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Among many scholarly pursuits, Gerald Gill ’70, associate professor of history at Tufts University, has conducted extensive, groundbreaking explorations of the history of African-Americans at Tufts and of race relations and black protest activities in Boston.
His impact as a teacher and scholar has been profound in his 26 years on the Tufts faculty. In 1997 he was the inaugural recipient of the university’s Arts and Science Multicultural Service Award. At the Millennium Reunion of Black Alumni, the Pan-African Alliance held a ceremony making Gill an honorary Tufts alumnus, acknowledging his service to black alumni, and the same year he received the annual Distinguished Service Award from Tufts’ Africana Center.
This last recognition was indeed special, for the award was renamed in his honor. Now called the Gerald T. Gill Distinguished Service Award, it is given to faculty or staff whose achievements exemplify a commitment to enriching the lives of students, faculty, and staff and whose work demonstrates an effort to create an environment where the contributions of people of African descent are celebrated in a diverse approach to learning inside and outside of the classroom.
The coeditor of The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader, produced in conjunction with the PBS television series that debuted in 1987, and author of The Case for Affirmative Action for Blacks in Higher Education (1978) and The Meanness Mania: The Changed Mood (1980), Gill has been recognized twice as Professor of the Year in Massachusetts by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and CASE, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. The awards salute his dedication to teaching and impact on and involvement with undergraduates.
Perhaps those who knew Gill when he was an undergraduate would not be surprised to learn the focus areas of his scholarly pursuits nor of his impact at Tufts and beyond.
When Gill arrived at the all-male Lafayette in 1966, a year of ROTC was mandatory. Protests against the war in Vietnam were getting louder, but Gill was not against the war initially and paid little attention. The 18-year-old from New Rochelle, N.Y., was the first in his family to go to college and he was thankful to attend a first-rate school at a time when few blacks had such an opportunity.
He says he got there because, when he took his PSAT, he checked a box marked “Negro.” That brought him to the attention of the National Scholarship and Service Fund for Negro Students. Lafayette, the first college to accept Gill, gave him generous financial support, the main reason he chose the school.
“I had no problem with ROTC because I was the beneficiary of Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964,” he says. But the times were changing. The emerging black power and anti-war movements would transform his ideals and shape the way he viewed the world for the rest of his life.
When Stokley Carmichael spoke at the College, not long making after his famous “black power” speech at Berkeley, some students objected, seeing Carmichael as separatist. Martin Luther King Jr., they argued, was preaching integration, not separation. But, Gill recalls, “I agreed with much of what Carmichael had to say. It was a turning point for me.”
In spring 1968, following the assassination of King, a group of students wanted to form a black student organization, modeling its constitution after a similar one at Princeton University. Though it proved difficult, the Association of Black Collegians was born.
“I’m proud to say it is still on campus,” Gill says.
As a junior, Gill changed his major from international relations to history. He studied African Americans in the American Revolution and the origins of the black Baptist church. And he took a course on the black man in American civilization.
“That was the key,” Gill says. “That’s what started it all.”
As a senior, Gill was on Student Council and president of ABC. He was also a residence hall proctor for first-year black students. The new students had been steeped in activism in high school and came ready to carry the torch at Lafayette, Gill says. The association spelled out a list of demands in a manifesto. They wanted more black students, black studies programs, more black faculty members and administrators, a black social center, and the end or neutralization of the effects of racism on campus.
In March 1970, about 25 black students met at length with several trustees, and the following month the board approved the establishment of a Black Cultural Center, later to be dedicated in honor of David A. Portlock.
With thoughts on employment after college, Gill was taking education courses. At the urging of Portlock, who had been recruited by Lafayette in 1968 as a part-time adviser to blacks from his teaching job in the Easton Area school system, Gill trimmed his afro and shaved his mustache and goatee for his student-teaching practicum at Phillipsburg High School. He was the first black to teach at the school, he says.
The fall after Gill’s graduation, as he began teaching social studies at a middle school in New Rochelle, the number of blacks in the incoming class was nearly double the number when he had entered Lafayette.
At the urging of Isaac Newton Patterson IV, a part-time instructor of African African studies, Gill went to Howard University, where he earned a master’s and doctoral degrees in history.
In 1970 Gill told Lafayette Alumnus magazine there was “nothing” he liked about Lafayette and would not consider working for it.
“That was an accurate reflection of my views then, but not now. I do appreciate the education I got from Lafayette, and I’m proud of it,” he says.
America has changed, too, since he left Lafayette, Gill says. There has been progress in race relations, and affirmative action has created the largest black middle class in history. Yet large numbers of blacks still live in poverty.
“We haven’t yet reached the promised land in race relations,” Gill says. “There’s a constant need to struggle.”