From living Black history to teaching it
Reflections on Black culture in 1960s Paris and the importance of teaching Black history
By: Helena Milburn
April 18, 2024
Lebert “Sandy” Bethune sits in the office in his New York City apartment.
Photo by Helena Milburn
Lebert “Sandy” Bethune was invited to return for an event at Stoney Brook University in Long Island, New York, where he taught about Black history almost fifty years ago. Now, Bethune had the chance to teach a new generation about that history, that he not only studied but lived through.
Bethune was sitting in his Paris apartment in 1964 doing what he often did then, hanging out with his friends and listening to jazz records, when suddenly another friend Carlos Moore knocked on the door.
“The man is here,” Moore said to Bethune when he answered the door.
Bethune and his friends knew who the man was.
Moore ran out of Bethune’s apartment and up the street with the others following close behind, eventually leading them into the brownstone apartment of American writer Chester Himes. When they opened the door to the apartment, they saw Himes’ sitting on his couch and, sitting next to him, “the man,” Malcolm X.
Earlier in the week, Bethune and his friends had heard Malcolm X was coming to Paris and hoped for a chance to meet him. They tried, without success, to figure out what hotel he would be staying at, and were resigned to the fact their meeting wouldn't happen – until Moore brought them face to face.
During his time in Paris, Bethune and his friends showed Malcolm X around the city and interviewed him for a documentary. He left an impression on Bethune, who later described Malcolm X as having a father-like presence, and had hoped to meet him again. But Malcolm X left Europe and, only a few months later, was assassinated.
Bethune, a young, idealistic, aspiring writer and poet, spent his mid-20s in Paris where he met the likes of James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Malcolm X. His experiences are part of a rich tradition of Black creatives and Civil Rights leaders in 1960s Paris. Now, at 86, Bethune is reflecting on his time there and explaining the importance of teaching Black history.
When Bethune came back to the U.S. in the early 1970s, he started programs teaching Black history, and, half a century later, he is still telling his stories at the intersection of art, literature and the Civil Rights Movement. This history has even more resonance in a political climate that has made education about Black history and social justice a target.
Sitting on the couch in his home office, in New York City, next to stacks of books on every open surface, with old papers stuck between their pages, and walls adorned with old framed photos of the men he’d met, Bethune recalled the experiences that would inspire him to teach Black history.
As Bethune recounted his decades of stories, he would often cite the poems that were important to him: the Claude McKay he heard growing up, his favorite Lanston Hughes. He not only remembered their titles, but also whole stanzas, which he would recite in the middle of a thought.
Growing up in Jamaica
Sandy Bethune was born in 1938, in Kingston, Jamaica. Growing up, Bethune said there was no formal Black studies in school, but he had heard a bit about famous Jamaican activists, like Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay, who both lived in the U.S.
Bethune recalled hearing McKay’s “Flame-Heart” in third grade and can still recall many of its lines. In the poem McKay, who left Jamaica, wrote about memories of his home country.
Also in his childhood, Bethune heard stories of his grand-uncle who marched with Marcus Garvey in New York, and he saw pictures of Garvey’s elaborate 1924 parade. Garvey was a Pan-Africanist who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914 and who advocated for the decolonization of Africa and economic improvement for Black people through self-reliance.
“We heard about that, but we don't we don't know the details,” Bethune said
Even without knowing the details, Bethune said Garvey was showing him something new. He said Garvey was a different kind of representation, or what Bethune called “prominence.”
“This prominence [Garvey had] is positive prominence, as opposed to the prominence that we got in Jamaica at that time,” Bethune said. “It was the prominence of dancing or grinning. And these are serious people, this is not show business, this is the real stuff.”
Bethune attended Kingston College for high school, where he was on the cricket team and ran track.
Bethune (lower center-right) and his high school cricket team in 1954.
Photo courtesy of Sandy Bethune.
At 17, his parents moved with Sandy and his two younger siblings to the U.S., where they settled in Queens. Bethune started attending New York University, taking the long subway ride to the Manhattan campus from his parents’ house.
While at NYU, Bethune was involved on campus editing student literary magazines. He said he was conceited then, and would recite whole paragraphs from Shakespeare plays to his over 200-person classes.
His youthful interest in poetry and literature had lingered and Bethune wanted to pursue a career of his own. He heard of the growing number of Black intellectuals, activists and writers moving to Paris and, imbued with confidence from his new NYU degree, decided he wanted to follow in their footsteps.
Bethune said his mother, who only had a sixth-grade education, said: “All I want from you is to be a feather in my cap.” Meaning, he said, “make me proud.”
After graduating from NYU, Bethune asked his mother if he could borrow $1,000 to move to Paris. He told her he would write a chapter of a book every month for seven months, then come back to the U.S. and sell his book to become rich and famous.
Also at this time, the draft for the Vietnam war had begun and Bethune said he didn't want to be sent to fight. His mother, also not wanting her son to be drafted, agreed to his plan, and Bethune set off across the Atlantic for Paris.
Meeting Langston Hughes
Living in Paris in 1964 and trying to make it as a writer, Bethune and his friends heard that Langston Hughes was coming to the city on an invitation from the U.S. State Department for an event open to the public. Bethune and his friends couldn't pass up an opportunity to see such an accomplished poet in person, but they weren’t fans of Hughes’ work then.
“Now, we weren't particularly happy with Langston … We considered Langston to be kind of old fashioned,” Bethune said. “And, maybe, Langston wrote simple things.”
Jason Miller, a professor of 20th century American poetry at North Carolina State University said that this was a common critique of Hughes’ work and continues to be today. But Miller said the value of Hughes’ writing comes from the cultural and historical context it exists in.
“The cultural context surrounding what he's writing about is really key.” Miller said “And so yes, accessible, simple, is something he embraced.”
Despite their overall perception of Hughes, Bethune said there was one poem he connected to: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” According to Miller, who has published three books on Hughes, the poem was one of Hughes’ earliest works, written by Hughes while he was on a train from Cleveland, Ohio, to Mexico City.
“The poem has been read, historically, as the idea of an archetypal speaker, imagining his connection across time and geography to be connected all the way back to slaves and workers who have built other countries and continents,” Miller said.
At the event, Bethune showed Hughes some of his poems, and Hughes liked two he wrote about his late grandmother, who Bethune described as one of the most important and supportive people in his life. Those poems later became Bethune’s first published works.
Bethune and Hughes maintained a relationship and they met whenever Hughes was in Paris. Bethune said that Hughes' humor was important. He said he was always cracking jokes and Bethune had never seen him angry.
“Humor was essential to Langston Hughes,” Miller said. He said for Hughes laughter was “absolutely a personality trait, also a rhetorical tool.”
Miller said Hughes would use humor to get away with saying things that might otherwise have been seen as offensive. Miller referenced one 1957 speech at the Windy City Press Club in Chicago, where Miller said Hughes’ thesis was “we haven't been able to legislate whites into integrating and treating us equally, maybe we can laugh them into it.”
In one story, Bethune had recently traveled to Tanzania to film a documentary, but shortly after arriving was kicked out without warning or reason. Bethune returned to Paris upset by his trip being cut short, and walked the streets, stewing in his discontent, when he heard a familiar voice call down from a balcony.
“Hey Sandy! Didn't I just leave you in Africa? What happened?” Hughes shouted down at him.
Bethune told Hughes about his deportation, to which Hughes tried to comfort him by saying: “Sandy don’t worry about that. I’ve been thrown out of better countries than that.”
“Langston Hughes believed that you had to laugh to keep from crying,” Miller said.
Following the incident, Hughes gave Bethune some small writing jobs to pay him and wrote Bethune a poem about the importance of a negative experience. The poem Hughes wrote, along with a photo of the two of them, still hangs in Bethune’s office.
Bethune (left) and Hughes (right) with the poem Hughes wrote below them. The Poem reads:
“It is wise / To suffer illusions, / Delusion, / Even dreams — / To believe that in this life / what is real / May also be what it seems. / What is not true / May be — / for you.”
Miller said he was not surprised to hear Hughes did this for Bethune, and that it was common for Hughes to give young writers poems, work and advice.
“Hughes really realized that there was a pretty closed circle,” Miller said. “And he absolutely wanted to open up those doors for everyone else as much as he could.”
Interviewing Malcolm X
Bethune said that both Hughes and Malcolm X were like father figures.
“In his presence you felt, like, very – like [he’s] your dad. He was very secure,” Bethune said about Malcolm X.
This perception was very different from the Malcolm X he had seen on TV, a person he said was characterized as a separatist and a “leader to darkness and to death.”
After meeting him in Chester Himes’ apartment, Malcolm X asked Bethune and two of his friends, Moore, an Afro-Cuban man who had left Castro’s regime, and John Taylor, a photographer from Tennessee, to show him around Paris to meet more African-Americans. In exchange, Malcolm X agreed to a taped interview with Bethune, Moore and Taylor.
Bethune and his friends got a 16 millimeter Bolex camera, set up their shot and each had a chance to ask the infamous civil rights leader whatever they wanted.
“Brother Malcolm,” Bethune said, “who is the Black man?” He later asked: “Who is the Afro-American?”
Bethune said he always struggled with his identity as a Black man between Jamaica, America and Paris. Even though he never lived in England, his identity was tied to the British as well, because of the colonial history of Jamaica.
“My identity was formed [when I came to the U.S.], but it was much more English oriented, and it remained so to a large extent,” Bethune said.
Bethune said when he was in the U.S., he was sometimes not taken as an authority on Black studies because he was Jamaican, not African American, and he said there was tension between the two groups. But Bethune said when those tensions arose, he would just go back to Malcolm X’s answer to his question about Afro-Americans.
“In America, you don't catch hell because you're from Jamaica, you don't catch hell because you're from Brazil, or from Cuba, or from Dominica,” Malcolm X said. “You catch hell because you're Black.”
Malcolm X and Sandy Bethune in 1964.
Photo courtesy of Sandy Bethune.
The films Bethune made in Paris deal with his question of identity.
“In the case of the Malcolm film, there's the issue of political identity and authenticity, politics,” Bethune said.
He also made another film while in Paris that follows a young racially-ambiguous model who slowly takes off her makeup and “mask,” called “Juju of My Own.”
A character in the film says: “My father said, ‘If you sleep in a mask, it sticks to your face.’ I will never sleep in mine. I want to keep my face, I want to keep my name.”
Teaching Black history
Malcolm X was assassinated in New York City only a few months after his interview with Bethune. Bethune, who considered himself an idealist, said that while the news of Malcolm X’s death was shocking, it did not change his idealism.
“We dedicated ourselves to press on in whatever way we can,” Bethune said.
Bethune and Taylor got to work putting together a documentary with what they filmed during their interview. The film, titled “Malcolm X: Struggle for Freedom,” has been shown in Lincoln Center in Manhattan and is now archived in the National Museum of African American History and Culture collections.
Bethune said he feels a responsibility to tell the stories of the men he met in Paris. He recognized the importance of telling and teaching Black history.
The perceptions of the figures he met in Paris have changed in the fifty years since he left.
“Hughes is – once we start digging, even with fingernails – someone that is always in the cultural imagination of America,” Miller said of Hughes’ legacy today.
Despite this, for a long time Hughes was left out of political conversations. Hughes was branded as a communist, even being called to testify before Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), and that reputation meant that he was not mentioned by politicians at all for decades after his death. According to Miller, it was not until the Hughes poem “Kids Who Die” gained popularity in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s killing that Hughes and his work became quotable by national politicians.
When he moved back to the U.S. in the late 1960s, he went to Columbia University to lobby for increased study of Black history. Columbia hired him for the summer of 1968 as assistant in the Department of Philosophy and the Special Sciences.
Five years later, Bethune returned to teaching Black history, this time at Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York. There he taught Social-Cultural Features and Expressions of the Afro-American Experience.
Bethune said that Black studies being withheld from children sets them back.
“When you have a sense that something is being kept from you, of course you want to get it, temptation,” Bethune said. “But also there's always an uneasy feeling of like, ‘Why?’ You know? It's so wrong, I'm gonna go with this, but still, it gets you.”
Teaching about race has become a point of contention in politics recently. Critical Race Theory, an approach to analyzing issues of race, became a target of the right, even though most educators said it is not being taught to students before college. CRT became a catch-all for race education, with state lawmakers passing bills restricting what about race could be taught in schools.
According to Education Week, 44 states have introduced bills or taken similar action to limit CRT or teaching about racism or sexism in schools from 2021 to 2024. In 18 states, these bills have passed, or restrictions were enacted without legislation.
On March 21, Bethune was invited back to Stony Brook University to discuss his life and films. His wife April, who he met at Stony Brook, and daughter, Simone, were there to watch him speak. But Bethune said he was surprised to see many of the students he taught at Stony Brook almost 50 years ago in the audience. He later learned Simone teared up in the audience, witnessing the admiration for her father.
“In that group, with former students of mine, there was a feeling of like, warmth, that I felt was quite extraordinary,” Bethune said.