Bois' thought in "Of the Dawn of Freedom" implied a universal exclusivity, of "color" as the greatest problem of the 20th century. The general use of the term the "color-line" however, is usually in reference to the United States, a possibility Du Bois did not acknowledge in his initial essays. As well as in literary theory, the phrase circulates in the modern vernacular. For example, Newsweek published a piece by Anna Quindlen entitled "The Problem of the Color Line," about the continuing plague of racial discrimination in the United States.[5] The phrase does not only find use in the print world, either. PBS created a series entitled America Beyond the Color Line with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a documentary series that looked at communities of African Americans in four areas of the United States.[6] The phrase's current use in modern journalism reflects a continued use of the phrase even though the legalized segregation that continued after the abolishment of slavery was outlawed. It reflects a dual meaning of the phrase, one aspect of which reflects a color line created by the law, and the other of which reflects the de facto disparity between life for African Americans in the United States and life for other citizens. Many decades later, in 1952, nine years before he moved to Ghana,[7] Du Bois wrote an essay for Jewish Life magazine about his experiences during a trip to Poland and his changing attitude toward his phrase "the color-line". In the short essay, entitled "The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto", Du Bois wrote about his three trips to Poland, particularly his third in 1949, during which he viewed the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto. Du Bois wrote: The result of these three visits, and particularly of my view of the Warsaw ghetto, was not so much clearer understanding of the Jewish problem in the world as it was a real and complete understanding of the Negro problem. In the first place, the problem of slavery, emancipation and caste in the United States was no longer in my mind a separate and unique thing as I had so long conceived it. It was not even solely a matter of color and physical and racial characteristics, which was particularly a hard thing for me to learn, since for a lifetime the color line had been a real and efficient cause of misery. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_line_%28civil_rights_issue%29