coll. - Chronicles Of Faith

Chronicles of Faith emerges from a series of recorded interviews I conducted with Frederick Patterson in 1980 and again in 198687. The original interviews formed part of an oral history of the United Negro College Fund collected by the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University. The later series was conducted when Dr. Patterson decided to record his reminiscences more completely on paper.

Patterson was born before the twentieth century was two years old. Chronicles of Faith is therefore not only his life story but a story of the twentieth century as well and embodies the perspective of a participant in important national and international events of the period. It is, primarily, a history of institutions: Tuskegee Institute, the United Negro College Fund, the Phelps Stokes Fund, and the Robert R. Moton Memorial Institute.

A reading of Chronicles of Faith not only reveals the perspicacity which Patterson employed in the interest of African and African-American youth throughout his life but also illuminates the characters of other people active in the first half of this century. Patterson helps us remember some names that may be fading from historical memory.

This retrospective view of Pattersons life carries the reader to a variety of places: places as far apart economically as the White House (in the city of Pattersons birth) and the wooden shacks of sharecroppers and tenants on plantations in rural Alabama (at the time when Patterson was a college president); places as far apart geographically as Prairie View, Texas, and Kakata, Liberia; and places generally unheard of, such as Chehaw, Alabama, and Capahosic, Virginia. Pattersons offices in New York, in university laboratories,and in institutions of technical education in colonial East and West Africa are stops on the journey recalled here.

The significance of this collection of oral reminiscences lies in the spectrum of activities in African-American and African life with which Patterson has been associated. His story fleshes out a picture of the social, economic, and educational scene and therefore provides the political backdrop for African-Americans in the American South from the turn of the century to the present. He does the same thing, though to a lesser extent, for Africans in the final days of the British Empire. Chronicles provides evidence of historically consistent supportboth financial and spiritualin the African-American community for education and especially for its traditional institutions of higher education. Pattersons creation, the United Negro College Fund, was the first ongoing cooperative fund-raising organization for higher education in America.

Pattersons life serves as a reminder that the institutions with which he was affiliated reflect, in their present form, many years of thought, study, discussion, and struggle. Their maintenance and advancement require more of the same, with an extra measure of vigilance. Within Pattersons memoirs, we find no contradicition of Du Boiss assertion that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. But clearly, Pattersons recognition of the absurdity of that line did not deter him from using it as a whip to promote opportunities both for African and African-American people and for the American nation. His work challenges us to do no less.