A black journey through a white school

Autobiography explores struggles, journey through education

Seemingly throughout his adult life, Jack L. Daniel encountered accidental good fortune. Yet, it might also be noted that in time the harder and smarter he worked, the luckier he got. From a hardscrabble black life in mid20th- century Johnstown, Pa., to a miraculous climb to the higher reaches of academic life at the University of Pittsburgh, Mr. Daniel neither carefully fashioned his journey nor could have remotely predicted it.

A recently released autobiography, a self- described work of creative nonfiction — “Negotiating A Historically White University While Black” — anchors the story of Jack Daniel in his engagement with American education. The saga begins with his struggles in elementary school, and by its conclusion he had ascended to academia’s upper reaches. Recounting his unlikely academic life in between constitutes the meat of the book’s well- crafted narrative.

Unvarnished candor accompanies the book’s depiction of young Jack’s status as underachieving sibling in a God- fearing black Christian family whose other children walked the straight and narrow. Though working- class dwellers in public housing in decaying Johnstown, Grace and Russell Daniel were respected in their community by white and black citizens alike.

The Daniel good name — rather than Jack’s nonexistent good grades — prompted a white Johnstown merchant to recommend class- clown Jack to the 1960 freshman class at the Johnstown Junior College of the University of Pittsburgh. Playing Bridge, regarded as more refined than Jack’s ghetto game, bid whist, afforded young Jack limited white friendships. But modest grades followed his transfer to Pitt’s Pittsburgh campus. Nonetheless, by taking summer classes, Jack Daniel earned his bachelor’s degree in 1963 in psychology, two and years after he enrolled on probation at Johnstown.

The book takes those of us of a certain age back to the now- amusing nomenclature and style of the revolutionary- lite movements of late 1960s and early 1970s so- called radical black America. Dashikis, “jive turkey,” “Ray Charles sunglasses” and “Niggas” are reprised as now- familiar campus and community caricatures of the era. But the book makes clear the

seriousness of purpose with which Pitt black students/ scholars and community members respectively regarded their activism.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the 1969 occupation of the Pitt computer center by members of the Black Action Society ( formerly the Afro- American Cultural Society, founded by Jack Daniel et al). The students won concessions from a flexible Chancellor Wesley Posvar that substantially impact positively black life at Pitt into the 21st century. By- then Professor Jack Daniel played a key role in the enabling negotiations, like an academic Moses of both Israel and Egypt.

However, some community ruffians cum activists proved less impressed with Professor Daniel’s brand of black consciousness. Like Angela Davis contemporaneously, he was assaulted at gunpoint by an opposing political thug. Neither professor was shot during those days of internecine upheaval and both lived to recount the black attacks in their respective autobiographies.

Although the scholar from black Johnstown never reported an exemplary academic record, Jack Daniel, nevertheless, persevered enough, creatively enough ( admitting to maneuvering out of one of two language- proficiency standard requirements for the doctoral degree) to complete master’s and Ph. D. degrees by age 25.

He settled into married life with the brainy and black upper class Jerlean Colley, today a Pitt alumna and scholar from Sacramento, herself a retired Pitt professor. After but one academic disappointment, Jack Daniel committed to apply black consciousness to a Pitt career of stunning progression and accomplishments. Through about 10 Pitt faculty and ranking academic administration titles, Mr. Daniel’s contributions across the Pitt campus are numerous and varied. Without doubt, however, his achievements that uplift black Pitt give him the most satisfaction.

Through that aforementioned series of jobs, the Johnstown Juggernaut amassed a mountain of Pitt victories: establishment of named scholarships; recruitment of students who became Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, Goldwater and other signature scholars; establishment of the inaugural Black Studies ( today Africana) curriculum; mentoring students to earn doctorates; and fostering the appointment of African Americans to high administrative posts, amid other seminal achievements. Invoking poetry, metaphor and the wisdom of notables such as George Washington Carver, James Baldwin and mother Grace Daniel — to benefit students and now the book’s readers — Mr. Daniel also had mastered both teaching and academic advising.

I did hope for a richer treatment of the Daniel scholarly journey, although the book touches on it somewhat. He not only achieved full professor status, but he also achieved the title of distinguished service professor. Those designations result almost wholly from a record of research and refereed publications of the first rank in both quality and quantity. Perhaps his next manuscript will focus on Jack Daniel the speech, rhetoric and communication scholar.

Long- standing University of Pittsburgh accounts report that the first black student at Pitt ( then the Pittsburgh Academy) was required to sit outside an open classroom door to learn in 1829. In 2009, I observed that Jack Daniel was at the center of black Pitt progress for the last 40 years of that 180- year span. “Negotiating A Historically White University While Black” details how and why. The author, now retired, offers insights about continued forward movement as well. The book is available at Amazon.