THE ROUTE TO DIVERSITY

From Personal Experience:

William O. Roberts, Jr. ’63 has lived on the edge of the campus since 1968. Minister of Middletown’s First Church of Christ Congregational from 1969 to 1989, he is now engaged in a consulting practice.  As an undergraduate, he was president of the student body. He is the author of the recently published book, Crossing the Soul’s River.

 It was a Sunday evening in my junior year. I was sitting in the balcony of the chapel, relishing the experience of singing gorgeous music under the direction of Dick Winslow [Professor of Music], and barely paying attention as [Professor of Religion] Bill Spurrier introduced the guest preacher. I was reflecting on the weekend, more specifically, on my guest for the weekend, with whom I had not made much of a hit. Surely there must be something wrong with me. My thoughts wandered until they found a focus.
If only. . .
If only I were taller. Yes, that’s it. If only I were just a bit taller. That’s not unreasonable, God. Just two inches. It’s not too late. . .If only You . . .And then, for some reason, I looked down to the pulpit and noticed that the speaker was a man with very black skin.
 “But God, if you change me, don’t make me black.”
 The moment I thought that thought, I was shocked! How could I think such a thing?
 I was jolted into attention.

 The visitor was James Robinson, the founder of Operation Crossroads Africa. White folks, he said, needed to know what it was like to be black, and perhaps the best way to learn was to go to Africa.
 When the last hymn was sung, I made my way downstairs and responded to the closest thing to an altar call that I have ever known. Without saying a word, I confessed my sin (years later I would learn the name of that sin—white racism). Without making a scene, I approached the preacher who, though no taller than I, was a giant of a man. And without any idea what might be happening to me, I asked for an application form.

       I spent the summer of 1962 in The Gambia in West Africa. It was the year that this little country gained its independence from England. It was also the year I was freed from the restrictions of my white, Protestant upbringing and was introduced, through a juju man, to a world of the spirit I had never imagined existed.
 I returned to Wesleyan a changed man. Because the school was so small and so responsive to its students, I was able to alter my entire course of studies radically, and then I altered the course of my life. 

 I took Systematic Theology with John Maguire; I created a tutorial on the African novel; I found some students who wanted to study African history and we discovered an extremely able professor who was willing to teach us. I wrote an honors thesis on African religious thought (even though there were almost no books on the subject in the library, and I don’t believe we had an inter-library loan system). I was deeply involved as our fraternity, Delta Tau Delta, pledged its first non-white members; I became active in the Wesleyan Committee on Civil Rights.

 I worked as a researcher for Henry Clark, a sociology professor who was using Middletown for his field work for a book entitled The Church and Residential Desegregation. On his behalf we went into the living rooms and kitchens of members of the black community and listened to their life stories. I continued my work with the Wesleyan-Middletown Tutorial Program. And, finally, I attended Union Theological Seminary, where I met my wife, Melissa, a white Southerner who, about the same time I went to Africa, courageously helped to integrate the University of Alabama.

 That experience in the chapel stands as one of the great watershed moments of my life. • • •

Beginnings: Charles B. Ray to Victor L. Butterfield
 

The first black student to enroll at Wesleyan arrived in September 1832, only one year after the University opened. Charles B. Ray, aged 25 and an aspiring minister, had been a promising student at Wilbraham Academy in Wilbraham, Mass., where Willbur Fisk served as principal before becoming Wesleyan's first president. 

  Regrettably, Ray was forced to leave after less than two months. Led primarily by a few students from the South, undergraduates protested Ray's presence and demanded his removal. President Fisk, a strong proponent of Emancipation, made his opposition to this racist behavior very plain, but his attitude was shaded by ambiguity: He favored colonization for American blacks, and anticipated that Ray, once he was ordained as a Methodist minister, would relocate to Africa. Fisk announced that he would lay the matter of Ray's continued residence at the college before the Trustees and abide by their decision. After only seven weeks, well before the Board was to meet, continued hostility forced Ray to resign, and early in 1832 the Board of Trustees passed a resolution stating that "... under existing circumstances, we view the farther connection of Mr. Ray with this Institution as inexpedient." They further resolved that "none but white male persons shall be admitted as students at this institution." 

  Ray, who eventually changed his denominational affiliation from Methodist to Congregationalist, turned his considerable energies and talents to the cause of black civil rights and became an important religious and social leader and newspaper editor. His name lives on at the University in the Charles B. Ray Scholarships, originally limited to students of color but now awarded annually to students of any race who can demonstrate financial need. 

  Wesleyan repealed its whites-only stipulation after three years (in 1835) and Wilbur Fisk Burns became the first black graduate of the University in 1860. Still, until 1965, there were never more than a few black students on the campus at any one time. Of that group, most had attended private preparatory schools, like Phillips Exeter Academy, or superior public high schools. 

 It is difficult to pinpoint one specific event that initiated the chain of events leading to the coming of the Vanguard Class, but one circumstance should not be overlooked. The phenomenal increase in the institution's material wealth, stemming from the purchase of the American Educational Publishing Company in 1949, was pivotal. When AEP was sold in 1965 for 400,000 shares of Xerox stock worth $56 million, Wesleyan became almost overnight one of the best endowed institutions per capita in the United States. These resources enabled the University to expand substantially both its facilities and the size of the faculty. By the '60s, no project seemed unattainable, no horizon too distant. This fortune widened the University's outlook and served, ultimately, to strengthen its commitment to racial integration. 

  President Victor L. Butterfield constituted a potent force for change. Dean of Admissions from 1935 to 1941, associate dean from 1941 to 1942, acting president in 1942, then president from 1943 to 1967, he presided over a Wesleyan that was white and all male for most of his long tenure. Even a cursory look at Butterfield's administration, however, reveals a college in perpetual flux, initially with regard to curricular matters, later to social concerns. In 1943, at the outset of his administration, Butterfield started the Freshman Humanities Program together with his friend and colleague, the classics professor Nathan Marsh Pusey, later president of Lawrence College and then of Harvard University. The goal of the program was to break down traditional academic partitions, encouraging students to exercise their minds and make connections among the different disciplines, and shifting faculty--for a portion of their time--out of their own fields, deliberately stretching their intellects and capabilities. 

  In 1959, Butterfield pushed this idea further with the College Plan, his concept for completely restructuring the institution. He envisioned abandoning the usual departmental format in favor of a collection of residential colleges, each with its own broad-based curriculum in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, or arts.
 

 Today, few recall the wrenching debates that occupied the campus as a result of this proposal. The faculty was divided, but in the end it agreed to an experimental three-year trial for three colleges--the College of Letters, the College of Social Studies, and the College of Quantitative Studies. Developed along interdisciplinary lines, they were to operate from 1959 to 1962 and then be reassessed. While the College of Quantitative Studies survived for only four years, the other two were formally adopted in 1962. Although innovative, they did not lead to the radical changes that Butterfield had hoped to see. 

 Before he retired in 1967, President Butterfield also laid a strong foundation for the re-establishment of coeducation at the University.