I was saddened to learn last week of the passing of one of my most important mentors, William Cheek, a longtime professor of history at San Diego State who was instrumental in my intellectual, political, and professional development as a young college student back in the early 1980s.
As the San Diego Union-Tribune obituary of Professor Cheek noted:
In graduate school at the University of Virginia, Bill discovered the autobiography of John Mercer Langston, the biracial architect of the late nineteenth-century civil rights movement and first Black congressman from Virginia. Bill and Aimee Lee's lives intertwined with their joint work to ferret out and write Langston's compelling story. Bill's own experience growing up in the segregated South and his prolonged study of the African American experience made him a powerful advocate. Like his model Langston in the preceding century, Bill mesmerized students and public audiences. He described the injustice of the American past to endow listeners with a sense of purpose in building a fully participatory democracy in the present.
Indeed, Bill and his wife Aimee Lee’s seminal work, John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedom,1829-65 was the first biography of Langston, a contemporary of the legendary Frederick Douglass, who was equally important in promoting Black civil rights and building the foundations of a movement and struggle that persists to the present day. Langston aided John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, championed the Union cause, and began the long push for the U.S. to recognize the full humanity and citizenship rights of African Americans.
In the two classes that I took from Bill, both parts of his American historical biography course, he helped instill in me a deep commitment to social justice and the fundamental belief that ideas and ideals matter. Through lectures on seminal figures from Douglass to Lincoln to Martin Luther King Jr., Professor Cheek emphasized the crucial importance of white Americans coming to terms with the profundity of America’s original sin of slavery and the continuing disease of racism.
It was not an intellectual exercise in virtue signaling for Bill; it was a call to a compelling moral obligation to do whatever we could to right the wrongs of our past and redeem the present. Having grown up in the segregated South, Bill was a clear-eyed realist about the limitations of American democracy who continued to have faith in the value of the ongoing struggle to reach fully participatory democracy. The ideals of the Declaration of Independence could really mean something, finally, if Americans could ever get past, as he put it to me multiple times, “continuing to fight the Civil War.”
Professor Cheek’s lectures were always compelling, and many times I found myself tearing up as he outlined the personal agonies faced by Lincoln or the transformative traumas faced by those who had lost a spouse or, worse yet, a child. He put flesh on the bones of historical figures and challenged us all to find humanity in those who came before us and in each other. In Bill’s classroom, I came to realize that while the world outside was fraught and waited, as James Baldwin put it, “hungry as a Tiger,” there was something deeply ennobling and lasting about the kind of teaching and discussion of ideas that moved you to empathy, understanding, and radical imagination. He gave me the gift of purpose and commitment.
In the years after his classes, while Bill and Aimee Lee were still in San Diego, I would frequently visit them and spend hours talking about my academic and literary endeavors. Bill and Aimee Lee never wanted to talk about themselves, insisting instead that my wife and I tell them about our graduate studies and, later, our work as academics and activists in San Diego. The Cheeks embodied a level of total generosity of spirit that I have rarely seen elsewhere.
Bill Cheek always asked me hard questions. Did what I was doing matter? How did it help other people? Was I doing enough to challenge myself to do and/or be better? When I had my son, he asked me what kind of father I wanted to be and what kind of future I wanted for him. There were rarely any easy niceties, but there was always good humor, excellent food, fine wine, and love.
When I asked him once what I could do to repay him for all that he had done for me over the years, he simply said, “pass it on.”
Over the nearly thirty years of my career teaching young people myself, I have tried to honor that advice and do what I can to create a space, in the midst of a world gone mad, where my students can feel like their ideas really matter and that they can do good in the world by striving for excellence, doing right by others, and believing in the possibility of a beloved community.