Gerald Fry
Growing up in Wichita, Kansas, I had almost no contact with people who were not White like me. Black
students attended East High but were not in my classes. My only personal contacts with Blacks occurred on family vacations in Mexico, Cuba, and the Bahamas, where there seemed to be more integration of races than in Wichita. Fortunately for me, I was inspired by exceptional Blacks whom I met as a student and as a teacher.
My undergraduate experience at Stanford, which was basically all-White at the time, did not include interacting with Blacks except during a summer internship in Washington, DC and study abroad in Germany. Going to grad school at Princeton, I didn’t expect to have any contact with Blacks, but things turned out much differently. My life, personal and professional, was profoundly affected by Blacks I met while at Princeton. I signed up to take a year-long development studies class taught by Sir Arthur Lewis. As an undergraduate I had read his important book, The Theory of Economic Growth, which actually helps explain the phenomenal growth of China from 1980 to present. I imagined that he would be a tall thin pipe-smoking Englishman. Instead, he was a short bald overweight Black man. Later, he was to become the first Black to win a Nobel Prize in a field other than peace. His terrific year-long course inspired me to develop a strong interest in development studies, which has been the focus of my professional career.
In fact, my first university academic teaching job was as a Peace Corps Volunteer teaching at a brand-new Thai graduate university devoted to development studies, the National Institute of Development Administration (NIDA). My having been a student of Lewis certainly was a major factor in helping me land the most challenging job of my life, being an instructor teaching graduate students at the age of 24, only six years after graduating from East High.
In my second year at Princeton, I had a Black roommate, Julius Coles, one of the first Blacks ever admitted to Princeton. He was a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta. We are still in close touch, and over the years he has taught me much about the lives and circumstances of Blacks, which in my mind was “the Black world.” Thanks to him, I had a wonderful time a few years later getting acquainted with Black GIs on leave from Vietnam in Bangkok bars where I enjoyed Soul Music and savored Soul food. Several years ago, Julius received the James Madison Award, the highest award given to Princeton alumni for contributions to the common good. For example, as Director of Africare, Julius raised over $400 million in support of African development. In 2017, he showed me and Tiffany Smith, one of my Black doctoral students at Minnesota, around key historical places for Blacks in Atlanta.
Also while at Princeton, I had a wonderful classmate, Wilted Phiri, from the Zambia. Later he became Zambia’s Ambassador to Sweden and the Minister for Home Affairs. His interpersonal and intercultural skills were off the charts.
In my last semester at Princeton at a mixer (Princeton had no women students at time), I met Leith Mullings, a Black lady studying nursing in New York City. Frankly, she was appalled at my ignorance of Asia. I had never had any course work on Asia. She was heavily into Buddhism. A few weeks later, I received a package from her containing a copy of the novel by Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse titled Siddhartha, about the life of the Buddha. That inspired me to develop a strong interest in Buddhism and to want to live in a Buddhist country. I still have the envelope in which she sent me that book, and we are now friends on Facebook, 55 years later. I have told her how she inspired me to discover Buddhism and Thailand. Later, I became a Buddhist monk in Thailand. Mullings is now a distinguished anthropology professor at City University of New York and former president of the American Anthropological Association.
Also while at Princeton, I met a Black scholar from Yale who was married to a gorgeous lady from Burma which put in my mind for the first time ever the idea of intercultural romance and marriage. Recently, I celebrated the Golden Anniversary of my marriage to my Thai wife, Tasanee. My lovely grandsons are a mix of about eight ethnicities; their mother is a Chaldean-American.
Now as a professor at the University of Minnesota, my major connection with inspiring Blacks has been to mentor outstanding Black women who have gone on to have highly successful academic careers. This has provided me a chance to give back after the uplifting I received from Blacks such as Sir Arthur Lewis, Leith Mullings, and others.
