AN AMERICAN PROFILE

President-elect Barack Obama acknowledged he is "standing on the shoulders of giants," Black heroes in American history whose names we now recognize and admire. But what of other unrecognized Afro-Americans whose lives and careers and moral courage benefited not only "people of color" but white Americans as well?

We have become one nation, and the unrecognized "heroes" of this moral victory are legion.

Certainly friends are one of Life's greatest gifts, and I enjoyed 62 years of enduring friendship with a black Dartmouth classmate Charles T. Duncan, a friendship that began in 1942 at a time when a great war united our country. Today, our nation's pride and self respect has been tested and not found wanting. The world is astonished by our ability to heal old racial wounds.

How did this happen? I believe Charles Duncan's life and career provides an answer.

As a teacher and Dean of Howard University Law School the careers and lives of his students, touched by the flame of his thought, helped make today's America. Like a blow-torch cutting through all cant, specious reasoning and untenable assumptions, Charles Duncan's curriculum was logic, rationality and humanity. He believed with Justice Holmes that "the Law embodies the story of a nation's development, and in order to know what it is, we have to know what it has been, and most important, what it might become."

Langston Hughes once wrote: "No man my son can batter down/ the star flung ramparts of the mind".

The star flung ramparts of Charles Duncan's mind were a wonder, a surprise, and a delight. And above all, an education in the majesty and nobility of the Law. Charles Duncan's passion. The Law! The Law! To be taught, practiced and defended in a nation too accepting of lawlessness.

Charles Duncan saw the world with sighted eyes and a feeling heart. A man of compassion. Hating violence. Admiring gentleness, kindness and modesty. He believed in the ultimate victory of reason and morality convinced that force is always doomed to failure. And from his sense of compassion, responsibility and personal involvement emerged his great concern for alleviating suffering, injustice and discrimination.

He helped make America what it became on November 4th 2008.


Norman Weissman
Author of:

"Snapshots USA"
"Acceptable Losses"