Some of What I Learned from “An Evening with Earl Graves”

Hello, folks! This week my assignment was to watch the video below, “An Evening With Earl Graves,” and come back with some of my thoughts and what I learned. So, here we go. I’ll also update you with a bit of news about my campus outreach. The host in the video is Julian Bond.

What did you learn?

Thanks to this video and some of the research I did as a result of it, I had the opportunity to learn about Earl Graves and his contributions. As someone who majored in journalism in college, it was worthwhile to learn a bit about Graves and his contributions to Black journalism. In particular, Black Enterprise magazine, which I had not heard of before. I also learned about all of Graves’s involvement in politics, as an administrative assistant to New York’s Senator Robert Kennedy.

What surprised you?

One thing that surprised me was the sheer plethora of other important people Earl Graves interacted with in his life. In his interview on the Digital Archive (separate from the YouTube video), we can see his interactions with people like Bobby Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, Nelson Mandela, and Sidney Poitier.

What research rabbit-holes did you go down in the database?

While researching, I was very interested to learn about the political rivalry between Julian Bond and Congressman John Lewis. In 1986, Bond and Lewis ran against one another in the Democratic primary for representative of Georgia’s 5th Congressional district—which, in an interesting HistoryMakers crossover, was also the district that Andrew Young represented. From what I read, it was a very bitter campaign, dogged by allegations of drug abuse and corruption. Lewis, of course, won the campaign and represented the district until his death in July of last year. It’s fascinating to think about what might have been—as someone who has a relatively decent grasp on twentieth-century history, John Lewis was a household name. Both were prominent leaders of the civil rights movement and had a good chance of winning the primary. If Bond had won, would he be a “household name” for me?

Bond sheds some light on the campaign in his interview in the Digital Archive. He says, “John [Lewis] won this campaign for a couple of reasons, but for one, he'd managed to paint me, to define me, before I could define myself. And he defined me as a lazy person--and I've worked hard all my life.” He went on to describe the feeling of losing the campaign as “crushing,” but something that he was able to get over.

Julian Bond and Congressman John Lewis.

Now, a little bit of a personal update: The semester is going by quickly, and I have a lot of deadlines approaching. I presented to my HistoryMakers slideshow at Northeastern’s undergraduate history club this past Tuesday, and I think that went really well. I’m struggling to get approval to post more flyers in things in more public spaces (as I’ve been told that they would be removed without explicit consent from the school), but I’m super close to just doing it anyway and accepting the “consequences,” which I know wouldn’t be too bad anyway. Lastly, I am supposed to be presenting to a group of Northeastern’s Black faculty this month before Thanksgiving—so I’ll let you know how that goes!