http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2009-07-02/article/33259?headline=Ted-Vincent-1936-2009
By Paul Gackle, Special to the Planet
Thursday July 02, 2009
Family and friends of the late Ted Vincent will remember him as a
loving family-man, a selfless teacher, a natural entertainer and a
devoted egalitarian, but for Berkeley and the rest of the world his
legacy will rest in his five published books and the untold history
he uncovered.
Vincent, a regular contributor to the Daily Planet and a fixture in
the community as a writer and an activist for over 40 years, passed
away Sunday, June 14, from complications following a heart attack.
But Vincent, who was 73, wasn't just another zany Berkeley liberal;
he was an independent scholar whose trailblazing research helped
revolutionize academia's approach to African-American history in the 1970s.
Vincent was intensely passionate about everything he did, whether it
was playing boogie-woogie on the piano or running ultra-marathons in
the Sierra Mountains. He was uncompromising in his values, yet
tolerant of everyone.
"He had a strong sense of moral justice and a real compassion for
racial minorities, the downtrodden and the poor," said his son,
Rickey Vincent, who received in Ph.D from UC Berkeley in ethnic
studies. "He was an investigator who would tell these forgotten,
unknown stories of people who were fighting for equality at these
crucial moments in history."
Theodore G. Vincent was born in Washington D.C, on Feb. 24, 1936. He
inherited his political convictions from his father, Tad Vincent, an
idealistic union organizer for the CIO. Vincent's upbringing was kind
of like a leftist-union version of being an army brat; he attended 11
different grade schools while his father crisscrossed the country
fighting for labor rights.
Vincent was the oldest of Tad and Billie Vincent's five children; he
is survived by four younger sisters, Jenny, Joanie, Susan and Lucy.
The Vincent kids grew up in a house where the union songs of Pete
Seeger and Woody Guthrie were being played constantly. But it was the
years the family spent living in the south that left an indelible
imprint on Vincent.
When was Vincent 10, the family lived in Selma, Alabama for a year,
where his father spent his days organizing food and tobacco workers
and his evenings running a literacy program for African-Americans.
Vincent's family believes his lifelong compassion for racial equality
was spawned by the experience of watching his father face threats
from southern racists.
"He was proud of my father for that kind of bravery," said Jenny
Warwick, the oldest of the Vincent's sisters.
Vincent was born to write. He was the sports editor at Manuel Arts
High School in East Los Angelesa completely integrated high school
in the 1950sand he later wrote for the college newspaper at Los
Angeles Community College.
"You couldn't keep the pen out of his fingers. Until the day he died,
he was always writing," said Warwick.
Vincent moved to the East Bay in 1961 and received a Master's degree
in History from UC Berkeley. Berkeley in the '60s was the perfect
breeding ground for Vincent's revolutionary ideals, but he was only
tangentially involved in the anti-war movement. His true passions
were civil rights and the Black Power movement. In 1964, he taught an
African-American history course at Merritt College in Oakland that
was attended by Huey P. Newton, the eventual founder of the Black
Panther Party. And he married Toni Vincent, who went on to become a
Black Panther and with whom he had his first two children, Rickey and
Teo Barry Vincent.
At Cal, Vincent wrote his first book, Black Power and the Garvey
Movement, which would help reshape the direction of African-American
studies. By exploring Garveyism and the competing political and
cultural movements of its time, Vincent was the first historian to
really examine some of the more radical elements in the black drive
for equality. He followed it up two years later with another book,
Voices of a Black Nation: Political Journalism in the Harlem
Renaissance, which was a stark portrait of the Harlem Renaissance; a
collection of the movement's lesser told stories of racism, lynching
and murder.
Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King Jr., Research
and Education Institute at Stanford, said Vincent's work was
revolutionary because it amplified voices that had been typically
shoved into the margins of African-American history.
"He was really breaking new ground in that time," said Carson. "It
showed some of the things that were possible when we were developing
an approach to African-American history."
Vincent moved back to Los Angeles in 1972 to enter a doctoral program
in History at UCLA. But he dropped out before he received his Ph.D.
After getting entangled in an ethical conflict with a professor,
Vincent decided academia required too much conformity for his tastes
and he never looked back.
Instead of joining a faculty at a prestigious university, Vincent
taught history from the frontlines in the community colleges where
the people resided. And he continued to write books, without a Ph.D,
on his own terms.
In 1981, he published Mudville's Revenge: The Rise and Fall of
American Sport, which chronicles how popular sports have been taken
away from the people and "Romanized" for corporate profit. He
debunked the presumption that black jazz arose out of the
infrastructure of white clubs in his fourth book, Keep Cool: The
Black Activists who Built the Jazz Age, published in 1995.
Vincent's final book, The Legacy of Vicente Guererro: Mexico's First
Black Indian President, which chronicles the history of Africans in
Mexico, has had an enormous impact amongst both Mexican and American
scholars. The book, published in 2001, is the first scholarly work in
America to uncover the history of Yanga, who organized the first
slave rebellion in the Americas against the Spanish Empire in the late 1500s.
"It was a very outstanding history he wrote," said Dr. Carlos Muñoz,
Professor Emeritus in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC
Berkeley. "My God, nobody in this country knew about Yanga or Vicente
Guererro, so it was groundbreaking research."
Vincent was a consultant to the Oakland Museum's current exhibit,
"The African Presence in Mexico," which runs through Aug. 23.
Some say it was a tragedy that Vincent never completed his Ph.D. With
a faculty position, he could have been one of the most influential
historians in African-American studies. But Professor Muñoz believes
Vincent was simply fulfilling his destiny.
"We all pursue our particular paths. He didn't want to feel obligated
to an institution that demands a certain amount of conformity for
survival," he said. "Ted said, 'The hell with that. I'm going to be
me and do what I want to do and follow my passions to where it leads me.' "
And history was just one of Vincent's many passions. He was also a
music lover, a sports nut and an ardent runner.
Whenever Vincent stumbled upon a guitar or a piano, he had to play.
At parties and family gatherings, he'd hammer on the piano and lead
sing-a-longs of his favorite political anthems and rock 'n roll
tunes. And when his third wife, Bernice Brucker was ill, he'd often
play the piano in the lobby of the Kaiser Hospital and hope that
nobody would ask him to stop.
Vincent was an intellectual, but he fancied himself a working-class
intellectual. He was a baseball junkie, who collected decades of
statistics and was known to meticulously keep score in the bleacher
seats of the Oakland Coliseum. But as much as Vincent enjoyed
professional sports, he almost preferred watching girls' basketball
games at Berkeley High School. And up to the final year of his life,
he watched Cal football games from Tightwad Hill.
"He didn't want to be an ivory tower at all," said Selma Spector
Vincent, Vincent's second wife and the mother of his only daughter, Mimi.
In the late '70s, Vincent found what might have been his true love
running. He ran marathons, he ran ultra-marathons; he ran over 70
miles around Lake Tahoe and every year he ran the Bay to Breakers,
the race he considered the people's race.
Last year, Vincent missed his first Bay to the Breakers race in over
30 years after he received indications that he had a heart flutter.
But this year, he was cleared to walk the race. He donned the shirt
he wore every year, a red and white 1980 Bay to Breakers T-shirttorn
to shreds and speckled with rust stains from the pins of previous
races. Spector Vincent, whom Vincent reconnected with in the later
years of his life, walked half of the race with him. She said he was
very happy and already looking forward to next year's race.
Spector Vincent remembers her lover's last joyful moment. He was
lying in a hospital bed and he couldn't talk.
"Our daughter, Mimi, was leaving for the day and he wrote us a little
note that said, 'I love you 2.' He held our hands," she said.
Vincent's niece, Julia Menard Warwick, summed up her uncle's
impassioned spirit in her eulogy at the funeral on June 25: "Whatever
Ted did, he did it to the fullest…When I first heard he was dead, one
of the first things I thought was, "But he was so alive!"
Later that day, he was buried in that good old 1980 Bay to the
Breakers T-shirt. Like Vincent, the shirt held onstrong willed and
determinedright to the end.
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