In his newlywed days, Gerald Early, director of Washington University’s Center for Humanities, was constantly turning on the television to old black-and-white shows.
His wife Ida didn’t understand his habit. One day, she asked him why he found them so appealing.
“His response floored me,” said Ida, secretary of the university’s Board of Trustees. “He said because these are genuine artifacts of the American imagination. And I thought, you know, I guess they are. Who could say it better?”
“He is a great writer and analyst,” Ida said. “He really helps us understand the experiences we are having as human beings, as citizens, as parents, as scholars, as teachers, and as students.”
In addition to leading the center, Gerald is also the university’s Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters and a professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies.
On September 14, Gerald will receive the St. Louis American Foundation’s Lifetime Achiever in Education award at the Salute to Excellence in Education Scholarship and Awards Gala. The event will be held at 7 p.m. at the America’s Center Ballroom, following a reception at 6 p.m.
Gerald is a renowned scholar in the humanities, a respected leader at the university, a noted essayist, and a cherished teacher among students and colleagues. Yet, when the St. Louis American asked both Ida and Gerald what his greatest accomplishments were, they gave the exact same response (though they were not in the same room.)
“Being a great husband and wonderful father and now he’s working on becoming a great grandfather,” Ida said. “I think he would think those are his greatest achievements.”
A fire-breather
Early grew up in Philadelphia, and he wrote about the city in his essay on boxer and Olympic Gold Medalist Joe Frazier, “The Fire-Breather, the Gym and the City.”
He wrote: “As I grew up among black and white working-class people in
Philadelphia, boxing was in the blood, in the genetic makeup of the city. Boxers loomed over the landscape, symbolic and ornamental, portentous and implike, like angels and gargoyles in the architecture. Boxing called to me from the pavement; it stalked me in the very air. My wife, Ida, on arriving in Philadelphia as a college freshman said the city ‘had an attitude. Hard, crowded, tough, untrusting, as if being nice was a sign of weakness. It seemed like a place where everybody lives on top of each other and everybody was at war with everybody else.’ She was right.”
By the time he was a teenager, Gerald knew he wanted to be an essayist, he said. After earning his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Cornell University, Gerald arrived at Washington University in 1982 as a black studies professor. He has been there ever since.
In the 1990s, he led simultaneously both the African-American Studies and the American Culture Studies departments.
In 2001, he became the director of the Center for Humanities (formerly the International Writers Center founded by William H. Gass.) The center provides a forum and a space for humanities scholars to come and give lectures, bring guests, have conversations and dialogue, he said.
“On the whole, the humanities center is a catalyst to help make things happen,” Early said, “and a place where people can feel they have a second home outside of their departments.”
Recasting the center
Under Gerald’s leadership, the center also moved from being on the outer rim of the campus into the university’s newest building in the middle of campus.
Gerald localized on campus the focus of what had been a brilliant star in the international literary firmament, said Chris King, managing editor of the St. Louis American, a former faculty member in Gerald’s African-American Studies department, and now a member of the center’s advisory board.
“It took a tremendous amount of will to do this, since what Bill Gass had created had a ‘wow’ factor you could never duplicate with ‘just another’ humanities center,” King said.
But what Gerald did was very badly needed, King said. Instead of bringing world superstars to campus for episodic conferences, Gerald is using the center’s funding to strengthen and interconnect the humanities faculty and students who have committed themselves to Washington University.
“Gerald’s vision for humanities actually makes harassed, overcommitted, under-nourished and disconnected scholars and students feel like a nourished part of an engaged academic community,” King said.
What’s also untraditional about Gerald’s leadership of the center is that he opens all programs up to undergraduates – not just scholars, faculty or graduate students.
“It’s a precious opportunity for them to feel they are scholars in the making and to get feedback that they are accepted in this world,” said Dean Mary Laurita, College of Arts & Sciences. “It changes their lives.”
Laurita helps to oversee the Merle Kling Undergraduate Honors Fellowship, which encourages undergraduates to conduct research in the humanities and offers them a workspace.
“They are doing work they feel that fits into that mission; they’re attending lectures they wouldn’t have attended otherwise,” Laurita said. “They are integrated into the center. That’s important. That’s one thing that he has changed – the nature of the center.”
Building a diverse community
Gerald said that offering these resources to undergraduates is important for the future of the university.
“I feel all the resources should be available to all the people that are here,” Gerald said. “Undergraduates should be encouraged to use them. It was important to my own sense of mission, as a teacher, to make sure that undergraduates felt connected with the center.”
This encouragement is particularly important for minority undergraduate students, he said. Very few minorities go onto become college professors because most enter into professional school, such as law or medicine, he said.
“You want to diversify the whole field of knowledge-making, which is really what scholarship is – you are making knowledge,” Gerald said. “You want to diversify that field with as many different kinds of people and with as many different perspectives.”
In addition to leading the center, Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton said Gerald has also been a national leader in fostering understanding about the history of race in important areas, such as jazz, boxing and baseball.
“Sometimes race figures prominently among those issues that divide us,” Wrighton said. “But Gerald is a person who brings people together and inspires everyone. And he has been a tremendous contributor to Washington University’s efforts to build a more diverse, more inclusive community.”
A trusted voice
When James V. Wertsch, associate vice chancellor for international affairs at Wash. U., arrived at the university in 1995, he was well aware of Gerald’s reputation. Gerald had just received the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Gerald is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Wertsch is the Marshall S. Snow Professor in Arts & Sciences at the university.
Despite Gerald’s many awards, Wertsch said what impresses him most is the way Gerald affects an audience when he speaks.
“I have a lot of brilliant colleagues at Washington University, who are some of the best people in their fields,” he said. “But not all of us can present to a big public audience the way that Gerald can.”
This is one of the reasons that Gerald is considered to be a wise faculty member, who many turn to for advice about various decisions concerning the university, Wertsch said.
“Gerald has a reputation as the guy you want to take ‘the big ask’ to the dean or the chancellor,” King said. “He gets things done, and as a result he is able to get bigger things done. And to do this you have to make ‘the big ask,’ whether of the chancellor or the major national funding centers for humanities.”
Tickets for the Salute to Excellence in Education Gala are on sale now. Individual tickets are $85 each/$850 table and VIP/Corporate tickets are $150 each/$1500 table. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit www.stlamerican.com and click on Salute to Excellence, or call 314-533-8000.
