Reflections of an MIT Student Activist
Part I: The Early Years
By Dr. Waayl Ahmad Salih, MIT ’72, SM/EAA ‘73
This four-part reflection on being a student activist during a time of social upheaval and transformation at MIT and nationwide is written by Dr. Waayl Ahmad Salih with parts adapted from his 1999 interview with Clarence G. Williams in Technology and the Dream: Reflections on the Black Experience at MIT, 1941–1999 (MIT Press, 2001).
“I had never heard of MIT . . . I was going to volunteer to fight for my country in Vietnam. That was my plan.”
Early Life
My given name was Milton David Dailey. I began going by Ahmad Salih after joining the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), a black nationalist organization, in 1970. I changed my name legally in 1971 because MIT wouldn’t put an alias on my degree.
I was born on the south side of Chicago in 1950. My family moved to Indianapolis when I was three. My parents were both from the South, and we were very poor. My mother, Clara Dailey, was from Alabama and only had a fourth-grade education. My father, John Porter Dailey, was from Mississippi and finished high school before dropping out of college after about a year. An alcoholic, he was unemployed during much of my early childhood and, as a result, we lived in a number of dirt-floor basements and dilapidated houses.
At one point, my father accidentally burned down the house above us, and our family was forced to live with our cousins for a few months. My aunt and uncle had thirteen kids themselves, so eventually my four siblings and I were sent to the Guardian’s Home, a large state-run facility that was used to warehouse orphans and children whose parents couldn’t take care of them. This was how the county welfare department dealt with wards of the state in those days.
Nowadays, children are more commonly placed in group homes. My siblings and I were later split up into separate foster homes. My older brother Larry and I were placed in the home of the Hares, a sanctified minister and his wife. I remained with them from the age of six until I came to MIT at age 18.
Having a stable and loving home life in spite of my rough beginnings was one of the first big breaks of my life. I lived with foster parents who loved me. Looking back, I can see that as the main difference between how my life has turned out compared to the lives of my brothers and sisters.
“I look at my life as a series of lucky breaks. It kind of makes you believe in a divinity.”
In elementary school and junior high school, I tried to be a bad boy. I often played pranks with my friends and frequently got into trouble. I also liked doing math problems and puzzles, which fostered my interest in science and math. But the rebel part of me didn’t want to “perform” for teachers. So, I would do things ass-backwards, like score zeroes on tests even when I knew all of the answers. I became valedictorian of my junior high school class solely based on an achievement test, despite having all D’s and F’s.
One day, at the end of junior high, I was ragging on one of my foster brothers for dropping out of school (he ended up in the Navy and going to Vietnam). Well aware that I was messing up in school too, he said to me, “Well, you’re going to do it too” — drop out, that is. In order to prove him wrong, I started studying and began to get better grades.
High School
I went to Shortridge High School, a predominately white public high school on the north side of Indianapolis. During the 1960s, the neighborhood was rapidly changing: Blacks moving in, while the mostly white, Jewish population was moving out. When I first arrived at Shortridge, the student body was around 70% white. By the time I graduated, it had changed dramatically to about 70% black students. During my sophomore year, the board of the Indianapolis Public Schools turned Shortridge into a magnet school. It was an attempt, I suppose, to stave off the “black takeover” of Shortridge. It didn’t work, but it gave students the opportunity to take advanced math and science courses as well as non-traditional languages like Japanese.
At Shortridge, I took chemistry, physics, and calculus, doubling up on math and science courses each year. They called me “Mr. President” because I was president of so many clubs (Spanish Club, Book Club, Mu Alpha Theta, Thespians, etc.).
Because I lived in the hood, I knew all the homeboys. After playing football, wrestling, and running track, I knew all the athletes. (I set a school record in the 440-yard dash that still stands to this day — likely because they switched to the metric system in the 70’s.) Being a nerd in calculus and physics, I knew all the scholars. And being in the band, orchestra, and thespians, I knew all the musicians and actors. So, politics was a natural progression for me. I was later elected both senior class president and president of the student council.
Mr. Green, my calculus teacher (later to become principal of Shortridge High School) was the reason I decided to attend MIT, a school I had never heard of. I had been planning on enlisting into the Marines and fighting for my country in Vietnam. Mr. Green not only persuaded me to apply to MIT but filled out the application himself and had me sign it. MIT was the only college I applied to.
My older brother Larry was the radical at Shortridge. He had joined the Black Muslims in his junior year and staged a one-man sit-in in front of the school to protest discrimination. Coincidentally, my real father had by this time turned his life around by joining the Nation of Islam. In compliance with their ‘Do for Self’ philosophy, he started a land-grading business and eventually bought a house, which enabled my parents to get my two older sisters out of foster care. Looking back, my early exposure to both Islam and Christianity would be the beginning of a lifelong spiritual quest.
Beginning around 1964, some of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) sit-ins and marches with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Abernathy came to Indianapolis, but I never participated. I was more into my school activities and academics.
After getting accepted to MIT, I had a choice to make: Am I going to go to the Marines or am I going to go to this school, MIT? My girlfriend at the time helped me make the decision. She said, “Well, you know, if you go to the Marines, you can’t leave when you want to leave. If you go to school, you can come back and visit me or I can come up and see you.”
“Alright,” I said. “I’ll go to MIT.”
Note
This article is Part 1 of a four-part series. To learn more about Dr. Waayl Ahmad Salih’s story, read Part 2 here, Part 3 here, and Part 4 here.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Warren Shaw ’72 and Inez Shaw ’73 (formerly Hope), Beverly Morrow ’73 (formerly Dalrymple) and Curtis Morrow ’73, Larry Dean ’76, James Clark ’74, Mae Wesson ’75 (formerly White), Clarence Williams, Elliott Borden ’73, and David Lee ’76 for their help with jogging my memory about key dates and events. Also, thanks Nelly Rosario ’94 and Elaine Harris ’78 for inspiring me to share this story.
About Dr. Waayl Ahmad Salih
Dr. Waayl Ahmad Salih was a student activist at MIT who later became an engineer and then a physician. He holds SB (1972), MS (1973), and EAA (1974) degrees, each from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT; an MS (1977) in Biomedical Engineering from Stanford University; and an MD (1985) from the University of California at Irvine. Prior to his medical practice, Dr. Salih worked for several years as an engineer with various aerospace companies in Massachusetts and southern California. As a board-certified emergency physician, Dr. Salih has worked at multiple facilities — from small community hospitals to academic level-1 trauma centers — during his 28-year medical career. In 1995 and 2005 he served as a diplomate of the American Board of Emergency Medicine. Dr. Salih retired in 2015 and lives in Rancho Santa Margarita, California.
