“I GREW UP IN the shadow of Emmett Till, who was lynched in Mississippi at the age of fourteen. That young man was slightly older than I was.” Ed Whitfield—sixty-seven years old, six feet two, sturdy, with a white beard and shaved head—speaks to me about his life and that of his family in racist America.
Ed is Daniel’s cousin, the son of his American aunt, Winifred Whitfield. We are seated comfortably in the offices of the Fund for Democratic Communities, a foundation that he co-directs in Greensboro, North Carolina. Before the recession, this building held the largest Wrangler jeans factory in the nation—the floor still bears traces of the workers’ shoes and the equipment that once stood here. In the distance, a freight train blows its whistle as it crosses a countryside draped in warm autumn colors.
I came down from New York in a tiny plane to meet Ed at the Greensboro airport, which, on Thanksgiving Day, was totally deserted. Good Christians were home with their families and Donald Trump had just been elected president of the United States. After a few hours of suspense, Ed appeared—he had just returned from a visit to his daughter in Atlanta. I am happy to have caught up with this rare bird, but for the first time in my investigations, I feel almost like an imposter, an insignificant white man lost in the Deep South. If I believe what I hear on the news, nothing ever changes in America: the police still shoot Black people in the back with impunity, the prisons are full of brown people, and the rift between communities doesn’t seem to want to heal. Meanwhile, Trump is well on his way to joyfully pulling apart everything Obama worked so hard to build over the previous eight years. “Trump’s election is going to encourage the racists,” says Cousin Ed. “In the South, the KKK mostly celebrated his victory.”
Daniel’s American family is from Little Rock, Arkansas, a place where 284 Black people were lynched between 1883 and 1959, with the tacit agreement of the police and the public authorities. To hear Ed tell it, the Black community reacted to this ambient racism in two ways. First, by arming themselves. “When John Carter was lynched in 1927, the mob started fanning out into other parts of the city looking for some more Black folk to mess with. I understand from some historical reports that they only stopped when a few Black people came out on their porches with shotguns to say, you know, don’t bring that mess up in here. My father was eighteen years old at the time. I grew up in a house full of guns, and it just seemed normal to me. My sister had a .410 shotgun and my brothers and I had .22s. My father had guns and pistols. And he wasn’t a hunter or anything, but he would take us to target practice and talk to us about gun safety. The first time I heard anything about race was when my parents told me that we would go downtown and I needed to be careful because there would be white* people. I was quite young, and I thought, ‘White people, that’s interesting!’ Our walls were kind of a green color, and the door frames were white, and I was thinking to myself, ‘I’ve never seen people that color.’ I was three or four. When I saw them, I was really disappointed—‘I thought you said white people!’”
The second way the Whitfield family fought for their rights was through academic excellence and the desegregation of the education system. Ed’s mother, Winifred, was an exemplary figure in the fight for civil rights who died a centenarian in 2015. She became a teacher in 1929 at the age of seventeen and eventually earned her master’s degree in education. All of her children went to “the white school.”
“People think that the reason for school desegregation was because you had all these poor Negroes who had these terrible schools in their community. That’s not it. In Little Rock, the education that was available to us in the predominantly Black schools was a quality education,” Ed says. “Opportunities were much more restricted, so there was nothing else that a smart Black person could do but become a schoolteacher. It was really about proving that we were as good as they were. For a lot of those young people, it was pure hell. My sister went to Little Rock Central High School in 1960—this was the school where the president of the United States had to send troops to in 1957 to allow those nine Black children to go to school. But she went, and I remember hearing her stories about being elbowed in the hallway, having ink poured on her in the classroom, having soup spilled on her in the cafeteria. She wrote a poem about it. I still remember the first lines:
I walk these great halls of Central High School
The treatment I get is none for a fool.
Ed went to the same high school in 1964. He was tolerated, barely, though he wasn’t allowed to act in the senior class play “because there were no roles for Negroes,” nor did he participate in an exchange program with a school in Madison, Wisconsin. “We couldn’t find a black child there to exchange with you,” they told him. Ed never made a grade below an “A” except in music, where the grading was subjective and the teacher racist, though that didn’t stop Ed from playing Handel’s Messiah on his oboe for the Christmas concert at the local Black college. But Ed’s particular gift was for mathematics. In 1965, he spent the summer in Ohio taking advanced classes, where he excelled in group theory. He spent the next two summers in a program at Cornell University, first as a student, then as a tutor. His rise to the top was astonishing: in the summer of 1967, at age eighteen, he was invited to the White House to receive the US Presidential Scholars medal from Lyndon B. Johnson. In the official photo, young Ed is slightly taller than LBJ. “I wanted to refuse it. At the time, I was already active in the NAACP* youth chapter and very much opposed to the war in Vietnam. And then I thought about it and I realized, if I do this [refuse the medal], my mother will kill me. That’s one thing that I kind of regret. I would have been the only person ever to do that.”
Ed would soon climb even higher. The presidential scholarship opened doors for him at all the major universities. He received a very serious offer from Harvard but eventually settled on Cornell, where he already felt at home. He took classes in mathematics, philosophy, political science, and African American literature in a program designed to propel promising students from a bachelor’s degree to a doctorate in six years, top speed.
But history would decide otherwise. During his sophomore year, Ed became president of Cornell’s African American student union and quickly suggested changing their name to the Black Liberation Front as an homage to the Viet Cong. This new political engagement came at a time of extreme tension: Martin Luther King had just been assassinated, and the Tet Offensive had marked a turning point in the Vietnam War. Early in 1969, African American students at Duke University in North Carolina occupied the administrative buildings to attract public attention to the issues they were facing. The Duke protests inspired Ed and his classmates at Cornell, who had a few complaints of their own: Black students who straightened their hair in the dorms, creating a smell unfamiliar to their white classmates, were being accused of smoking joints. And worse, some “jokers” with ties to the KKK had burned a giant cross on campus, a traumatic sight for young people from the South. Lastly, after participating in a protest, a group of African American students had been brought before a disciplinary commission organized by the university that was entirely made up of white men.
Ed and his friends decided to stage an occupation—an armed one, whose objective was to create as much disruption and attract as much attention as possible. They achieved their goal: a reactionary historian later called it “the day Cornell died.”* On April 20, 1969, Ed’s heavily armed team took over Cornell’s Willard Straight Hall. “It could have gone very differently, but the university president was a Quaker, a guy named James Perkins, and he was dead set on not wanting anyone to get hurt,” Ed recalls. Perkins would be harshly criticized for what his detractors called a permissive attitude, but his actions likely prevented a massacre. He agreed to the revolutionaries’ demands and offered to take their weapons discreetly out the back door before they gave themselves up. Ed refused: “We came in here with ’em, so we’re going to go out with ’em.” The protest was a windfall for reporters, especially one Steve Starr, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his photo of Ed Whitfield leading a group of protesters out of Willard Straight Hall. Ed hardly looks like the same young man who had gone to the White House in his Sunday best twenty months earlier—he has long hair and a beard, and he carries a rifle in his right hand. “I am so happy that we didn’t have to do anything with those guns other than have them,” he says. Those images appeared all over the world: Daniel saw them in Germany, and his French family discovered them in Paris Match.
Ed’s career at the university was over. He wasn’t expelled and would even return to Cornell the following semester, but his heart was no longer in it. He taught for two years at Malcolm X Liberation University in Greensboro before going to work in manufacturing, where he was a union representative for over thirty years. Since his retirement in 2009, he has been a spokesperson for the Fund for Democratic Communities, which works to create “a system which is not exploitative, based on reconstituting the commons.”
I ask him if he regrets leaving behind the university career that could have been his if he had been willing to toe the line, like most of his classmates. “That would be so boring to me,” he says. “I would have a hard time living with myself under those conditions. My ambition in life was never to try and figure out if I could make myself successful. I was always trying to figure out how I could bring my community along, and that’s why, fifty years later, I’m still marching, even if I’m not as quick as I used to be. But,” he adds with a smile, “I’m working on my second retirement as a famous blues musician.” A beautiful bass guitar is in fact sitting on a pile of things in the back of his car.
During the 1950s and ’60s, Winifred Whitfield managed to stay in touch with Renée Pauly. “My mother talked about Daniel a lot,” Ed recalls. “She just felt bad about what her brother had done, going over there and having a child and not doing anything to take care of him. She thought that was awful.” Winifred sent packages to Renée for Daniel, and it was through her that he eventually contacted his American family.
UPON ARRIVING IN New York at the end of May 1969, Daniel was immediately pulled out of line by customs agents, the first stop and search of many. These gentlemen, who were oddly convinced that Daniel was a drug smuggler, seemed fascinated by his orange-and-blue-striped socks. Walter waited for him at the exit, and Uncle Carl (Winston and Winifred’s brother) and Cousin Robert (Ed’s older brother) picked them up from the airport. Giants, like all the men in their family, they loaded Daniel and Walter’s luggage into an equally giant American car. The two friends spoke a little English, but they had a hard time understanding Daniel’s uncle and cousin, who drove them toward New Rochelle.
Uncle Carl owned a garage, a taxi service, and a number of other more-or-less-legal businesses in Harlem. Thin and elegantly dressed in black, the forty-year-old projected a relaxed charm that Daniel liked immediately. Carl was also a collector for an illegal numbers game, and he invited his European nephew to come with him on his rounds. They ended the day in one of the neighborhood’s basements. Outside, an Irish policeman twirled his nightstick while pacing the sidewalk, just like in the movies. “The cops were incredibly corrupt—that one was looking out for his bread and butter,” Daniel remembers. “Another big guy was guarding the entrance; Carl told him that I was ‘OK.’ The inside was dimly lit, everyone was Black, everyone was smoking, the guys who ran the business wore dark sunglasses. Working men went there to lose their money playing cards or dice or other games I wasn’t familiar with. The tables were covered with wads of cash, and whole piles of it flew from one end of the room to the other at high speed. It was an amazing thing to see, kind of an organized chaos, very picaresque.”
Daniel and Walter worked at Uncle Carl’s garage for a while, then took a Greyhound bus to Little Rock, Arkansas, where Aunt Winifred and the family were waiting. “He looked like my mother’s family,” Ed says, remembering Daniel’s arrival. The young Frenchman was in awe of Ed and his friends—“Black American revolutionaries armed to the teeth”—and by “the enormity of what had happened at Cornell.” An unmarked FBI car followed Ed everywhere he went, and Winifred strongly recommended that Daniel not run in the street if policemen were present. Ed and Winifred told him all about the family history, the fight for civil rights, and Black consciousness. Ed spoke about his “undying love for African people.” “I didn’t understand at the time how meaningful that visit was for Daniel,” Ed recalls. “Later on, he wrote a letter thanking me for spending time with him and talking about how he had really found something he could be a part of.” Meeting his family and seeing a Black America that was fighting for its civil rights at the end of the 1960s was like an electric shock for Daniel’s politics and identity.
Over the next three months, he and Walter traveled around the US on Greyhound buses, thanks to the 99/99 ticket, which, for ninetynine dollars, gave them unlimited access to the whole network for ninety-nine days. They crossed the continent (three days and three nights, nonstop) because Daniel’s father, Winston McLemore, now retired from the US Army, lived in Seaside, California. Winston and his wife, Mary, welcomed Daniel into their home, but things didn’t click the way they had with the Whitfields. Winston voted Republican and his worldview was diametrically opposed to that of his son. After a few days of living with his biological father, Daniel discovered that Winston was a serious alcoholic whose episodes sometimes led to violent altercations with his wife—everything Daniel had learned to hate in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Mary was also suspicious of Daniel, convinced that he had come to claim his share of her husband’s inheritance. Winston, an honest enough man despite his standoffishness, offered to help support Daniel while he finished school. “Fifty dollars* a month would really help,” Daniel suggested. “I could go to school without having to work nights.” Winston agreed, but Mary made sure that Daniel never saw a penny. “Meeting his father must have been a big letdown,” Walter says. “But he didn’t show it. We clowned around like always, even put on a little show for Winston and Mary.”†
The duo didn’t stay in Seaside for long, choosing instead to go mix with the flower children at Berkeley. Then, at the “Celebration at Big Sur,” they discovered the music of Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell amid clouds of marijuana smoke.
After two decades of waiting, the visit to Seaside was a bitter disappointment for Daniel, but it did lead to a much more significant encounter. The McLemores were friends with a half dozen other Black army retirees, including the Wade family. Mrs. Wade—who had grown up with Winifred Whitfield and, like her, knew how to run things—sent her grown daughter to chauffeur Daniel around during his stay. And that’s how Daniel Pauly met Sandra Wade—but we’ll come back to her later.
In the meantime, Walter and Daniel continued their road movie on the Greyhound, passing the time by playing endless games of chess, which Walter almost always won. In August, they ended up in New Orleans, where they witnessed the evacuation of the city ahead of Hurricane Camille (from which it was ultimately spared). Penniless as usual, they took a tour through New Orleans’s underground. They finally realized that, to the people they met there, a Black-and-white duo could only be a gay couple. This prejudice would be confirmed by Ted Conover during his study of American hobo culture a decade later.* Daniel described their picaresque adventure in a humorous text entitled An Innocent’s Summer.†
He and Walter were a lot less innocent, however, when they boarded the plane back to Europe in New York. Walter, fascinated by the States, applied to one American college after another, eventually completing his doctorate in applied chemistry in Fargo, North Dakota. Daniel, for his part, could no longer see himself having a relationship with a white woman and broke up with Ute as soon as he returned to Germany. “I was terribly upset by everything I had seen and I reacted badly,” Daniel admits. “I know now that what we had was worth more than my convictions. She was a wonderful girl, and she helped make me into an open-minded adult.”
* Ed has a way of pronouncing “white” so that you can hear the “h.”
* National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
* Thomas Sowell, “The Day Cornell Died,” Hoover Digest, no. 4 (1999).
* Fifty US dollars in 1969 is about 320 dollars in today’s money.
† “There’s no point, there’s no sense in having a father you literally can’t communicate with, whose feelings for you have always been open to question.” Marie Ndiaye, Three Strong Women: A Novel, trans. John Fletcher (London: MacLehose Press: 2013), 12.
* Ted Conover, Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails With America’s Hoboes (New York: Vintage, 2001, first published 1984).
† Unpublished.