“What’s the aim of those summer season packages?” he requested rhetorically. In his view, “The No. 1 goal is to assist individuals perceive how this coaching and these expertise might help clear up issues that they care about.” If younger Black students flip away from economics as a result of the sphere seems to them to be justifying the established order, “I’m not shocked,” he mentioned. “If that is what economics is instructing, who desires to be a part of that?”
Myers is an fascinating individual. He swam competitively in school and took up age-group competitors later in life to encourage his daughter to remain on her swim workforce. He has been partly deaf all his life, and his listening to has gotten worse with age, so we communicated by Zoom with the assistance of captions. After incomes an economics diploma in 1971 at Morgan State College, a traditionally Black faculty in Baltimore, he enrolled within the Ph.D. program at M.I.T., incomes his doctorate in 1976. At Minnesota, he holds the Roy Wilkins chair in human relations and social justice. (Wilkins was the pinnacle of the N.A.A.C.P. from 1955 to 1977.)
Myers instructed me concerning the economists, each Black and white, who lent a hand to him and others early on. One was his father, Samuel L. Myers, a path breaker who earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard in 1949. The youthful Myers additionally cited Marcus Alexis, a constitution member of the Caucus of Black Economists who helped begin what turned the summer season program for minority undergraduates; Andrew Brimmer, one other originator of the summer season program, who went on to function the primary Black governor of the Federal Reserve, from 1966 to 1974; Clifton Wharton, who was named president of Michigan State College in 1969 and later supported the summer season program as chairman of the Rockefeller Basis; Phyllis Wallace, who in 1948 turned the primary Black lady to earn a doctorate in economics at Yale; and Bernard Anderson, who turned the primary African American to win tenure on the Wharton Faculty of the College of Pennsylvania.
Myers mentioned he additionally acquired help from white professors on M.I.T.’s economics college, amongst them Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Michael Piore, Richard Eckaus, Duncan Foley and Charles Kindleberger. Kindleberger “had dinner events, invited all of us over,” Myers mentioned. “We might stroll across the lake after dinner.” He mentioned Kindleberger knew that the Black doctoral candidates “needed to coalesce.”
“The opposing view was, ‘Why would you need these Negroes to be congregating amongst themselves, as a result of that will reproduce pathologies?’” Myers mentioned. “I’m pleased and content material that I’m unapologetically Black,” he mentioned. “I don’t suppose Black persons are pulling me down. I’ve co-authored with plenty of white economists, however I don’t need to suppose that the one method to be a superb Black economist is to be socialized with white economists.”
