Treasure Hunter
by Lauren Collins May 3, 2010
Howard Dodson, Jr.
When Howard Dodson, Jr., the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem, was thirty, the life expectancy for a black male was sixty. Dodson was just enrolling in a doctoral program at U.C. Berkeley. “I figured I’d be forty by the time I was done, and I’d only have twenty years to work,” Dodson recalled last week, sitting in one of the center’s conference rooms. “So I went into this conversation with me and God. I said, ‘Look, God. I need some more time. Give me seventy-two years. I’ll have done all the work I needed to do. I’ll be ready to, you know, waltz on out of here.’ ” Dodson paused for a minute—quiet, grave. “Well, about five years ago, I started renegotiations!” he said.
Dodson, who turns seventy-one in June, will retire next year, after a quarter century of running the Schomburg, the world’s premier facility for the preservation and study of African-American culture. Under his stewardship, the center has raised more than forty million dollars. Its treasures, ten million of them, are various: Richard Wright’s manuscript of “Native Son,” a first edition of Phyllis Wheatley’s poems, African fertility masks, sheet music for spirituals, photographs of strawberry pickers and uptown grandees, Malcolm X’s diaries from Mecca. Dodson has salvaged artifacts from Dumpsters (the love letters of the muralist Aaron Douglas) and from storage units (the papers of Léon Damas, the founder of the Négritude movement). Rummaging in the collection one day, Dodson came upon a sheet of commemorative stamps from the 1936 Olympics. “It was signed by Jesse Owens and the six other African-American athletes who won medals,” he said. “And by Göring and Hitler!” If the African-American experience is a diaspora, Dodson has amassed its richest seed bank.
Dodson grew up in Chester, Pennsylvania, where his parents, both natives of Danville, Virginia, had moved during the First World War. His father found work in construction. His mother became a silk presser. “It was a rough town,” Dodson recalled. “I was, for some reason, designated from an early age to—in the language of the time—‘represent the race.’ For that reason, everybody drew a ring of protection around me.” Dodson went on to West Chester State College, and to Villanova, where he earned a master’s in history and political science. He joined the Peace Corps in 1964, and spent two years in Ecuador. “I was inspired by reading ‘The Ugly American,’ ” he recalled. “It talked about the ways that expatriates were misrepresenting Americans abroad, and I decided that I could do a better job.”
In 1968, he said, “the combination of King’s death, the collapse of the Poor People’s Campaign, and Bobby Kennedy’s assassination drove a stake into my plans.” He felt that he had debts to redeem in America. “I was the first person in my family to go to college, and I didn’t have a right to individualism,” he said. Confused and bereft, he retreated to a friend’s cabin in the mountains near Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. “I declared myself insane and was trying to read myself back into sanity, to ground myself in the history of my people,” he said.
After his exile in Puerto Rico, Dodson went to Berkeley, where he studied slavery in the Western Hemisphere, and favored an outfit of flared pants and a flat-topped hat, which helped him become known as the Cisco Kid. At the Schomburg, he was wearing a double-breasted tweed suit, a brown paisley tie, and laceless leather slippers, and, on his left index finger, a gold pyramid ring, signifying his status as a thirty-third-degree Mason. A lucky cowrie shell was pinned to his left lapel. “I’ve been dressing since I was in high school,” Dodson said. “I worked with my mother at the dry-cleaning plant off the Main Line, where I had my pick of anything left after thirty days.”
One of the high points of Dodson’s tenure at the Schomburg was his involvement with the African Burial Ground project, which oversaw the exhumation and reburial of the remains of more than four hundred Africans, which had lain in an unmarked cemetery downtown. “Those seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ancestors gave me assignments,” Dodson said. “I’d do stuff, and they’d say, ‘Look, follow through.’ I’d say, ‘I’ve got a full-time job, and I don’t have time.’ And they’d say, ‘No, you’ve gotta do this.’ ” Now the ancestors are urging Dodson to visit the rock churches in Ethiopia, to go to Xi’an to see the terra-cotta warriors, to visit Machu Picchu. They’re telling him it’s his time. “I fulfilled all my service obligations,” he said. “I don’t owe anything to anybody! But me.” ♦
