Washington stressed economic preparation, rather than protest, as the means of promoting the social mobility of black people. Washington, who had founded the college in 1881, and his approach to politics permeated the campus culture. In contrast, in the 1950s Tuskegee Institute was still governed by the conservative ideas of the late Booker T. He did not behave like most of the faculty, either.īorn in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in 1929, Hamilton had attended Roosevelt University, considered a hotbed of Chicago radicalism when he graduated in 1951. Students in the dormitories would imitate his charismatic cadences, precise grammar, and impressive diction. Not a Southerner, he did not sound like the rest of the Tuskegee faculty. It was immediately obvious that Hamilton was different from the other professors. I first met Charles Vernon Hamilton when I was a student at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama. Watching the unfolding of civil rights history informed and enriched his scholarship as he created a role for himself as an intellectual amongst activists. He lived through the Jim Crow era and witnessed the political transformation that made possible the election of black officials in the South.

Board of Education (1954) and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–56). A chronicler of the Civil Rights Movement, he was a young adult at the time of Brown v. He was a teenager when the publication of Gunner Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem in Modern Democracy (1944) spotlighted the country’s racial issues and when President Truman integrated the military (1948), in which Hamilton served for a year. His search for meaning within politics is found in his teaching, writing, and speeches. Political scientists often classify themselves as either empiricists or interpretative analysts.

Black power charles hamilton