![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2016\/05\/Coretta-King-1971-pg13-888WEB.jpg\")
<\/a>Coretta Scott King marches in the 1971 academic procession at Commencement. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)<\/p><\/div>\n
1978: ‘Serial, Kaleidoscopic Exposure’ \u2014 Robert MacNeil, journalist<\/h5>\n
The trouble with having been born into the mass media age \u2014 the television age \u2014 is that it discourages concentration. It encourages serial, kaleidoscopic exposure. It diminishes your attention span, reduces it to that a small child. Its variety becomes a narcotic, not a stimulus. You consume not what you<\/em> choose and when, but when they<\/em> choose \u2014 and what.<\/p>\n When I entered the University of Georgia, it was not because the admissions committee had reviewed my application and realized that I was third in my class of 160, had scored decently on the SATs, had been in the honor society, editor of the school paper, and a host of other things that made me desirable college material.<\/p>\n It was because a federal judge had reviewed not only my application, but had reviewed the university\u2019s behavior to it and came to the conclusion that the only reason I had been denied admission was because of the color of my skin. And then he ordered me in \u2014 the first and only black woman in the entire school of 20,000 students.<\/p>\n The students \u2014 not all, to be sure, but enough \u2014 greeted me in a mob, attacked the dormitory where I had just begun to unpack my clothes, hurled bricks and bottles through the window \u2014 some of the shattered glass flew into my suitcase, showering my skirts and blouses with debris \u2014 and shouted threats late in the night, demanding on the one hand that I leave immediately, but insisting on the other that they would kill me if I showed my face.<\/p>\n At Yale, I was secretary of our political organization called the Black Student Alliance at Yale \u2014 BSAY \u2014 and I remember my first year there, attending my first meeting of this political group.<\/p>\n And most of all, I remember the trepidation that I experienced as a transplant from the back hills of Appalachia in the company of these largely urban black people. Black and smart, and elegant, and from elsewhere, as we\u2019d say in the valley where I grew up. A group with a definite sense of what was and what was not authentically black, jockeying for position by being blacker than thou…<\/p>\n Filing out, I asked a friend, a man named Linwood from North Carolina, whether he found it hard to fit into this meeting. And I\u2019ll always remember his response to me. \u201cSkip,\u201d he said to me, shaking his head sadly at all the posturing that had been going on, \u201cI\u2019ve been black my whole life.\u201d<\/p>\n It was as if a load had been lifted from me. Or, as Benjamin Mays put it, put this realization so well in 1970, \u201cI\u2019m glad that I didn\u2019t have to wait 70 years for someone in the 1960s to teach me to appreciate what I am: black.\u201d<\/p>\n1982: ‘The First and Only Black Woman’ \u2014 Charlayne Hunter-Gault, PBS journalist<\/h5>\n
1994: ‘Being Blacker than Thou’ \u2014 Henry Louis Gates, literary critic, historian, and Harvard University professor<\/h5>\n