488 Ethnic Minorities
Twenty-four African American students stood shoulder
to shoulder the next day in front of the council while their
statement was read. They allowed the council 24 hours to
respond. Robert Lee Green, president of ABPsi also spoke.
He demanded that APA assess each member $50.00 to aid the
black psychology cause. He also demanded that psychology
stop using the black ghetto as a research colony.
Green and I were invited guests on the Today Showthat
week. Our brief exposure, broadcast from Washington, was
seen by an estimated 19 million TV viewers. We were both
nervous participants!
The black student group’s statement focused on increasing
the number of black undergraduates, graduate students, and
faculty and on establishing training programs for black
students in the black community. The Council adopted “in
principle” the black student statement and appointed George
Miller and me as a committee to negotiate with the black
students and to develop a more specific set of proposals to
present to the October council meeting. We invited the BSPA
to send negotiators to Washington to meet with us. No way.
We were invited to come to Watts, a black conclave in Los
Angeles, to negotiate. Miller and I flew to Los Angeles where
we were met at the airport and each taken to a host family in
Watts. I stayed in the home of Charles Thomas, a major fig-
ure in black psychology. We met with students for a couple
days in a small neighborhood church. Our meals were pre-
pared and served by a black “ladies group.” Discussions were
spirited, but friendly. Our evening meal was accompanied by
unlimited quantities of Cold Duck, and during the evening
numbers of black students and black psychologists joined the
group for informal, light-hearted interactions. We took back
to APA several proposed by-laws changes (that were quickly
passed by the required 2/3 majority of those voting) and
recommendations for Central Office staffing changes to
help new committees ensure priority for minority-increasing
efforts. APA agreed to provide space for a new BSPA suite of
offices and to lend money to staff them. Ernestine Thomas
moved to Washington to provide staffing support.
By the end of the 1960s, a majority of APA members were
sympathetic to the black demands. The country had wit-
nessed a decade of struggle against the defenders of segrega-
tion, Jim Crow, and racial injustice. The parallel struggle
against the Vietnam war was ongoing. The climate for change
was favorable.
During the same 1969 APA convention in Washington
there were anti-war demonstrations by psychologists. I led a
march of some 300 psychologists (many from Psychologists
for Social Action) down Connecticut Avenue to Lafayette
Park, across from the White House, where I. F. Stone and I
spoke against the war. Later in the week, a sunrise service
was held at the Lincoln Memorial when Molly Harrower,
B. F. Skinner, and I spoke against the war. Many of these
events were recorded by Bryce Nelson (1969) in Science.(In
this same issue is a report from the Department of Health,
Education and Welfare on the safety of the oral contraceptive
pill saying that the benefits outweigh the risks; and another
article on the risks of pesticides, but no restrictions yet on the
private use of DDT.) It is also worth noting that Americans
had just landed on the moon. It was clearly a decade of major
change.
Kenneth B. Clark was elected in 1969, the first African
American APA president. At the 1970 APA convention in
Miami Beach, the APA board was confronted by a militant
Association for Women in Psychology with demands for
major financial reparations from APA for years of unequal pay,
discrimination in hiring and in graduate admissions, and for
blatant sexism. The registration form for the convention asked
for member’s name and wife’s name, even though 30 percent
of the APA membership was female. Texts in psychology re-
ferred to “men and girls” and sexual harassment was rife.
All of this was to change, but someone else will tell that
story.Minority Psychologists in the Community
VERA S. PASTERThe shifting status of African American people in this coun-
try has been mirrored by our changing positions in the pro-
fession of psychology. It was not until the Emancipation in
1865 that enslaved persons could be taught to read except
under penalty of imprisonment, flogging, or other severe
punishments. In the south, schools for slaves were out of the
question, and colleges were unthinkable. In the free states,
there were a handful of colleges, including Berea and
Oberlin, that opened their doors to black persons. After the
Emancipation, in the former slave-owning states, colleges for
African Americans began to be established by missionary
groups (historically black colleges). Later, in 1890, the