THE SHEDDING OF MASKS BEGINS (1968)

n one of Ken's journal entries of 1968, he writes of an experience that became a very real turning point in his life, one which would effect his interrelationships with students and colleagues in the years ahead. It was the beginning of what he refers to as a shedding of "masks." The experience occurred during Ken's tenure at Mississippi State, while teaching a course on the sociology of small groups.

It [the course] was for a group of school teachers who were being brought in for one year under a grant somebody in education had swung from the federal government.

The group would be bi-racial . . .

Twenty students showed up for the first day of the class, ten black, ten white, mostly in their thirties. All the whites on one side of the room, blacks on the other. About evenly divided by sex. They all had copies of Cartwright and Zander's Group Dynamics, the big dry reader out of experimental social psychology I had been using as a text since taking Cartwright's course myself at Michigan. They seemed to look sincere about being there, ready to lap it up. That was fine with me. I was ready to lay it out. So I introduced the course and launched into a lecture on the history of science, and they all wrote it down furiously. By the time I got to the part about how the study of small groups can really tell us the story, they looked about as exhausted and bored as most groups asked to receive a wagon bed of shit on the first day out. After class a few stayed around to chat with me about things I had said; I was anxious to get back to my office.

[The next day,] The students were ready again. Pencils poised. Books in laps. Smiles. Ready. The bell rang, and I moved off the desk in the corner where I had been sitting, smoking, to the lectern in the middle. I opened the folder, found my blue mark where I had stopped before and looked up. Panicked for a moment then plunged right in. "Okay then." My pause was okay for a few seconds, then people began to shift in their seats. A few more seconds . . . "There's something I want to ask you," I heard myself saying. Precise, clear, good volume; but I was completely without knowledge of what I would ask and frightened by the possibility that I could not produce a credible question. Pause. "Uh." Pause. "Why is it, that all the people on that side," I waved more vigorously than I should have, "are black, and all the people on that side," I waved the other way, "are white?"