Walking with the Ghost

The curious academic life of Penn's first black professor eludes even his reverent biographer.

by Nick Norlen

Michael T. Regan TOME RAIDER: Penn professor Bruce Kuklick scoured records — and his own memory — to piece together William Fontaine's academic life. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

In the mid-20th century, William Fontaine became the first fully affiliated black faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, placing him among very sparse company in the Ivy League.

But despite Fontaine's historic rise in the face of segregation, his legacy is ethereal, even in academia.

It's fitting, then, that Bruce Kuklick's biographical sketch of him, Black Philosopher, White Academy: The Career of William Fontaine (Penn Press, $55), begins much like a ghost story: Kuklick is alone in the university's archives, doing unrelated research, browsing a bare-bones file on the late philosophy professor, when he sees something that would give most people chills — his own name.

It's less scary when you know that Kuklick — now a Penn professor himself — had been taught by Fontaine nearly half a century earlier.

But before his discovery — a recommendation letter Fontaine had written for him — Kuklick had only vague memories of his former teacher.

The letter was enough, the admittedly unsuperstitious Kuklick writes, to shake his "metaphysical bones" — and to send him on a quest to flesh out the life contained in that slim manila folder.

"This project just kind of sent me on this journey to all these strange places trying to piece out what had gone on in his life," he says. "It turned out to be extremely interesting to me, mainly, I think, because he turned out not to be just a teacher who had written a recommendation for me — which I had forgotten about — but this kind of unique historical figure."

Unfortunately, the uniqueness of what Fontaine had achieved was conversely proportional to the availability of concrete accounts about what his road to the top of academia had been like.

That disclaimer — frequently repeated by Kuklick throughout Black Philosopher — can be as frustrating for the reader as it apparently was for Kuklick, who says he was "more than uncomfortable" conjecturing about the context of Fontaine's ascent.

Still, through interviews with family members, scouring of obscure military records and fights with university officials for simple transcripts, Kuklick managed to piece together what amounts to a silhouette of the circumstances and motivations that led Fontaine to a place on Penn's faculty.

"I'm just an old white guy, and trying to immerse myself in the world of what it was like to be poor and black and trying to make it in this period in the United States was a real eye-opener for me," he says.

Amid his struggle to fit in at the institution, Fontaine was not content simply to be on staff — he endeavored to make an impact on his students.

"In one way, that was his role at Penn — to shake up these kids," Kuklick says. "And I think he succeeded."

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

"I feel in some way that I've repaid some kind of personal debt to him. But am I satisfied that I really know the guy? A little bit, but not [really]," he says. "I still dream about him a little."

Nevertheless, Kuklick found out enough to come to at least one conclusion.

"This wasn't a heroic story," Kuklick says. "This was enormously difficult for this guy. It cost him an awful lot to do this. I think in a lot of ways he would have had a far happier life if he had just stayed at Morgan State College or something like that. I came to see him as not so much a tragic figure, but a guy who paid a pretty high price for the emergence of a better era in race relations in the United States."

Faint as Fontaine's life may be, his legacy has produced tangible results.

"If you compare the universities in the U.S. 40 years ago, and what they're like today — then they were so homogenous, a lot of white men with tweed jackets and ties, and a lot of white males sitting in their classrooms," Kuklick says. "Now, you go to these schools and it's spectacularly different. He was there before it happened."

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Bruce Kuklick will discuss his book, Thu., Oct. 16, 6-7 p.m., free, Penn Bookstore, 3601 Walnut St., 215-898-7595, upenn.bncollege.com.