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Scenes from Wesleyan classrooms. Photo from the Hewlett Diversity Archive
From Personal Experience:
Edward “Mick” Rudd ’66 spent the summer of 1964 as a volunteer with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC). The owner of Shank Painter Co., Inc., a graphic design
business in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he is also president of the Cape
Cod Lighthouse Charter School, the middle school his daughter attended.
• • •
have a recurring memory of a summer night between my junior and senior
years at Wesleyan when I was a civil rights worker in rural Mississippi.
Stokely Carmichael was driving me back from a ‘mass meeting’ with the ‘peoples’.
We had ended the rally on an evangelical note, singing spirituals and rendering
our difficult anthem, “We Shall Overcome,” with unwonted harmony, belying
for the moment the vast social schisms between us. Now it was late on an unlit two-lane country
road. On the seat between us lay Stokely’s comical chrome-plated .22-caliber
pistol. It looked exactly like the cap gun I had brandished in childhood
to subdue renegade Indians. The road ahead was blocked by a wrecked car.
In its wall-eyed headlights were the cow it had hit and its driver, a small
agitated man whom we recognized as our local organizer from the night’s
meeting. The cow was dying noisily; steam was rising from its hide and
its leg bone was poking through a gaping wound. It was clearly in agony.
Stokely offered to shoot the cow in the head. The Mississippian placed
a trembling hand over the gun. The dead cow, he explained, would be connected
to his damaged car. But a bullet hole in the carcass would mean he also
had a gun, which we all understood would be a direct affront to the local
white supremacy. Stokely and I drove on; the cow would have to die in its
own time.
Among my memories of Wesleyan that scene
remains incongruous even after 35 years and history’s blessing upon the
collegiate civil rights movement. What was I doing in Mississippi that
summer? And what was so important in Alabama the following year that I
took a semester off from school? I can remember sitting in class, looking
out on the monastic campus on a soft spring afternoon in 1965. A sultry,
upwelling breeze ruffled the edges of the campus panorama. In my fevered
mind it was the calm before the storm. It was utterly impossible to concentrate.
My girlfriend from Mary Washington College had just called from some hick
town in Virginia. She needed $100 for bail, something she dare not ask
her parents. I had the unbearable feeling that history was being made and
I wasn’t there to be part of it. It was the ’60s when late-breaking history
was just becoming ubiquitous and accessible. And “relevant.” At the time
I was only kidding myself if I thought the “movement” was relevant to my
education. It was, in retrospect, merely relevant to me, an unsteady scholar
whose education thus far had only served to protract his adolescence and
innocence. But I was lucky. The men who governed my
fate at Wesleyan saw my wanderlust for what it really was—not necessarily
relevant to my education but certainly part of it.
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An
Arrest and an Injunction
After the occupation of Fisk Hall and before the
establishment of the AAI, life on the campus continued its pendulum swing
from stability to crisis.
In April of 1969, six black undergraduates
drove to San Francisco carrying firearms, which they hoped to donate to
the Black Panthers. They were apprehended and arrested, charged with robbery
and possession of drugs and illegal weapons. In the car they had a shotgun
and sixteen handguns, some of which had apparently been stolen from a store
in Portland, Conn. Once they were identified as Wesleyan students and the
University was notified, Etherington contacted William Coleman, a prominent
black lawyer in San Francisco, who defended them. The president contributed
personally to, and solicited faculty and administrators for, funds for
the young men's legal fees and bail.
According to Alford Young, when Campbell was asked
why the University moved to help these students, he replied: "We had to
acknowledge that part of the reason they were in some of the situations
in which they found themselves was because they had been at Wesleyan. We
wanted to see that our students were treated fairly."
During the fall of '69, Beckham moved into
North College, becoming associate provost for Division I, with a portfolio
that also covered AAI, Upward Bound, programs like TOPS, and anything related
to Wesleyan's efforts toward diversity. In 1973 he was named dean of the
college, a position in which he remained for seventeen years.
Beckham's significant presence was much
needed in that autumn of 1969, a season that Campbell referred to recently
as the "the nadir of race relations on the campus." The rhetoric of confrontation
escalated dramatically. There were incidents at the president's house and
at least one at the Campbells' house. The Kirkpatricks and Campbells lived
on Mt. Vernon Street, literally around the corner from the president's
house; "It was very easy for wrought-up students to annoy all three households
in one night," said Kirkpatrick.
This already tense atmosphere was exacerbated
by a continuing barrage of angry letters in the Argus concerning an altercation
between two black students and a white student, which led eventually to
the suspension of one of the black students and expulsion of the other. 
The
black student population mounted a vigorous protest, demanding that the
suspended student be reinstated, and that the AAS be given sole jurisdiction
over its members because black students could not get a fair hearing before
the Student Judicial Board. The president rejected the demands, but indicated
a willingness to discuss the matter and possibly lift the suspension.
That was where the situation stood on November
7, Homecoming Weekend. There were intimations that the game next day would
be disrupted. The next morning, the Middletown Police Department reported
to the University that it had been informed of a potential attack on the
president, possibly at the Saturday football game, and suggested that he
accept guards--which he did not.
The University secured a court injunction to block
potential disorders, which was served at the Malcolm X House by the sheriff
and the dean. The dean also delivered a message from the president urging
house residents not to act precipitously. On Saturday morning, Etherington called a 7:30
meeting with Coach Don Russell, senior officers of the University, and
one of the referees. The Williams coach was unable to attend. Etherington
announced that if demonstrators took over the field and prevented play,
Wesleyan was prepared to forfeit the game. Don Russell agreed; the referee
said he understood.
"There was a huge crowd at the game," Colin Campbell
recalled recently. "And we had an undefeated team in a deep rivalry--elements
that could lead to bad behavior at the best of times."
Instead of sitting in his usual place in the stands,
Etherington watched from the second floor of Fayerweather gymnasium; extra
police remained on standby throughout the day, and a party scheduled for
McConaughy that evening was canceled. As the game proceeded, administrators granted
permission for students to use the microphone at half-time. Bernard Freamon
'69 addressed the crowd in strong but unthreatening terms; the game proceeded
and Wesleyan won it 18-17.
The injunction was lifted the next day,
and based on a report from Beckham and then-Associate Professor of Psychology
Karl Scheibe, Etherington lifted the suspension.
After the game, Campbell and Chancellor Richard
Ohmann were taking stock of the day in Ohmann's office in North College;
Nancy Campbell was waiting for her husband down the hall. A small group
of black students came into the hallway. "They marched in looking grim,"
said Colin Campbell, "but one of them, Tony Wheeldin '71, said 'Don't worry,
Mrs. Campbell, we're only the social committee."
"I took them into my office," Colin Campbell
recalls. "They told me that because we had called off the all-campus dance,
they believed, looking ahead, that there would be some reconciling and
healing to do. They wanted to hold an all-campus gathering right after
Thanksgiving, and asked me if the administration would support it financially.
I said, 'You bet we will!'"
Students also approached President Etherington
on the same subject. He recalls, "It was a carefully studied decision,
because the student government did not want to finance the event."
"Much like the Fisk Hall events of six months
earlier," says Campbell, "this was a reaffirmation of what I always felt
was underlying goodwill in our relations with these undergraduates. I've
always felt that getting through these events--which kept going on into
the '70s--was made possible by that goodwill."
An earlier experience has also stayed with
him, one that "involved a group of black students who wanted to follow
up on some demands by a very late-night visit to our house on Mt. Vernon
Street. Doorbell rings. I'm in bed, Nancy's in bed. We come downstairs.
I had on a bathrobe and--I don't remember the pattern of the undershorts.
Bill Boulware was the last in line of the group that filed in; very serious
expressions. As he passed me, he said quietly,'I like your shorts.'
"These moments are indelibly printed on my mind
because they were messages. Maybe they weren't intended as such, but that's
what I sure took them to be. Messages that said: 'Look, we have really
serious issues to address with you folks, but we will address them verbally.
We will talk. This is not intended to harm the institution, but it has
to be done.' "That message was sent and received over
and over through months of debate and confrontation." |
