THE ROUTE TO DIVERSITY

The Rev. Edwin Sanders '69, Watson Fellow and a member of Eclectic, was a member of the Black Panther Party as an undergraduate and when he returned after graduation as one of the first co-directors of the Afro-American Institute (now CAAS). He is senior servant of the Metropolitan Interdenominational Church in Nashville, Tenn. In 1994, he received the Wesleyan University Service Award.
 

I recall the day after we had taken over Fisk Hall, I ran into Willie Kerr on the steps of South College. Willie had a way of framing everything in historical terms, and in such a way as to let you know you were only a ripple in a vast stream, not the stream itself. He explained to me that what had happened the day before was clearly a by-product of something that had been brewing at Wesleyan for generations. He told me that he did not understand it and would not applaud it, but he believed it was a part of something that had been started a long time earlier.

 I know this from my own experience. When I was in high school in Memphis, many white students from northern universities came south to be part of our voter registration initiative. Between my sophomore and junior years, I spent time changing license plates for folks coming from places like Connecticut, to help them avoid trouble in Mississippi, where northern license plates would arouse suspicion.

  I first heard about Wesleyan from a man who taught in the freedom school we ran, and from Ron Young'65, now president of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Philadelphia, who also worked at my church. At Wesleyan, we learned that some of our own professors had been Freedom Riders! David Swift and John Maguire. There's a famous photo of a man, all bloodied in his face, getting off a bus in the South; behind him is a tall lean man; that was David Swift. As Willie Kerr said, what happened the day we took over Fisk Hall had been set in motion years earlier.

 Our existence here was framed by takeovers from the beginning. We started off by taking over a table at the dining hall, the Black table. We took over a lounge on Foss Hill, in fact we took over a series of lounges, where we studied, played whist, hung out. And we took over the radio station! After sundown, you got blues and jazz all night. 

  We were known as Hoys Boys. Now, you couldn't call us boys and get away with it, but they called everyone in the class Hoys Boys. It was an affirmative action. It’s important that we acknowledge that.

  We had individual identities when we arrived, but quickly developed a collective identity as well. You could call everyone brother. There were no sisters on campus yet and that was difficult to deal with. 

 From the beginning we challenged the institution, and the institution challenged us. Those years had a transforming effect on our lives, and probably shapes who we are unto this day.

     One of the single most significant moments of my life occurred on campus during freshman year. We were gathered in Carl Johnson's room, when someone came running in and said: "There's a brother preaching in the chapel tonight." It was a Sunday night, and we said, "Naw! Nobody black is preaching in that chapel," but there was. That speaker was Vincent Harding, who delivered a message entitled "The Gift of Blackness." That was the first time I'd heard a discussion of blackness in a way that cut so clearly to the hurt and pain yet came away without bitterness. I believe that was the night I decided I could handle the difficulty of a life in the ministry.

  Actually, we played a recording of "The Gift of Blackness" from loudspeakers in Fisk Hall during the takeover; we played the speeches of Malcolm X and of Vincent Harding.

  Malcolm X said that power comes out of the barrel of a gun. We did believe that a revolution was imminent, and that we had to assume a posture to be able to defend ourselves. 

  The philosophy of the Black Panther Party was that the panther is an animal that never attacks yet if attacked is capable of destroying its enemies. Some of us bought into it more than others. It could have translated into an experience that we might be talking about today in much more tragic terms.

 For we did see evidence around us of assaults upon students who were standing up for their rights. We saw what happened at Kent State and at Jackson State in Jackson, Mississippi. We thought it could happen to us. And yes, there were some guns on campus. We were taking some pretty bold stands.

  There's a story that probably doesn't get told much today, about a group of Wesleyan students who were arrested taking a carload of guns to help support the Panther Party out West. But let me tell you, once again, Wesleyan proved to be Wesleyan, because the University stepped up, hired the best attorney in California, and made sure those students were defended.

  Wesleyan was trying to understand what was going on with us and I'm sure there were many folks who thought the University was crazy at the time; I'm sure there were many who withdrew their support. However I think time has  proven that Wesleyan was right. 

 I'm not convinced that we weren't right also. Reading open files from the FBI, we now know there were agents provocateurs on campus who were trying to create disruption, trying to incriminate us.

There were many liberation movements at that time. Folks of all complexions were advancing a lot of powerful radical issues. So, often we were able to achieve what we did because there were plenty of other people seconding our motions.

 It was good to have Edgar Beckham there. We could depend on him to feed it to us straight; he never lied to us. It was good to have someone there you could trust. 
 And I want to tell you about one of the most important group of all, the custodial staff. When we showed up, it was like "our children are here!" They took care of us. They made sure we had places to go to church, that we were invited to go places to eat. Wesleyan was very wealthy at that time, and we had maids. Mine behaved like my mother: She'd say: "You-all leave stuff around like this at home?" 

 The president's secretary, Barbara Davidson, took us under her wing, and the people on the serving lines made sure we had plenty to eat.

 I believe the African-American Institute is indeed the greatest legacy of our time. It has endured over years and serves as the center of black progress here on the campus. We were in way over our heads, trying to do something bigger than we understood, but that was an important beginning, probably in ways we can't even understand today. The trust and respect that was given to us, shown to us, was essential. 

 We had tough times, but we established a legacy that is still providing benefits. Wesleyan played an important role in how students of color are embraced, how they were dealt with and understood in circles of higher education. 

Profound Changes
 

In 1967-68 the atmosphere became more heated. Edwin D. Etherington '48 became president in July 1967; co-education was essentially assured, though not yet formally approved. Thirty-nine blacks enrolled with the class of '71 (10.9 percent of the class).

Etherington's ties to the "old" Wesleyan were strong: he'd been a prominent undergraduate, editor of the Argus, associate editor of the Cardinal, and, as an alumnus had served on the committee that oversaw the sale of AEP to Xerox. Before he attended law school, he spent a year at Wesleyan teaching English and serving as assistant to the dean. He had proven his managerial and leadership skills as president of the American Stock Exchange (1962-66). He came to Wesleyan with the clear understanding that he had a mandate to shepherd the University through important changes: the return to co-education and the move toward a more diverse institution. He acted quickly to implement these innovations, often needing all his considerable oratorical skills and his imposing height and presence.

Etherington had been named president designate in 1966, a full year before Victor Butterfield retired. During that preparatory time, Etherington instituted the Study of Educational Policies and Procedures, or SEPP. Fifteen working groups covered fifteen topics, and their reports constituted the agenda for Etherington's presidency.

John Maguire, appointed associate provost in 1967, became responsible for managing the study groups, preparing the final reports, and directing the implementation of their recommendations. The SEPP provided the policy framework within which Wesleyan unfolded for the next ten or twelve years. It guided the processes by which Wesleyan became co-educational, developed several graduate programs, and invested in new facilities.

There was, however, no SEPP guideline covering expansion of the curriculum to correspond to changes in the ethnic and racial make-up of the student body.

 Much of the new president's time--certainly more than he originally anticipated--was dedicated to managing issues related to African-American and other minority students. The University was still, in many ways, evaluating its position on the matter.

Colin G. Campbell, who had been a vice president at the American Stock Exchange with Etherington, accompanied him to Wesleyan as vice president for financial affairs. When interviewed for this article last April, he recalled: "When I came to Wesleyan in July of 1967, the subject of black undergraduates was never even discussed. The notion that Wesleyan was substantially enlarging its minority presence was never presented to me, as a newcomer, as a priority."

"And yet within a year, it had become a very critical aspect of our lives, very much a part of the internal politics of Wesleyan. Things were complicated, of course, by external events--the trial of Black Panther leader Bobby Seale in New Haven, anti-war activities--these events clashed head-on with our lack of preparedness for the increasingly large number of black students on campus."

The first official black student organization, the Afro-American Society (AAS), was founded in 1967, led by Bill Boulware '71, Dwight Greene '70, David Jones '70, Lawrence Madlock '70, and Thurman Northcross '71. Initially collegial rather than political, in less than a year the AAS had become distinctly political; in the spring of 1968, its efforts were focused on trying to secure a black student residence. Interaction with blacks and black organizations in Middletown enlarged its scope, and aspects of the Black Panther philosophy were absorbed into its agenda. The Black Panther Party, started by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in California in 1966, was portrayed by the media as a collection of dangerous, ranting, gun-toting outlaws. The Panthers were also, however, fiercely dedicated to goals of better housing and schools for African Americans and other minorities, and became famous for serving free breakfasts to poor children living in the inner cities.

An active cell of Panther sympathizers evolved within the AAS, among them some who pushed the organization to become more radical. Some AAS members went into Middletown's two high schools, urging the introduction of black studies courses taught by black teachers. On campus, they issued their first call for the recruitment of more black faculty. Black and white undergraduates were already working in the  Middletown tutorial program; when blacks came to the campus in larger numbers, they restructured the tutorial to give it a more African-American orientation, and for a time it became an instrument for black student activity in the town. A few years later, the program was absorbed and thereafter managed by Community Action for Greater Middletown.

 Also in 1967, TOPS (Teenagers Organized for Productive Service) was created by James "Cup" Moody, a black Middletown resident concerned with finding wholesome and productive outlets for young blacks in the city. Moody established ties with many black Wesleyan undergraduates.

 Increasing civil rights and anti-war activity across the country, the growing number of African-American undergraduates at Wesleyan, escalating rhetoric, and the advent of serious drug use across the campus all contributed to a charged and often jittery atmosphere.

"Naive" is a word that frequently occurs in recollections of those early days. Willie Kerr observed:

 "In our naivete we hadn't anticipated that the students we admitted were not, as we had expected they would be, thrilled and grateful. They were resentful. They thought they were being patronized. We simply had not foreseen that, and it certainly does us no credit that we were so innocent."

 "It shouldn't have taken so long. We are all prisoners of our upbringing."

Peter Jones '69, now president of Tenebraex Corporation in Cambridge, Mass., spoke last February at the gathering on campus that featured members of the Vanguard Class: "There was social unrest in America and on the campus, but it was not unrest in the sense of avoiding responsibility. Rather, we as students believed we could have a hand in changing the University, changing society, and changing the world. A lot of those thoughts turned out to be naive in retrospect, naive certainly in terms of the amount of change we could accomplish."

Beckham recalls that the social climate on the campus changed, too, as the percentage of black undergraduates grew. "Wesleyan was used to black people like Terry Hatter ['54], Orlando Hines ['55 ], David Morris ['55], Chuck Stone ['48], and me. All black individuals. No black groups. We thought of ourselves as members of a black group, but the black group wasn't at Wesleyan.

"All of a sudden, there were enough black people to form a group, and Wesleyan didn't have the foggiest notion of how to deal with them. It had to learn."

The assassination of Martin Luther King in April of 1968 was a watershed event. Alford A. Young Jr. '88 wrote: "The intensity of the national black response to the assassination of King motivated black students at Wesleyan to take stock of what was going on in the country for Afro-Americans, and to make that relevant to their lives at Wesleyan. Most of the blacks who were involved in fraternities curtailed their activities in them. Such activity was thereafter regarded as an expression of the outdated integrationist philosophy. For black Wesleyan students it became time to become serious about their blackness."

Town and gown marched together, 1,500 strong, the length of Main Street to mourn the assassination of Dr. King. President Etherington asked students to represent Wesleyan at King's funeral. On April 16, Wesleyan and the Middletown Press sponsored a four-day forum, "Why We Can't Wait," in which black and white citizens debated problems such as low-income housing, lack of concern by whites, and racial strife in the city. On the campus, April 26 was billed as a "Day of Concern," during which seminars, discussion groups and speakouts were held to examine radicalism, the Vietnam War, urban rioting, the draft, and social relevance.

In May, speaking through the AAS, black undergraduates demanded a residential house of their own on the campus. The language of their statement echoed the tone they were hearing from Black Power leaders in the national media:

"We . . . demand a voice in the construction of our cultural destiny. We feel that the University has too long played her liberal white patriarchal role and that it is time that she cease considering black students as headless entities, whose only objective is assimilation. We will not assimilate (coerced integration) . . . . We demand a residential house . . . . In our demand for self-determination, we will not be deterred, our voice is loud and we will be heard."

Although by no means universal, there was support for this request from individuals like Associate Provost Maguire and others on the campus; and, over the summer months, a former faculty house on Washington Terrace was converted into Afro-American House, with room for eleven students.

 In May of 1968, the campus was diverted to some extent from academic and social upheavals when the Board of Trustees voted to restore coeducation after a hiatus of fifty-six years. (The first period of coeducation had lasted from 1872 to 1912.)

President Etherington called a full student body meeting to announce the Board's decision and report that the University would be admitting female transfer students into the upper classes the next year. "You could have heard the cheer on Main Street," he recalled.

 But such incidents of camaraderie were rare and, in October of 1968, twelve black students burned four copies of Olla Podrida, the college yearbook, on the steps of North College, protesting the meager representation of blacks in the publication: With an undergraduate black population of more than 100, only three photos included blacks.

Drugs were more prevalent on campus, and a few drug-addicted undergraduates were suspected in an unusually large number of robberies in dormitories. Blacks protested angrily that they were being singled out for suspicion. In fact, both black and white students were suspected, but emotions were raw.

Perceptions about the interaction between the minority community and the administration varied widely. The administration, rapidly readjusting its antennae and steadily becoming more attuned to the needs of black students, believed it was making headway in meeting requests. Blacks saw the machinery grinding at an agonizingly slow pace, with each concession having to be wrung from the administration.

 A portion of the white community was put off by the confrontational language and demeanor of some black students, but blacks were aware that pressure applied usually gained results. Colin Campbell remembers that "1968-69 was an amazing year. Everything was escalating--activities and demands and tempers. But the demands were about things that--if you overlook the rhetoric of "non-negotiable" and the like--really made good sense. And indeed they were responded to by the administration: more support services, more blacks in the administration, more blacks on the faculty, a place for blacks to live, a place for a cultural center. All that activity was in response to what I think were legitimate demands--expressed at times in a decidedly bellicose fashion."

Meanwhile the normal life of the University went on. Students attended classes, wrote papers, met deadlines, took exams; they performed in plays and concerts, attended parties, fell in love, got too little sleep, and called home.

Jack Hoy left Wesleyan at the end of the '69 academic year for the newly established campus of the University of California at Irvine, where he used his Wesleyan experience to pursue recruitment of minority students and creation of programs to serve their needs.

At this time, the University joined many other colleges and universities in abandoning prescribed courses of study. In February of 1968, the faculty, by a ratio of two-to-one, voted to abolish most of the former requirements, including a science laboratory course, a language course, Freshman Humanities, and distribution of courses taken in the first two years among the three divisions. This left as the requirements for graduation only thirty-four courses, with a major program of eight to twelve courses and some "guidelines."

The physical education requirement survived, but only for one year. And while Etherington remembers "weeks of work" to set up a system for dormitory self-regulation, Willie Kerr's observation that parietal hours and rules mandating chaperons, "simply vanished," probably sums up the enormity of the change as most undergraduates experienced it.