Reflections of an MIT Student Activist
Part IV: Working Off Campus and Beyond
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).
“The first step in deciding what you’re going to do about something as large and multi-faceted as dealing with the problems of black people in the U.S. is to ‘know thyself’.”
The Black Panther Party
A couple of Black Students’ Union (BSU) members had joined the Black Panther Party (BPP), just as I did when I went home to Indianapolis for the summer of ’69. I was attracted by the BPP’s program of self-defense against the “pigs”, who routinely beat, harassed, and killed black men, women, and children throughout the United States. (Sound familiar?)
We used “call trees” through which, sometimes with the help of local gangs, we could quickly mobilize a crowd of Panthers and other neighbors to act as witnesses and to intervene if necessary when cops harassed or started beating a black person on the street. We also had a free breakfast program for school-aged kids and, in some cities, a grocery giveaway for anybody, white or black.
However, I wasn’t much into the Communist philosophy. I thought that the main problem we had in America was race not class. I stayed with the BPP for less than a year, leaving during the fall of ’69.
The National Urban League and the Congress on Racial Equality
Other MIT black students and staff at the time joined the National Urban League (NUL), whose mission is “to enable African Americans to secure economic self-reliance, parity, power and civil rights” in urban areas. One member was Mel King, then a lecturer in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and creator of the department’s Community Fellows Program in 1970.
Students and staff also joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the third oldest civil rights groups in the United States. One CORE member was Jim Bishop PhD ’69, Professor of Chemistry and Associate Dean for Student Affairs, who worked primarily on housing discrimination. One of the ways CORE exposed racism in housing was by having a white volunteer apply for a rental property immediately after a Black applicant had been told that the property was no longer available.
The Republic of New Afrika
I also spent a lot of time during my junior and senior years at MIT working with the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), a black nationalist organization. I left the BPP in the fall of 1969 and joined the RNA after going to a few of their meetings with Henry Tucker ’71 (aka, Hakim Abdallah), Ron Meekins ’73 (later Balaghun Ali) and Ron Johnson (who didn’t change his name or join the RNA).
I switched to the RNA because they advocated revolution instead of reform, unlike the BPP, NAACP, SCLC, and most of the other Black organizations. The RNA believed that Black Americans should form a separate nation just as the United States had done with the British. The RNA also demanded reparations from the U.S. government.
In 1968, the RNA issued a Declaration of Independence and chose a red, black, and green flag at its constitutional convention in Detroit. As its initial territory, the organization selected five states in the south where most black people still lived: Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Our plan was to conduct a plebiscite — a vote of the people — in our claimed territory to determine whether the national government would be the U.S. or the RNA.
The plebiscite would be monitored by the United Nations. After the plebiscite, the RNA realized that a revolutionary war would be necessary in order to secure the land. We already had a non-governmental seat in the U.N. General Assembly, as well as verbal support and the promise of weapons from the USSR (Soviet Union), (Red) China, Cuba, and some Eastern Bloc nations.
The RNA’s community programs included free breakfast and tutoring programs for youth, as well as clothing giveaways and self-defense classes for everybody. We had contacts with liberation movements in Central America, Africa, and Asia. We also had weapons training classes for members.
The RNA was targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO, but our demise began after a shootout in Alabama in 1971, during which one law-enforcement officer was killed and two were wounded. Eleven members of the RNA and most of the leadership were imprisoned for up to twenty years, although RNA president Imari Obadele was acquitted and released after five years. (Fortunately, neither I nor any other MIT students went on that trip.)
Ultimately, the ideology of black nationalism led to the failure of the movement, since most black people didn’t want a separate nation — only justice and equal rights in this one. The issue of reparations continues to be raised in Congress to this day.
Where do we go from here?
In order for anyone to effectively address the issues facing black people in America, one must first know thyself (from the ancient Greek and Egyptian aphorism). The problem is that one cannot know oneself by simply sitting back and thinking about it. The only way to truly know thyself is by seeing yourself in action, which requires constant introspection and brutal honesty.
After reading the history of the BSU summarized in this series, and after reflecting on my role in it, plus 28 years as a practicing Emergency Physician, one would think:
Here is an intellectual activist who spent his life trying to help people.
And that is the story that I usually tell.
But the truth is that, for much of my life, I was a coward. I spent a large portion of my life escaping and being governed by my appetites. I first began escaping through the use of weed and women as a means of coping with the murder of my then 18-month-old daughter in October of 1969. I was saved academically by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) nationwide strike in the spring of 1970, which resulted in students being allowed to choose pass-fail in any course at MIT or take the final and get a grade.
Even though I lucked out gradewise (receiving one A and the rest Passes, so technically I had a 5.0 that semester), I realized that if I continued on my current path, I wouldn’t graduate. So I moved out of the party house on St. Botolph Street in Boston and moved on-campus into Senior House. I quit consuming weed and alcohol for the next seven years, through my graduate years at Stanford (good move). I became BSU co-chair with my roommate Warren Shaw, and I got married (bad move — it only lasted ten months).
I became a professional student as a way to avoid working and as a way to avoid my responsibilities to my two boys, born in 1968 and 1971. I later re-started my old habits of escape from life through weed during my off days throughout the next 20 years of my career. I even did crack during my last year of medical school and first year of general surgery residency.
Even though I’d received many accolades and awards through the years, I knew that I could have done much better, especially in being there for my family. The only thing that stopped me was finding out that my youngest daughter was smoking weed in middle school and acknowledging my bad influence on her. I then quit escaping from life and began reconnecting and repairing relationships with my family, friends, and associates.
I still have a tendency to indulge in escapism (I’m an avid reader), and I must be vigilant about my tendency to shut people out. But I do my best to give back to the community by mentoring foster kids through a local organization and by being involved in local politics. That, plus many home improvement projects, keeps me busier than before I retired.
In the interest of honesty, I also must add that I could not have done all of this without the help of my second wife Sheila (married 29 years on April 16th) and my kids, now 23, 25, 46, and 48.
Someone once told me, “First accept what is. Then act”. I would take it a step further:
First accept what is. Then embrace it.
In today’s society, we often want to accept the good, but reject the bad. We want to win, but hate losing. We fail to realize, as the Buddhists say, that winning and losing are two sides of the same coin.
I believe that we must take a leap of faith and believe that the God that is the spark within each of us is in control. We have to believe that this world is the perfect vehicle for our enlightenment. We have to believe that each of us is the perfect stage for this great play in which we are all playing a part.
We have to embrace losing as well as winning.
I’ll leave you with two quotes:
Do not ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go and do that. — Harold Thurman Whitman
When you hear the dogs…keep goin’. — Harriet Tubman
Note
This article is Part 4 of a four-part series. To learn more about Dr. Waayl Ahmad Salih’s story, read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 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.
