Calvin Hernton, 69; Wrote on Sex and Race

Calvin C. Hernton, a poet, essayist and scholar who tackled taboo questions of sex and race in wide-ranging works that are often used as college texts, died of cancer Oct. 1 at his home in Oberlin, Ohio. He was 69.

Hernton was an emeritus professor at Oberlin College, where he developed courses in African, African American and Caribbean literature. He was the author of eight books, the most notorious of which was “Sex and Racism in America,” published in 1964 by Doubleday.

“No writer I have come across except Hernton has had the temerity to so frankly tackle that old bugaboo S-E-X as it relates to life, liberty and the pursuit of integration,” writer Langston Hughes once said.

In that work, Hernton, a sociologist by training, explored the complex psychology of black and white relations, relying on personal experience and interviews with both blacks and whites, whom he called his “informants.”

He argued that sex and racism have been inextricably entwined since the slave era and resulted in crippling distortions that persist in contemporary America. Chief among these beliefs were the demonizing of black men as sexual predators and of black women as easy targets for white men’s lust.

“[T]here is a sexual involvement, at once real and vicarious, connecting white and black people in America that spans the history of this country from the era of slavery to the present,” Hernton wrote, “an involvement so immaculate and yet so perverse, so ethereal and yet so concrete, that all race relations tend to be, however subtle, sex relations.”

His thesis provoked outrage because he “explored the whole issue of miscegenation, which is a real hot potato in the discussion of American race relations,” said novelist, poet and publisher Ishmael Reed, who has published Hernton’s poetry. “A number of people had written about it but not as provocatively as Calvin Hernton.”

“Sex and Racism” was one of the earliest works by African Americans in the 1960s to “broadcast the sense of anger many black Americans had,” said Lorenzo Thomas, a poet and critic at the University of Houston. “Young people who had been taught to believe in the American creed . . . looked around and saw many people were not practicing the American creed. [His book] reflected the new sensibility of a younger generation.”

Hernton boldly asserted that blacks, especially middle-class blacks, frowned on interracial sex as much as whites. “Black and white people disagree on most things concerning race in America, but when it comes to sex and race they stand shoulder to shoulder. . . . [T]he vast majority of blacks really feel deep down inside that sex across the color line is morally wrong and somehow sinful.”

Born in Chattanooga, Tenn., Hernton told in the book of an experience that seared into his consciousness the limitations imposed on black males. When he was 7 he met a white girl of about the same age while walking home from school.

They became friends, romping together on the street every day when their paths crossed.

Then Hernton’s grandmother discovered their friendship. She hauled him home by his collar, uttering not a word, and delivered what he described as “the beating of my life.” Finally speaking, she berated him for “messing round wit a white girl,” which she said would bring trouble on the family and all their black neighbors. After that day he never saw his white friend again.

His grandmother instilled such fear in him that it unnerved him the first time a white woman sat next to him on a subway. He watched her warily out of the corners of his eyes and checked the reactions of the other passengers, not relaxing until she left. “The taboo of the white woman,” he wrote in “Sex and Racism,” “eats into the psyche . . . and creates in the black male a hidden ambivalence towards all women, black as well as white.”

Prof. Richard Yarborough, a researcher at the UCLA Center for African American Studies, said Hernton’s book is an important cultural document for its case studies and its focus on “speculating about the kinds of ways race twists up our sense of ourselves.”

Hernton attended Talladega College in Alabama, earning a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1954 and a master’s at Fisk University in 1956. He was a social worker in New York and taught sociology for several years at Alabama’s A&M; University and other institutions.

He began to make a name for himself as a poet in England, where he lived for several years in the 1960s while studying under the radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing.

In the mid-1960s he co-founded with Reed, Thomas, poet Tom Dent and others the magazine Umbra, which became a catalyst for the black arts movement. By 1970, Hernton was a writer in residence at Oberlin and three years later joined its faculty in black studies and creative writing.

His poetry appeared in two volumes published by Reed, as well as in more than two dozen anthologies, journals and reviews.

In 1985 Hernton was attending a meeting in Brooklyn, N.Y., about organizing a black publishing venture when a speaker launched into a tirade against black women writers, accusing them of “taking over” the publishing world in a “conspiracy” against black male writers. The speaker was most critical of Toni Morrison, the future Nobel laureate, and Alice Walker, whose controversial 1982 novel “The Color Purple” had been made into a film by Steven Spielberg.

Hernton responded by writing “The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers,” published in 1987, in which he declared that black women writers were “celebrating a literary Fourth of July for the first time in America.” One of the chapters was devoted to an analysis of “The Color Purple,” which he praised as “one of the best sociological dramatic studies written on the subject of sexual oppression within the black race.”

“Sexual Mountain” was important because it focused critical attention on Walker and other black women writers, Reed said.

Along with an earlier book by critic Barbara Christian, it “led to some black women being accepted into the canon,” he said.

Hernton is survived by his wife, the former May O’Callaghan; a son, Antone, of New York; three grandchildren; and a brother.