[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 140 (Friday, September 30, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: September 30, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
  TRIBUTE TO DR. C. ERIC LINCOLN AND THE CLARK ATLANTA LECTURE SERIES

                                 ______


                          HON. HAROLD E. FORD

                              of tennessee

                    in the house of representatives

                       Friday, September 30, 1994

  Mr. FORD of Tennessee. Mr. Speaker, on Thursday, October 6, Dr. 
Jacqueline L. Burton of the Eli Lilly Endowment will deliver the 
Twelfth Annual C. Eric Lincoln Lecture at Clark Atlanta University. 
This historic lecture series is distinctive in that it is the oldest 
continuing series honoring a living black scholar. The Lincoln lectures 
were conceived, founded and initially financed by graduates of Clark 
Atlanta, who in their college days had been taught and motivated by 
this young professor, who began his scholarly career at Clark in 1954 
and stayed for a decade. His room in the men's dormitory quickly became 
a sort of intellectual ``watering hole'' for students from every 
discipline. His fledgling personal library was available to any 
student, any hour of the day or night and the ideological interchange 
which occurred there often lasted until the wee hours of the morning. 
The young scholars who attended these sessions proudly called 
themselves ``Mr. Lincoln's Boys.''
  Twelve years ago, 25 or 30 of ``Mr. Lincoln's Boys'' gathered in 
Atlanta with some ``Girls'' he had also taught to do something that 
would pass on to a new generation of college students some part of what 
they had gotten from Professor Lincoln's presence at Clark. Now that 
they had become doctors, ministers, professors, scientists, lawyers 
and other professionals, they wanted to institutionalize some part of 
what they learned from a man who was hired to teach them religion and 
philosophy, but who also taught them how to take hold of life and make 
it pay dividends for every honest effort. They had take to heart Dr. 
Lincoln's daily reminder: ``You can be better than you are. You can 
excel.'' They had indeed excelled and they wanted to share with their 
successors, a critical source of that excellence. So they founded the 
C. Eric Lincoln Lectures, which have brought to the Clark Atlanta 
campus Alex Haley, John Hope Franklin, Charles H. Long, Cornel West and 
others of similar eminence to share the perspectives which had shaped 
their lives.

  Who is C. Eric Lincoln? He is a living legend. Up from abject poverty 
in the cotton fields of North Alabama, C. Eric Lincoln retired a year 
ago at 70 from the faculty at Duke University, where he was the William 
Rank Kenan, Jr. Professor of Religion. Now ``Emeritus'' at Duke, he 
holds five earned degrees, a dozen honorary degrees and numerous other 
honors. He is the author of more than 20 books, the first being the 
celebrated ``The Black Machine in America,'' which was hailed by 
critics as ``one of the best technical case studies in the whole 
literature of social science.'' The book is still the recognized 
authority on black Islam after 35 years, and is still selling briskly 
in a revised edition. His most recent book, ``The Black Church in the 
African American Experience'' with Lawrence H. Mamiya--one of his 
former students--earned for him the distinguished title of ``Dean of 
Black Scholars'' from Time Magazine when the book was published in 
1991. Interspersed among his numerous scholarly works is a book of 
poetry, ``This Road Serves Freedom'' chronicling the African American 
odyssey and dramatized by a troupe of actors led by Ossie Davis and 
Ruby Dee in Symphony Hall in Boston. He is also the author of a novel, 
``The Avenue, Clayton City,'' which won the Lillian Smith Award as the 
Best Piece of Fiction about the South in 1988. His ``Race, Religion and 
the Continuing American Dilemma'' is the standard college text in race 
relations.

  Dr. Lincoln has lectured at many of the great universities of the 
world, in France, Scotland, England, Scandinavia, Iran, Africa, 
Iceland, and the United States. However, most gratifying to him has 
been his one-on-one relationship with youth, irrespective of race or 
station. In a professional career that spans 50 years, he remembers 
best the satisfactions that came with inspiring young people to 
``struggle against any convention that claims to have predetermined 
your capacity to be what you want to be.'' Under that rubric, over the 
years, inside and outside the classroom, he nurtured more than 200 
aspiring scholars through their frustrations of self-doubt to the 
fulfillment of publication and scholarly recognition, reading and 
critiquing their manuscripts, guiding their revisions, placing their 
best work with publishers who trusted his judgment because they 
respected his work. To see his young scholars in print and to rejoice 
with them in proving to themselves what they could do, was the only 
payment he ever asked or received.
  C. Eric Lincoln is the father of a whole generation of scholars 
currently interpreting the black experience in religion. Few would deny 
the impact of his work and influence on their careers. His writing and 
teaching continues in retirement, except that now Dr. Lincoln's 
``boys'' are for the most part young black men in prison. They see my 
name in books or in the press, he explains, and they write to me. He 
has never failed to answer a letter from a prisoner, and at any given 
time, he may be in correspondence with as many as 25 or 30 men he will 
probably never see. Some are Muslims. Some aspire for the Christian 
ministry. Some just need someone to talk to and to care about them. But 
practically all of them want books, he says. When he was teaching, 
Professor Lincoln set aside a percentage of his income from outside 
lectures to buy books for his growing prison clientele. When he 
retired, he reserved 200 paperbacks (no hardcovers are permitted 
prisoners) to have some on hand as the requests continue to come in. 
The rest of his scholarly books and papers were added to the C. Eric 
Lincoln Special Collection already housed at the library at Clark 
Atlanta University.

  Dr. Lincoln has a very interesting hobby--it is writing hymns as a 
means of expressing his religious convictions in context. In recent 
years, his hymn, ``How Like a Gentle Spirit'' in the New United 
Methodist Hymnal, has been widely acclaimed for its illuminating view 
of God without sexist overtones. Another popular hymn, ``Lord, Let Me 
Love,'' is a United Methodist supplemental hymnal, ``Songs of Zion.'' 
Two other hymns appear in the new Episcopal Hymnal, ``Lift Every 
Voice.'' On October 6, the students at Clark Atlanta will be singing a 
different kind of hymn to open the Twelfth Annual Lincoln Lectures. It 
will be their new Alma Mater occasioned by the merger of historic Clark 
College and Atlanta University. The Alma Mater, ``Reign Clark 
Atlanta!'' was written by C. Eric Lincoln, who though not an alumnus of 
the institution, gave it his formative years, and perhaps his most 
impressive years as a teacher and a friend to the students who 
institutionalized that effort in the C. Eric Lincoln Lectures.
  So, Reign Clark Atlanta! and a salute to Dr. Jacqueline Burton and 
the Eli Lilly Endowment, which funded much of the research which made 
C. Eric Lincoln the ``Dean of Black Scholars'' but more than that, a 
friend and inspirer, a challenge and a role model for black youth 
everywhere.

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