This month, the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida features excerpts from an interview with Dr. Mildred Hill-Lubin (1933-2018), a retired professor and assistant dean at UF, who was instrumental in bringing African literature to UF.
Hill-Lubin [H] was interviewed by Ryan Morini [M] in 2014. Excerpt edited by Beth Grobman. For the full interview, go to tinyurl.com/Iguana2141.
M: Let’s start with a little background—your career was sort of situated between African and African American Literature … how did you get started on that track?
H: My early days in college did not include that much African American literature. I remember my senior year, the professor put one book on reserve and had us read a bit out of it. The book was Sterling Brown’s “The Negro Cavalcade.” Because we—at that time, our minds were not even on African American literature—we thought it was not any good, because we had never had any in any place.
I was able then to go and get my master’s. And while I was there, the desegregation of schools began. We also had written a grant to help improve the teaching of English among public high schools, and while we were doing that, we had one consultant to come in—a very dedicated English professor who had studied African Literature. This is around [19]61 or so. She knew all about Chinua Achebe, and she introduced us to him and some of the other African literature writers. Well, immediately—as soon as I read those writers, I began to see the similarities. That is the way I became interested at looking at the relationship, or the interconnections, between African and African American Literature.
So that was my road. A pretty long road, but it was always a long road for me. [Laughter] The funniest [story] is, the first time that I went to college, I was not even accepted. Nobody had told me or sent me a letter saying “You may come,” or anything. So I always tell people I went to college without being even accepted. But I made the highest score, so they weren’t going to send me away then.
M: Did exposure to that literature kind of change your perception of Africa?
H: Oh, it did. But by that time, the Black Movement had started. I went back and graduated in 1960 as an undergraduate, and graduated at Western Reserve in 1961. So, this was the period when everything was on fire—I mean, literally, as well as stimulating in many ways. By then, I was feeling pretty close to Africa, and also I had the opportunity to go to Ghana, so I went and studied some. As I said, Africa and African American was in the air. The word that I was trying to remember for a long time was Africanism: that’s what you call our focus.
M: That’s right. Alongside the civil rights, there was a lot going on.
H: The Black arts came a little bit later. By that time, I was very much into African and African American literature. So much so that I was being hired as a consultant to come and talk about African and African American literature to high school teachers.
M: I was going to add, concomitant with that, you’ve also got a lot of the independence movements in Africa, so there’s a lot of African nationalism.
H: Oh yeah, the African countries were becoming free. You know that Chinua Achebe’s novel was written in [19]58, so he tells—and we then taught it as more of a view of history, a real life view of Africa. In that case, it was eye-opening that we could do that. We could see these were people who had a society, who had rules, and so on. And then at the same time, we could see the literary aspect of it, too.
M: In a previous interview, you noted there was another pivotal moment for you, and that was when Martin Luther King was assassinated —
H: Oh, that was a terrible day. Well, that day, we heard that Martin Luther King—it was sad then. But fortunately, we went into the chapel and had a little service, and that calmed people down a little bit. But we were very upset about that. That period was awful altogether, because people in the community, the whites in the community, had been calling persons who were talking about integrating, desegregating the schools, that they were going to get the children or do harm to them. And they finally got my telephone number. And they would tell me things like, “We going to shoot him [her son] just like we did Kennedy,” and things of that nature. So it was scary.
M: I can imagine. And so, you ended up coming to UF, then, in [19]74, is that correct?
H: It was ten years later. Then I went to graduate school to get my Ph.D.—Got the Ph.D. in [19]74 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Then I was to go back to Paine, because I went on one of their scholarships to help teachers, but instead, Florida was recruiting Black professors.
M: So you were the only Black female faculty member here at that time?
H: Well, I think that they had some in the College of Education. In the College of Liberal Arts, at that moment, there was a group of white women teaching literature, looking at women characters in the writing, and discussing it—you know, woman as agents and so on. So I decided, “Well, I’m a woman. I may as well join.” And that’s how I became involved in women’s programs. [Later] I was nominated to become an assistant dean in the graduate school. But I taught African American culture more than I did literature.
M: When you came in in [19]74, you would have been about the only person teaching African literature here. Is that right?
H: I had to plead for the course from the department! Nobody was teaching African literature! There was one lady teaching African American literature, but she was happy when I came and gave it to me. They didn’t have any idea about African literature in English. When I told them I wanted to teach it, they thought I was going to be teaching in translation. And I told them, “No, most of them wrote in English. And furthermore, they studied the same English people that we did.” [Laughter] So, they allowed me to start this class in African literature. I called it “African Literature in English.”
M: When was the first time you read James Baldwin? Do you recall?
H: I don’t think I had met Baldwin, but I had read so much about Baldwin that I thought I already knew him! [Laughter] In graduate school, I took a class—we did a great deal of Black literature in graduate school. And I took a class on Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin. Although I had not met [Baldwin], I just felt I knew him. Because he was not only a scholar, but he was a popular figure. So you just heard a great deal. And when he did “Fire Next Time” and all of those, he was on television shows, and just everywhere. And I definitely knew him through his works. We read “Go Tell It on The Mountain.” Many of his essays.
But I did get to meet him, [when he came to speak at a conference in Gainesville]. It was a full audience. Guess they were just as happy and excited as I was. It was going along very smoothly. Until all of the sudden, Baldwin was talking, and this voice came over the loudspeakers: “We don’t have that kind of talk here! You can’t talk like that!” And the whole college—“Oh!” and everybody’s eyes went up, and people were trying to figure out what to do, and where, and who was doing it. And of course, Baldwin, at first, was shocked. Like, “Who is this talking to me?” And, then, all of the sudden, Baldwin rolled those eyes up. And he’s saying, “Oh, white supremacy is over! It’s over!” Oh, he went on then to start preaching about white supremacy was over, and “We aren’t going to have that kind of thing, either, down here.”
M: Had you seen much of the—I mean, obviously, Gainesville still had—well, even still—but in the [19]80s, there was sort of very much an Old South kind of mentality in parts of Gainesville, and outlying areas, Alachua County.
H: Oh, definitely outlying areas! I have seen the Ku Klux Klan in a park up there in Lawtey. It was a service station there, and they parked with their hoods on and everything!
M: Did holding this conference, this event, open any doors at all, or make it easier to get more African literature into the curriculum? Did it change anything at UF after that?
H: I don’t think so. Because they act now like they just started International Studies! [Laughter] They don’t even count that class. But now, when I retired, one of the thing they did say, that I introduced so many new courses to the department. That was my significance. Which I think was a big one.
M: Academic politics are already pretty strange, to say the least.
H: I will say that we received great cooperation from the university to handle this conference. Many groups contributed. They decided to start inviting African poets or writers to campus. We did get funds for that. Ama Ata Aidoo came right after. And she came back quite a number of times. And it wasn’t long before they had begun teaching a bit about African writers. We brought in some new faculty members. And they had had some African literature.
M: Did you notice any more student interest in it after that?
H: Not noticeably, but I taught a course in African literature. And I would normally get a pretty good class full of students. I think many of them were looking for some elective in English, and that was the only thing open by that time, and so they would take it. [Laughter] But I don’t think they were that excited about it. But they did a pretty good job of working with it once they did get in the class. As I used to tell my students—many of them didn’t know anything about Africa or African American literature anyway—so I’d have to have so many books for them to look up this and all. But then, afterwards, I’d tell them, “Now, you pass it on, and then we won’t have to have people go reading everything else before they can begin to talk about the novel.”
M: When you first started teaching African literature, did the Smathers Library on campus have the materials you needed already, or was that an issue?
H: We have a pretty good collection now, but back then, it wasn’t that much.
M: You were pretty much swimming upstream and trying to—
H: When my teacher in undergraduate school put the Sterling Brown book on reserve, practically every Black book was out of print. Even Sterling Brown’s “The Negro Cavalcade.” No books—no Black books—were in print. And then, with the Movement, when people started hollering for Black courses and literature, and more and more, then we started getting many minimal collections. And I used to go around to the small bookstores. I told them I wanted to see children’s books with Black children in it. Then we’d buy it. I encouraged a lot of the bookstores to do that.
M: Thank you very much for sharing all of this. It’s important for people to be able to know what it took to get African literature to the point that it is now at UF. So thank you very much.
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