Former vice chancellor offers strategies for transforming inner-city America
Charles Z. Wilson was 16 years old when he left the Mississippi Delta with $50 in his pocket and joined the “Great Migration” of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north. His aim: to overcome color, racial and class barriers and realize his ambitions in what was then a “white man’s world.”
After several torturous years in Chicago’s decrepit “Black Belt” neighborhood, Wilson not only got a university education but by age 27 became the second African American to complete his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois.
Bruins who know Wilson fondly remember him as the vice chancellor of academic programs at UCLA. Under the stewardship of Chancellors Franklin Murphy and Charles Young, Wilson became one of UCLA’s “go to” administrators who contributed to the campus’s legendary management success.
In a talk at Haines Hall on Feb. 11, Wilson, now a Los Angeles-based management consultant, reflected on his life and the potential of higher education to transform inner-city and rural America. The event, devoted to a discussion of Wilson’s recent memoir, “Crossing Learning Boundaries by Choice: Black People Must Save Themselves” (AuthorHouse), was organized by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies as part of its Black History Month series of events.
Wilson pointed out that President Obama has promised to remake the nation – and that his pledge must be “restated and interpreted by each of us.” African Americans must “get up-front and take up the task of saving themselves,” he said, adding: “To put it very simply as a black man, we have to get off our butts and remake our inner-city and rural communities.” (He conceded that he was using “tough, unsophisticated language” but that it was deliberately aimed at spreading what he called “the legacy of the struggles that I have been a part of since I was 10 years old in Mississippi.”)
For him, Obama’s promise represents “a return to my book’s central theme — [that] we must transform black America to meet the 21
st-century,” Wilson said, adding: “Some of the lessons that I have attempted to convey in my book have been humanized by the success of President Obama.”
Although he was inclined to agree with those pundits who say that Obama “prevailed because of serendipity, a unique confluence of events, happenstances, a perfect storm,” Wilson said that Obama’s victory does offer a number of lessons for African Americans.
Professor Emeritus C.Z. Wilson (second from left in the middle row) with his parents and siblings.
“He projected a deep sense of trust, commitment to hard work and risk-taking, and a commitment to others,” he noted. And while Obama has become a role model for many, it’s important to realize that it’s not enough to emulate others without cultivating one’s “personal convictions and character, putting them in an action mode,” said Wilson.
“The president is in rare company in that he believes in the power of core values of honesty, trust, family, responsibility and education,” said Wilson, adding: “These values, he believes, are the difference between failure and success in this world — and that’s not easy to grab when you’re on the margins of the system, as he has been or as we grew up in inner cities.”
Wilson urged inner-city African Americans to end their economic and social isolation and move toward a more multicultural and mainstream America. His book, he said, discusses the ideas and strategies to not just revitalize historically black institutions and initiatives but to increase the educational and economic opportunities for African Americans while at the same time encouraging personal responsibility and risk-taking among black families.
“We’re taught in economics to look upward at the margin — this is why we’re in such trouble in Wall Street, because we never look at the other margin, which is the consumer, the inner cities, the working-class families,” he said, noting that decision-makers routinely assume that because consumers don’t have a lot of power they aren’t given any in making decisions that impact on their lives and the wider society.
“I’m happy that we now have a president who understands the dynamics of social systems, and he knows how to integrate them into a problem-solving framework,” said Wilson.
As a student at Carnegie Tech, the predecessor to Carnegie Mellon University, Wilson learned that individuals and temporary organizations have considerable power. “You don’t have to have a bureaucracy to make things happen — and Mr. Obama understands that,” said Wilson. “That’s why he’s talking about things like ‘the bad bank,’ a temporary bank that will allow the government on the one hand and the private banks on the other to join forces and solve their problems.”
Just as “the bad bank will disappear” once its problems are solved, the problems of the nation’s inner cities, too, can cease, Wilson proposed. “We have to begin to have more faith in our community-based organizations, our power to network and to build not-for-profit organizations … until we can get the larger systems and organizations to function for us,” he said.
