In September 1986, then-Japanese
Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone
shocked many Americans when he
asserted that America was
intellectually inferior to Japan
“because of a considerable number
of Blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans.”
Dillard University President Dr.
Samuel DuBois Cook, with characteristic
practicality, decided that something should
he done to refute Nakasone’s racist
misconceptions.
Earlier that year Cook had traveled
to Japan for a university presidents
conference sponsored by the United
Methodist Church and Japanese universities,
the only Black university president
in the twenty-member group. There he had
been impressed with a Japanese academic, Dr.
Makoto Fujita, who had been speaking at
historically Black colleges and universities
since 1954 and had a profound understanding
of and appreciation for the Black American
experience.
“I was impressed by Dr. Makoto Fujita,
and we discussed the possibility of a
Japanese study program,” Cook later
explained.
Fujita proposed that Dillard host
Japanese junior high school students on the
campus for a three-week English program.
Cook implemented the proposal and in 1991,
Dillard began a Japanese language studies
program headed by Fujita.
“No other university is conducting such
intense study,” Fujita brags.
That kind of institutional and academic
bridge building between cultures is Cook’s
way of fighting the tragedy and tyranny of
racism.
“I’m against all forms of racism. I
believe we all belong to each other — Blacks,
whites, orientals. We need to understand each
other as members of the human family,” Cook says.
Cook applied that same combination to
the tensions between Blacks and Jews in the
United States. The first Dillard University
National Conference on Black-Jewish
Relations was held in 1989, and shortly
afterward the institution established its Center
for Black-Jewish Relations, the only center of
its kind in the world. Among other things, it
sponsors an annual conference that focuses on
the political, religious and even musical ties
between Jews and African Americans. “When
Blacks and Jews fight, God cries,” Cook has
been known to say.
“Dr. Cook vowed during the civil rights
movement, when the Black-Jewish coalition
started to fall apart in the 1970s, that
one day he would help put the coalition back
together,” said Alan Katz, head of the Center
for Black-Jewish Relations. “Dr. Cook feels
that Blacks and Jews have a history of
common oppression and they are allies.”