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Matthew Countryman '81 Interweaves Family & Civil Rights History at the 2024 Mercer Tate '48 Lecture

Matthew Countryman '81, the featured speaker at the 32nd Annual Mercer Tate '48 Lecture at GFS, opened his talk with two quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on a slide projected above the stage in the Taulane Auditorium in the Loeb Performing Arts Center.  

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

and

“We have… come… to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time…to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”

Countryman explained to the audience, which included GFS Upper School students, faculty, and staff, as well as a number of alumni, School Committee members, and Countryman’s friends and family, that he chose these specific Dr. King quotes because of the inherent tension between them. The first calls for taking the “long view” while the second conveys immediacy.  

It’s this relationship between present struggles for social justice and incremental forward progress, he explained, that has defined both the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., as well as his own family’s history as changemakers and activists. 

Countryman’s presentation, "The Arc of the Moral Universe: Reflections on the Long Movement for Racial Justice," which took place on October 18, wove together a few interlocking narratives.

One thread was his scholarly reflections on the history of social movements for racial justice, from the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-20th century through to the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2020 George Floyd uprising. As Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and of History at the University of Michigan, and author of the book “Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia,” Countryman is extremely knowledgeable on these topics. 

“I wanted to talk about what I do, and the book I wrote, but figuring out how to put that together with my connection to GFS took a little while,” said Countryman, reflecting on his lecture. “I also wanted to tell the story of how my mother came to attend GFS—it has to be told repeatedly because the generations change.”

Matthew Countryman '81 with his parents, Ed Jakmauh and Joan Cannady Countryman '58 (left) and Beckie Tate Miller '83, daughter of Mercer Tate '48 (right)​​​

 

Joan Cannady Countryman ’58, Matthew Countryman’s mother, is a longtime member of the GFS community. She was the first Black graduate of the school; she arrived as a third grader in 1947, and later joined the GFS faculty and senior administration, and joined the School Committee (she was also a Mercer Tate ’48 lecturer in 2022). In addition to sharing her story, as well as his experiences growing up at GFS, Countryman emphasized that valuing learning and education extended back to his grandparents.

“Education was at the center of their lives,” he noted in his lecture, “because of what had been denied them growing up as Black children in the 1920s.”

Education has continued to play a prominent, vital role in the Countryman family (“We’re a family of educators because of GFS,” Countryman said). They are also a family of activists. He spoke about his parents’ and grandparents’ involvement in the Civil Rights Movement in Philadelphia, as well as his and his sister’s participation in nuclear disarmament and anti-apartheid activism the 1980s, and his daughter’s role in Black Lives Matter.

“I wanted to give the sense of how my mother came to GFS and how my own family history shows that change takes place over generations, even as it’s still urgent,” Countryman said. 

After Countryman’s lecture, he fielded questions from students in the audience which ranged in topic from broad issues like the end of Affirmative Action in higher education to teaching Black history on the high school level. 

A message that he returned to many times, from the opening Dr. King quotes, to the final answer during the Q&A, is that the struggle for racial justice—among other struggles, like climate justice—is ongoing. It’s both deeply pressing and achingly slow.

“We can go forward or backward,” he said. “It’s not just larger-than-life figures in the struggle for racial justice; leaders can be everyday folks.”

***


The Mercer Tate '48 Lecture was established in 1992 in honor and memory of Mercer D. Tate, a lifer at Germantown Friends School, and features prominent speakers from various fields of public service. Tate was a dedicated public servant devoted to the GFS community and to Philadelphia. Among his many public service activities, he was the Democratic leader of the ninth ward in Philadelphia, president of the Fellowship Commission, president of the United Neighborhood Centers of America, and a delegate to the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention, where he helped rewrite the state constitution.