Course teaches history of King

By Megan Finnerty
Features Editor

When Leonard Harris returned from his Fullbright fellowship, he saw something missing in the curriculum.

In fact, he saw something missing in his students.

"There is no historical continuity," said the philosophy professor. "I find my students know very little about what happened, about civil rights. We reap the benefits of the Civil Rights Movement, but we don’t remember how we got here."

So Harris created a class explaining the philosophies of Martin Luther King Jr. and how he shaped the Civil Rights Movement, the politics of America and the world.

The roughly 35 students in PHIL 242, "Philosophy, Culture and the African American Experience," will read a compilation of King’s numerous writings and learn about the history of segregation at Purdue, the Underground Rail Road in Lafayette and the Civil Rights Movement there.

"I hope to bring it home for them," he said. "King is very relevant to us today; we need to see how he’s not just a part of the past. His principles — racial equality, beloved community, pacifism — are still very relevant."

Harris said he wants students to leave the class understanding King’s history, philosophies and how powerful his philosophies are.

"I want students to think about these issues in their own lives. They don’t have to agree, but I want them to think about his teachings," he said. Daneshia Wilder, a sophomore in the School of Liberal Arts and a student in the class, said she enrolled because she wanted to learn about how King affected her life.

"A lot of people don’t know what he did, or about the Civil Rights Movement and they don’t know how we progressed from that period," she said. "I know things aren’t perfect now, but he helped us progress from that time. As people say, ‘If you don’t know where you’ve been, you won’t know where you’re going.’"

Angela Carlisle, a senior in the School of Liberal Arts, and a student in the class, said she hopes to understand more about King’s philosophies because she always heard about him in other classes, but no one focused on him.

In his seventh-floor office in LAEB, a pony-tailed Harris sits in shiny jeans behind a desk flanked by books standing in labeled ranks on the shelves. Personable and forthcoming, Harris tells the story of when he saw King speak in the fall of 1963 at Shiloh Baptist Church in Cleveland, the church he grew up in. He sat in the front left of the half-empty church.

"My mother and father took us to hear him," he said. "Now we all accept Dr. King, but that’s because the world accepted him as a leader before America did. We forget that he wasn’t always popular; he was an outcast. The church was half-full, and that wasn’t unusual. Many people in the black community were afraid, and rightly so; their children were getting beaten, they were losing their jobs because they were following this man.

"My parents were very formal, very somber, pious and humble in his presence, and somewhat afraid. Participating in these marches meant suffering and we didn’t talk about it until later, there was a silence, a hush."

He said students today can follow King by being sensitive to the fact that communities are still racialized, where people are not always judged by the content of their character.

"King didn’t give an algorithm to tell us what to do and when to do it." He said. "It’s up to you and your own integrity. You can’t be a worthy person and do nothing. If you can’t point to an objective thing that you did, you’re living America’s racist dream. It’s not good enough to say we’re progressing, because people’s lives get destroyed, they don’t get promoted, they don’t get the resources, they don’t get heard."

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Features editor:
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