Lincoln University of Missouri - Archives Yearbook (Jefferson City, MO)

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Toni Cade Bambera s. Bambara Moves People . . . Venita Hawthorne Clarion Feature Editor 4 Those of you who weren't at the Union Ballroom, February 11, you really missed something. Or someone I should say. She's Toni Cade Bambara, a black woman. She's a writer, having authored andlor edited three books. Two of them are anthologies, entitled The Black Woman and Tales, Short Stories for Black Folks and Gorilla, My Love. In her writings, she does not only entertain the reader but offers up a lesson or moral as well. Why? Because, as she says, l don't want to waste anyone's time. Stories that have no kind of lesson to them are just self-in- dulging agnosticism. All of these may not impress you much if you've never met Ms. Bambara or what's more important, listened to her. Her L.U. audience was attentive to many of her words as she talked about Traditional and Alternative Models. She explained that traditional models, on the other hand, are new ideas and methodology and are not accepted by society on a large scale, which are not only an improvement over traditional models but challenge the overall use of them. After Ms. Bambara's speech, the audience discussed the topics she had talked about and traded their own thoughts and ideas on different subjects with hers. l can think of no other tribute to give to a speaker than for an audience to show this kind of involvement. Their reaction shows the attraction Ms. Bambara has and also explains why so many other people were gathered around her, not only to get autographs and take pictures but to continue talking to her. In discussing black women's involvement in the Women's Rights Movement, Ms. Bambara points out that the movement began to attract national attention in the sixties but that the media's treatment of the movement damaged it. The people that were powerful in the media de- fined it as a new left phenomenon, says Ms. Bambara. They took the women's rights movement and labeled it 'women's lib,' To define it they said it was a middle-class white woman phenomenon and projected that fiction into the public. Now people tend to react-Women's Lib- blahl, instead of seeing it as a movement that we do have a vested interest in, in the sense that we're on the bottom of things. . .certainly black women have an interest in any kind of movement that has anything in it for black peopIe. Ms. Bambara has been established as an accomplished and prolific writer. But she's also an accomplished and conscientious teacher. She was an assistant and then an associate professor of the English department at Livingston Collegelliiutgers University in New Brunwvick, New Jer- sey, from 1969-1974. Currently she's visiting professor at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. She's also working with a different kind of school program, one of the alternative models she mentioned in her speech, called the lndepent Black Schools. There are 163 of these schools in the country, which help to educate black children, some as young as TWO-years old. Their main goal is to train and inform and de- velop our next generation in our ladultsl interest. Unfortunately, not a great deal of support is offered to these schools, since we have vested a lot of time in training ourselves not to trust ourselves. We do not trust a black school operating by itself. Another problem Ms. Bambara says are parents, who are suspicious about what you're doing to chiIdren's heads. The fact that they've given the child to you for two months and he still can't read, bothers them. The fact that the child has been to public schools for seven years and still can't read-somehow that's tolerated more. Bambara said.

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