Profile: Strickland Continues the Struggle Against Corruption

The class grew silent as Professor William Strickland sauntered into the classroom, a copy of The New York Times in hand. He begins to read articles from the paper in a soft-spoken voice, students in the first rows lean forward to listen. He picks quotes from stories such as BP’s recent settlement with the federal government and Bradley Manning’s trial, highlighting corruption that is available for all to see. “The system is fundamentally corrupt,” he finishes, as he strokes his graying beard and gazes toward the floor.

Strickland grew up in Roxbury Mass., a municipality in Boston. He described his experience in a recent interview, saying “In retrospect I think it was great. That’s where I met Malcolm[X] and [Louis] Farrakhan, and Boston was a Jazz center. I have very fond memories of growing up in Roxbury.” Strickland met Malcolm X, who was also from Roxbury, at the age of 8, and he would often frequent George Lee’s Jazz club Storyville.

He attended Boston Latin School and was admitted to Harvard upon graduation. He describes the high-demand academic environment which he faced, “You start off with a class of almost 700 boys and when we graduate it’s like 221 guys, two-thirds of the people flunked out or left, and in that class there were six of us black guys and two of us were accepted to Harvard.”

After two years at Harvard, Strickland found himself in an awkward situation with one of his advisers. He was looking for an escape and found it in the Marine Corps, “I panicked, and the Corps said they could get me out of town in three days, so I joined the Corps.” He was told that he would be stationed in Albany, when he received his orders he realized that it would be Albany, Ga. and not Albany, N.Y. as he had assumed. He would be exposed to a very different culture than he was used to in Boston. “I was exposed to a much different community of people than I grew up with, because my community was blacks and Jews, Italians and Armenians,” he said.

In the Marine Corps, Strickland became a part of the Criminal Investigation Division, he pointed out that “Nobody thought black people could be in CID.” He was deployed to Vietnam “when we weren’t supposed to [be there]” and Lebanon in 1958. He cannot discuss his experience because the work he did is classified, but he describes the lessons that he learned from his service. “The Marine Corps is like a fraternity, they socialize you and they put you on terms with yourself that you wouldn’t ordinarily become acquainted with, you find out that when you think you can’t walk another step, you can run five more miles,” he said.

Strickland returned to Harvard after his four years in the Marine Corps, and began to get involved in the developing Civil Rights Movement. His involvement began when he met Peter Countryman, a white student from Yale who organized the Northern Student Movement, which aimed to help assist the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee that had emerged in the South. “We started off tutoring kids in the school system, but then we discovered that the whole system was corrupt,” says Strickland. To address the problem at its roots, he took his work for the movement south, to Mississippi, and began coordinating directly with SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

When asked what the primary difference between working in the North and the South was, he responded, “These people would kill you, so that was an education.” He describes how one of the leaders of the movement, Bob Moses, was beaten into a coma. When he regained consciousness he washed the blood out of his shirt so his followers would not be scared, he came back as soon as he could and continued organizing. Strickland reminisced about the atmosphere that surrounded the movement, “People don’t appreciate, don’t understand, what a magnificent and life changing time it was, it was almost a kind of high, the excitement, and also you could see the concrete results of your efforts.”

In Mississippi he helped to found a think tank, Institute of the Black World, with Lerone Bennet Jr. who he describes as his “mentor in many ways.” Lerone helped Strickland in getting his message across to others, particularly by recommending that he modify his language to avoid profanities.

IBW ran into difficulties when the Federal Bureau of Investigation began using covert tactics to obstruct their efforts. He said, “We were COINTELPRO’ed, they broke into our office, they interfered with our fundraising, so we had to develop a theory with a small organization, how are we going to surivive? And so what we did was that those of us who had credentials we left.” The leaders of IBW found jobs as professors at various colleges across the country.

Strickland ran into Malcolm X on his way back from Mississippi, “he asked me to come to the organizing meeting for the OAU [Organization for African Unity].” He and Malcolm would become good friends and stay in contact until Malcolm’s assassination. “We were tight until he died, I’d go down to New York and hang out if he was in New York and he would come to town and come by my house to visit,” he said.

Strickland’s primary motivation for becoming a professor was to continue his pursuit against government corruption. He says, “I never pursued academia for academia’s sake, because this isn’t the real world. So I kept trying to influence, I tried to be relevant, the question is how do you politically educate the masses.”

His students seem to be picking up his message. In an interview earlier this week Sebastian Smick said, “It’s really thought provoking, it’s not something that I’ve had to think about in my own life very much, why the system exists the way it does today is something that has alluded me my entire life.”