Did you hear those reports claiming Latinos now outnumber Blacks? Saturday before last, there was a front page story in the Times quoting Dr. Henry Louis Gates saying that Latinos were now "the number one minority in the nation," and that this was somehow a historic moment. The article also said Gates was scheduled to appear in an upcoming Black Studies Conference to be held at the Schomburg Research Center in Black Culture...

Last Thursday, February 6th, there was a hint of snow blowing in the night air as I rolled off the George Washington Bridge onto the windy streets of Harlem. At the point where Lenox crosses 135th two massive structures, Harlem Hospital and the Schomburg Center, stand across from each other. Pedestrians bubbled up out of the subway as cars whisked past in the streets of the busy intersection.

I was on time, a few minutes early in fact, but guess what? The conference was closed. There were already 450 people packed into the 350 seat auditorium. I was part of the small crowd in the carpeted lobby just outside the hall. I chatted with the guards at the door. We were joined by a blue suited, youngish man who turned out to be the grandson of 1940s bandleader Cab Calloway.

As we reminisced about the music and the movies starring his zoot suited, jazzman grandad, a group of a dozen or so suddenly exited the auditorium. Right away Cab Calloway III turned to a guard and said authoritatively, "Now surely you can let us in!"  And just like that the guard said, "Yes, go right on in."

Five men and a woman were up on the softly lit black stage. Each spoke slowly and deliberately in turn. The audience sat rapt in the darkened hall. I noticed that Gates, who was to be a featured speaker, was nowhere to be seen. Drs. Carol Boyce Davies and James Turner ruefully recounted how professors of Black Studies are to some extent recognized and facilitated in American Academia, but they had to pay a price. They had to spend a good deal of time doing the kind of research the university approved of before they were permitted to indulge their first love, the unfettered study of their people.

Davies wore her hair in dreadlocks. Turner had on a dark brown African top flecked with white streaks. The moderator, Schomburg Director Howard Dodson, noted that in the roughly 300 years between 1492 and 1776, three times as many Africans as Europeans entered the Americas. Hence, he said, Black History is hardly a peripheral endeavor but a large bulk of the study of the American past. Dr. Dodson looked sharp as a tack in his dark brown suit, white shirt, black tie and glasses.

Dr. Ron Karenga, originator of the African American celebration of Kwanzaa, was also there on stage in his trademark 60s style dark glasses and black dashiki. No matter what he said he always brought it back to his twin themes, self-reliance and African centeredness. What I remember of panelist Dr. Robert Hall’s comments was his meticulous recounting of the history of Black Studies. He was a bespectacled, ruffled figure in his sport jacket and open necked shirt. But he was intense, very intense, as he delivered his detailed chronology of the discipline.

At one point a vociferous gent, sitting up front and wearing a brown cowboy hat, interrupted the deliberations with an insistent demand that they take questions from the floor. After a decent interval, that’s exactly what they did. The first questioner was a Latino gentleman who explained how he gained an appreciation, in fact, a love of his Africanness. He also said that he had helped secure the publication of W.E.B. DuBois Souls of Black Folk in Cuba. The audience cheered him.

Next came the fellow with the cowboy hat. He was a journalist, Playthell Benjamin. The tall stout figure stood at the mike holding a huge cigar and brandishing it for effect as he went to work. First he seemed to attack the comments of the first questioner by citing a litany of anti-Black actions of Latin American governments. Then he went to work on Hall’s chronology of the history of Black Studies. Among other things he let us know that he was in at the very beginning of the Black Studies movement and the civil rights movement. That was a surprise to me and apparently to the audience as well.

Another questioner turned out to be none other than Dr. Lenora Fulani, former candidate for the presidency of the US. She was warmly greeted by the crowd. Fulani politely asked why it was that the Black Studies movement had not only failed in maintaining African American consciousness, but also done little to foster the literacy of the Black student in America. Dr. James Strickland, another panelist, seemed to take offense at the question. In testy tones he said, in effect, that the whole generation of American youth, not just Blacks, were going nowhere. Karenga, however, explained that though the discipline could not be blamed for the failures of the society, we all had an obligation to teach African awareness at all times in all of our activities in our communities.

Afterwards I learned that Dodson, at the very beginning, had given an explanation for Gates absence, and said that the issue of Latinos surpassing Blacks was not, as the Times piece indicated, to be a major focus of the conference.

By the way, the place where the conference was held, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, was named after Puerto Rican Arturo Schomburg. As a youth in the NY public schools, Schomburg asked his teacher why he was not learning anything about the history and contributions of Africans. The teacher said because Africans had no history or contributions worth mentioning. Arturo Schomburg spent his entire life proving him wrong. His private collection of books on Black history ultimately became a public library that eventually became an internationally renowned research center.

Furthermore, whether or not Latinos outnumber Blacks remains to be seen, since the identifications "Latino" and "Black," to some extent, overlap. But beyond that, who's really counting? Not the Latinos. Not Blacks. The Census Bureau is run by Euro Americans who decide the categories for classification and first floated the idea that we should be worried about who is "the number one minority." I wonder if it will be headline news on the day, not that far off, when they hold that dubious title? (Arthur Lewin, author of AFRICA IS NOT A COUNTRY: IT'S A CONTINENT  Ramsees7@yahoo.com )

The Conference was sponsored by Princeton University, the Schomburg Center and the CUNY Institute for Research on the African Diaspora and the Caribbean (IRADAC). For a fuller recounting of the 3-day event see Herb Boyd's excellent article in www.tbwt.com  ramsees7@yahoo.com