Reflections/Jonathan Gramling
I Just Don’t Understand!
Perhaps the University of Wisconsin is a different place than the place I attended in the 1970s. But I just can’t understand why a Euro-American UW-Madison student would record a racist rant and put it on the Internet. Why is she compelled to say such ignorant things? How could she retain such ignorance when the truth that proved her beliefs a lie surrounded her at UW-Madison?
I loved coming to UW-Madison in 1970. For me it was a wonderland of ideas and people and a world-class education. I met people different from me, from my roommate Tim Bernthal from Racine who was Lutheran and I Catholic to Jeff and Rob, two Jewish roommates from New York with whom Tim and I shared a small rental house. What bound us together, in some ways, was the strong anti-war movement and counter culture that was prevalent in Madison. Madison was a place of enlightenment.
It did have its negative reputation amongst the more conservative folks I knew. I worked at a custard stand in Milwaukee after my freshman year and one of the managers would mock me for attending “The Little Red Schoolhouse” in Madison. I had to get three haircuts — I had grown my hair long my freshman year — in one day before I met the almost military standard for hair length that they had. I was a very conscientious worker back them and they also mocked me for my perfectionism, so to speak. I could take it because I knew that in the matter of a few months, I would be back up in Madison to further explore the world.
It was through UW-Madison and the University Catholic Center that I got involved with Project Self-Help and Awareness, which took college students down to Mississippi during college breaks to work in Head Start centers, help plant people’s fields and on one occasion slaughter hogs and prepare the family’s pork supply for the year. And at night, we would talk and share so many things. And I listened to stories of the civil rights movement in Mississippi. While Dr. Martin Luther King and others led the national movement, each town and city had to have its own civil rights movement to break the grip of the racist power structure in their community. These were real-life, unknown civil rights heroes.
At UW-Madison, I took several classes from the Afro American Studies Department, courses on history and culture. I met people who came from Milwaukee and while we weren’t buddies, the conversations we had in class were important to my personal growth.
One of the people I had met through the project was Eddie Young who lived in Itta Bina, Mississippi, which is home to Mississippi Valley State University, the school attended by Jerry Rice, the all-world wide receiver. After Eddie had visited me at UW-Madison, he invited me to visit Alcorn State University where he went to school in Lorman, Mississippi. I ended up going there for two years, from 1975 to 1977. It was one of the most impactful experiences of my life. I became aware of what it was like to be in the minority on a college campus and beyond and how my own racial attitudes could use an adjustment.
I came back to UW-Madison to get my undergraduate degree before returning to Mississippi in 1978 to work on the congressional campaign of an independent Black candidate. I met my former wife during the campaign in Jackson, Mississippi.
During this time, I also became involved with the United Farmworkers Union support group in Madison and met Dolores Huerta, who was the union’s lead organizer. I met Refugio Guajardo, a California farm worker assigned to Madison. And as we walked the picket line outside of liquor stores selling Gallo and Franzia wines at the time, Refugio and I would talk. It was an incredibly educational experience that led to some friends and I — when we were out in San Francisco — to visit the dedication of a UFW health clinic, perhaps in Salinas, through the local UFW office in San Francisco that we went to visit.
And during those early years in the 1970s, I stayed on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation for a week ostensibly doing repairs on an old church in the midst of the Missouri River valley, but again I met people and learned much. I had taken a course on Native American history from the point of view of Native people. It opened my eyes to many things and gave new meaning to my family’s travels through a Northern Wisconsin reservation back in the early 1960s, I believe, and seeing the poverty of the people who lived there as we passed by.
Our lives are shaped by the people we meet along the way and the relationships that we form. I have become good friends with people from West Africa and India and other places around the world because of the relationships that we formed. They have influenced my life and I hope mine has influenced theirs.
And those relationships had led to my work at the Urban League, NAACP, Centro Hispano, the Southeast Asian Healing Center and other places. It’s all about relationships and your willingness to follow those relationships to experiences unknown.
I often tell people that Madison is a portal to the world. You can meet people from just about every country and learn about the world through their eyes and experiences. And in the process, you also learn how human everyone is — you get your occasional bumps and bruises — and also how such wonderful, talented and kind people come from all areas of the globe. By meeting people different than you, it enriches your life and, in my view, makes you a “civilized” person who has grown beyond ones station in life they were born into.
And so let me get back to the Euro-American student who posted the racist rant online. UW-Madison is about more than picking up job skills. While those are important, they are only half the education for UW-Madison is a world-class university that allows one to become a world citizen. And if you just stay with the people whom you have known your entire life while on campus, then you truly haven’t grown as a person and taken advantage of what UW-Madison is all about. Why pay all of the tuition money to attend this university if you don’t take advantage of all that there is to offer? You can learn a profession at a community college for a lot less money.
UW-Madison is about more than a classroom experience. It’s about growing beyond our childhood perceptions of people and experientially learning all that the world has to offer. And through that experience, one can grow out of the ignorant intellectual clothing of our youth to an enlightened understanding of the world and all of the wonderfully complex people within it. For that, I will always be grateful to UW-Madison.