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| Flyer mentioning Kyrle Elkin, 1951 (Brooklyn College Archives) |
This man was a good friend of
my parents named Kyrle Elkin, tall and soft-spoken with a large mustache;
always wore a black suit. He lived with his wife Lillian – elegant, thin, long
red hair in a braid – in a Dutch Colonial house set on a slight rise up from
the street. Both were born in New York City in 1915, which made
them just over a decade older than my parents give or take a few years.
W.E.B. Du Bois, born in
1868, wrote The Souls of Black Folk in
which he famously declared, “The problem of the twentieth century is the
problem of the color-line.” The first African-American to earn a PhD from Harvard,
he co-founded the NAACP and edited its journal, The Crisis, for 24 years. Until his death in 1963, Du Bois challenged
racism and poverty all over the globe and advocated for human rights and world
peace.
I didn’t know about Mr.
Elkin’s connection to Du Bois or frankly much about Du Bois until many years
later when the second volume of David Levering Lewis’s biography of him won the
2001 Pulitzer Prize. Then my father told me he remembered his friend’s
involvement with Du Bois but said they hardly spoke about it. By that time his
friend was dead.
Kyrle Elkin grew up in
Queens, Brooklyn, and The Bronx, the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant who worked
as a salesman and later owned a hardware store. His mother, born in the United
States, was a bookkeeper. They must have been enormously proud of their son
when he was admitted to Harvard in 1936. I speculate that his pacifism and commitment
to social justice emerged during the late 1930s although Lewis states he came
to organized politics through Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign.
In 1950, Du Bois agreed to
chair a new organization called the Peace Information Center whose five officers
included Kyrle Elkin as treasurer. The group’s first task was to promote the newly-written
Stockholm Peace Appeal which petitioned the United States to undergo nuclear
disarmament. We were barely into the Korean War.
After Secretary of State
Dean Acheson denounced the Stockholm Peace Appeal as Communist propaganda, the
Department of Justice demanded that the PIC register “as an agent of a foreign
principal within the United States.” At that point, Du Bois and his four colleagues
decided to dissolve the PIC but the government would not permit it. Indicted
and arraigned in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, each
would pay $10,000 and serve five years in jail if convicted.
With the formation of the
National Committee to Defend Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois and Associates, support grew
for the principals of the now-disbanded PIC. Albert Einstein, for example,
testified on behalf of Du Bois. In November 1951 the charges were dismissed.
I remember Mr. Elkin sitting on his screened porch just before a summer thunderstorm while the war escalated in Vietnam and Mount Vernon’s residents battled over integrating the city’s public schools.
https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2015/11/businessman-young-father-of-two.html
Do we know who the first African-American woman was to get a Phd at Harvard?
ReplyDeleteHarvard doesn't make it easy to find out. But it is complicated because 1963 was the first year that women received degrees from Harvard instead of Radcliffe. It looks like the first African-American woman earned a BA from Radcliffe in 1898.
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