Note: A memorial service for Khalid Lum, pictured, will be held Saturday beginning at 11 a.m. at the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale, 211 Park St.
Crystal Emery.
How do you measure the life of a man? I was 15 years old in 1975, the year I met Khalid Lum. Khalid was the director of the AfroAmerican Cultural Center at Yale and I was an impressionable teenager. His giant personality held my attention no matter the topic. I was enthralled by his current events lessons.
In 1973 Khalid was hired full-time under the presidency of Kingman Brewster Jr. at Yale University. Khalid was so damn important in that time and place. As the first fulltime director of the AfroAmerican Culture Center, he actually established it as an institution that was a meeting place of African American folks and African American culture, not only for Yale but for New Haven and beyond.
Khalid set the precedent of what an AfroAmerican cultural center should look like, be, feel. Khalid broke down the Ivy wall that separated Yale from the community. Within 211 Park Street, all were welcome.
A historian as much as an aesthete, Khalid understood New Haven’s rich history as a place where plays debuted before their New York runs. He brought ‘For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide’ to New Haven before it premiered on Broadway. During those formative years, Khalid even introduced me to Ntozake Shange, a meeting that would forever change the course of my life.
Khalid changed the course of so many other lives, too, whether it through Umoja House, the Black Church at Yale, the UIC tutorial program, or the drums of Paul Huggins. The Black church couldn’t have been the Black church at Yale as it was without Khalid. He set the tone. Namibia Night was a great example of Khalid’s understanding of building young leadership as well as exposing young minds to international causes. All the house resident organizations had to volunteer to support a fundraiser about a political issue in Africa, and that money went to Africa.
So, how do you measure the life of this man? The words from the song ‘Seasons of Love’ sums it up.
In daylights, in sunsets
In midnights, in cups of coffee
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife
To this day, Khalid holds as one of the most brilliant minds I have ever met. He was kind and full of warmth, too, but I think people were most attracted to Khalid for his realness. He was a complex man, equally characterized by frailties and idiosyncrasies shared by the rest of us. Brilliant but never pretentious, stubborn but pliable, he never claimed to be perfect. I literally grew up at his feet.
There are many students who attended Yale during this period that fondly reference Khalid as someone who offered each of them assistance during rough times. So many former students say that the AfroAmerican Cultural Center was a home within a hostile environment where they spent much time feeling alienated. If you felt out of place, Khalid would take you home with him, be it to his home in New Haven, or his home in New Jersey, he would gladly take you home with him.
“I can’t imagine what my college career would have been like, and I can only imagine it would have been much worse if not for him,” recalled Rev. Ian Straker. “I was exposed to jazz, and theater and music that I never would have experienced otherwise, as well as had a raising of my consciousness about Black politics, nationally as well as internationally.”
Khalid was known to help many graduate students write their dissertations, but the man also knew how to have fun. I specifically remember the Yale-Harvard football game of 1977 for the big cabaret party thrown by the AfroAmerican Cultural Center. Khalid and his staff really outdid themselves that year, booking a block of tickets for the Earth, Wind and Fire concert at the New Haven Coliseum. The concert after party at 211 Park St. that Saturday night lasted until the next morning. They had to kick out partygoers so they could hold church the next morning!
Rev. Dwight Andrews: “All the folks of the Umoja House remember him so fondly and beautifully. He was brilliant. I am grateful for the ways that he sharpened my thinking about a lot of issues and clarified my sense of self as a Black man. I will always be grateful for Khalid and the house [211 Park Street] that he built out of his own imagination.”
For this writer, Khalid wrote the first real profile of my work, which was featured in the New Haven Independent. In those days I was still shy about doing interviews, uncomfortable with the process. Khalid came to my home and told me how proud he was of who I had become. His praise and affirmation was crucial for my development as a young artist and as a human being. Khalid always knew just the right words to say – but you did not want to land on Khalid’s bad side. ’Cause Khalid was a word sorcerer. He could just as easily use words to make you loose track of which way was up.
Khalid was a lover of life, and sometimes his extreme personality led him to excess. Cigarettes, women, a good glass of wine. And yet through all the ups and downs, the aneurisms, the strokes, Khalid was still Khalid. I had the chance to interact with him on a consistent basis when we both worked in the same building at 900 Chapel St. At that time we were on the fourth floor and Khalid was on the sixth. If you knew Khalid, you knew that he could talk. He’d come down to our office and we’d laugh until late, just remembering and learning and loving and living.
Khalid’s later years were difficult, extremely difficult. And those who had tried to be helpful just could not contain his enormous energy. And yet he was still Khalid. I lost track of Khalid and looked everywhere for him, and found him earlier this year at the Arden House. He was still our Khalid. He was aware of who we were, and he still had his collection of newspapers to read. And we laughed and we smiled and our hearts cried.
How do you measure a life?
In truths that he learned
Or in times that he cried
In bridges he burned or the way that she died
You measure a life in love. Khalid really believed in helping people – not buying them cups of coffee – but helping us think about our place in the world. Khalid’s love affected so many lives in positive ways. Energy doesn’t die, science tells us it transforms. I know Khalid has moved on to the next part of his journey, and wherever he is I’m sure he’s asking somebody for a Pepsi.
Namaskar.