Tufts professor Gill was chronicler of black Boston

Liz Hoffman

Gerald Gill was not from Boston.
He attended Lafayette College in rural Pennsylvania and he earned both his master’s degree and Ph.D. at Howard University in Washington, D.C. His strong accent, though spoken with a certain soft gracefulness, and his allegiance to the Yankees clearly placed his hometown in New York.

But during his 27 years in Boston, Gill, a civil rights expert and renowned black historian who passed away last Tuesday, found a second home and a scholarly calling.

Since he began teaching at Tufts University in 1980, Gill was a student favorite. His courses in African American history and the American South were must-takes, and he was one of the most popular academic advisors on campus. The two-time Massachusetts Professor of the Year, who also won nearly every teaching award at Tufts, is remembered by students as much for his demeanor — sweet, soft-spoken and highly personable — as his ability to make history relevant again.

“He completely changed the trajectory of my life,” said David Pomerantz, a former contributing writer to the Bay State Banner, a 2007 graduate of Tufts and one of Gill’s advisees. “He opened my eyes to a whole lot of issues involving race and class and the way the world is that I never had any experience with, growing up in an all-white suburb.

“I’d always been interested in history but had been receiving one version, and he showed me that there was a lot more out there.”

Unfortunately, one month before he was to begin his 28th year as an associate professor of history at Tufts, Gill died suddenly in his Cambridge apartment as a result of arterial sclerosis. He was 58.

Gill’s passion for issues of social justice and multicultural learning left its mark on the Tufts curriculum, where he was the faculty expert in African American history. He was a constant presence at the campus’ Africana Center, and its annual Distinguished Service Award, which he received in 2000, now bears his name.

“Gerald’s death is a huge loss for all of Tufts, but especially our African American community,” Tufts University President Lawrence Bacow said, noting that Gill worked with the university’s admissions office to recruit new minority students. “He believed that Tufts should be open, welcoming and accessible to all and he worked to make it so. We will miss him dearly.”

Gill’s passion extended beyond Tufts’ Medford-Somerville campus. The city of Boston became the setting for his latest and most ambitious project — a history of the city’s troubled race relations.

The book, titled “Struggling Yet in Freedom’s Birthplace,” reevaluated Boston’s notorious name with a keen eye towards historical accuracy. The book remains unfinished.

“He wasn’t an apologist for racism in Boston, but I think he chose a different path,” Pomerantz said. “He chose to focus on how the black community in Boston was fighting for freedom. In his own way, I think he was still struggling for civil rights and at the same time trying to preserve the legacy of people that had been doing that for decades.”

That personal struggle began 40 years ago in eastern Pennsylvania, where Gill enrolled in 1967 as one of only a few African American students at Lafayette College. He was strongly influenced by the civil rights movement, and was stirred by a speech Stokely Carmichael gave at the college in the late 1960s.

The new ideas propelled Gill into issues of race and social justice, and he was one of the founders of Lafayette’s Association of Black Collegians and the Black Cultural Center, both of which remain at the heart of the college’s African American student community to this day.

Bob Weiner, professor of history and Jewish chaplain at Lafayette, remembers Gill as “a wonderfully engaging and engaged student.”

“When we talked about issues of race and equality, he approached them as much from sadness as from anger and always with a sense of balance and perspective,” Weiner said. “He wanted to learn about the problems, and then he wanted to fix them. He had a wonderful spirit and a great love for humanity.”

Gill’s journey continued in Boston, where he took a teaching post at Tufts in 1980. He focused his research on race relations and the civil rights movement, as well as antiwar movements in the African American community — Gill himself was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War.

At Tufts, Gill infused the curriculum with a wealth of African American, and more broadly, multicultural learning. In addition to his African American and American South courses, he taught a class the history of sports in America, in which he lectured about Irish prizefighters and Jewish basketball players and brought in his collection of Negro League baseball uniforms. He was also instrumental in codifying the American Studies and Peace and Justice Studies majors, two highly interdisciplinary fields.

“He brought a new character to the campus, and to the [history] department,” said Sol Gittleman, former provost and now Tufts’ Alice and Nathan Gantcher University Professor. “He had an influence on students, to be sure, but he had a real impact on his colleagues, too. He was a teacher of teachers; that may be his greatest legacy.”

Gill carried his work into the surrounding communities. He held a fellowship at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and delivered the keynote speech last November at a conference entitled “Power and Protest: The Civil Rights Movement in Boston, 1960-1968” at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. He also helped local public schools develop curriculums for African American and 20th century American history.

And he was deeply committed to fostering the same love of history in his students.

“He was creating another generation of people who cared about the things he cared about,” said Steven Cohen, a lecturer in American studies at Tufts.

“To listen to him talk about history was to be there,” he continued. “It wasn’t a dry subject of trends and socioeconomic factors, but about how history is made and changed in the big picture, by movements and groups. He wanted people to recognize that history isn’t made by one person, but is made by people.”