America in Travail

by Edgar H. Brookes

Overview

In 1968, Pendle Hill was good enough to invite me to give a series of lectures in American and Canadian universities, culminating in participation in its own famous Spring Term. I spoke on my own and Alan Paton's beloved and unstable country, South Africa, and gladly did my work of teaching. But I learned much more than I thought. I was told in advance that I would find American student life greatly changed, and so I did. During my stay there occurred the assassination of Martin Luther King, followed both by nation-wide mourning and by angry riots. All this stirred me deeply. I felt that it would be good for me to put my thoughts into words, and this I now do.

Brash as it may seem for a mere visitor, and a South African at that, to comment on American affairs, I hope that what I say may help some of you in your own thinking; and as a South African I can only speak in humility and with deep pain, knowing the desperate needs and diminishing hopes of my own darkened land. I speak also as one who in this situation has had to tight for unpopular truths at some risk and amid many difficulties, one who has been denied opportunity after opportunity of service after having, in earlier years, been able to do much in his country's life.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940157160098
Publisher:	Pendle Hill Publications
Publication date:	03/22/2017
Series:	Pendle Hill Pamphlets , #159
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	122 KB

About the Author

Readers already familiar with Edgar Brookes’ beautiful and moving Three Letters from Africa will be interested in the impact made on him by his recent visit to America. To this encounter he brought the understanding and perception which has developed through a lifetime of racial encounter in his own homeland. During the course of that lifetime, begun in 1897, he swung from complete apartheid to integration. He represented the Africans of Natal and Zululand in the South African Parliament from 1937 to 1952. He stood for South Africa at the League of Nations and UNESCO. He has served on planning councils and commissions; he has written fourteen books, mostly on interracial matters; professionally he has taught students of all colors at Adams College and the Universities of Pretoria and Natal. And he was the head of the Liberal Party till its recent dissolution. These activities have divided him from many, but they have evoked the admiration and gratitude of others. It is not surprising that he has been awarded the Wellcome medal for dedicated service to Africa.

The present pamphlet is in substance a lecture given at Pendle Hill in May of 1968.