THE ROUTE TO DIVERSITY

Edward Hayes Jr '69, LLB Stanford University Law School '72, is senior partner of Hayes and Associates, a law firm in Washington, D.C., specializing in communications regulation, corporate representation, international trade, and project finance. 
 

  It is appropriate to celebrate the Vanguard Class; it was the foundation for Wesleyan's modern commitment to ethnic diversity. I stress modern, because Wesleyan made a commitment from its beginning; The first black student came to the University in the 1830s. He did not last very long, just a few weeks, and you can imagine the kinds of pressure he was under, but Wesleyan was there from the very beginning. It recognized that, given its moral foundation, it had to have blacks on the campus.

  I was a student in a huge public high school right in Washington, D.C., Of six kids, I was the only one to go to college. I knew I wanted to go to a small college in New England. One day a representative from Wesleyan came to my school, saying he wanted to talk to the best and the brightest, and I was invited to be part of the group. That man was Jack Hoy--a dynamic, energetic, committed guy. You can get caught up in his crusade. At first we clashed: I told him I wanted to go to another college down the river, but he said "No, no, you've got to take a look at Wesleyan." 

 Raymond Puryear and I went up together, the first trip to New England for both of us. We stayed at Eclectic, where we were made very comfortable; they made us feel welcome. We attended classes and we had a great time. Wesleyan felt like home from the very beginning.

 When we arrived on campus, I was a naive, starry-eyed freshman who had no idea of what to expect. Some other members of the Vanguard group had met one another earlier at a summer school; I wasn’t part of that. We had no concept of ourselves as a special group. We were just students, and to Wesleyan's credit, that is exactly the way it should have been.
   But we had ways of acknowledging one another. We would give each other the nod. You        know--the nod. You would be walking down the street, see someone of color on the other side, you just give that little nod, a recognition that we had community, that we had connected. 

 My freshman roommate was from Winnetka, Illinois. We clicked right away, but when we were first introduced, he wanted to talk about his trip to France that past summer; I remember I kept saying, "Marvelous!" or something like that. We had to find common ground for conversation; I realized that was something we had to do with everyone.

  When we arrived, Wesleyan thought it was ready. A few months later, it realized it wasn't so ready. We had to adjust to it, it had to adjust to us.

 The so-called black table did not start until our second semester. It was not exclusionary, but it got people upset. There were campus meetings about it; the administration felt it had gone wrong somewhere if we were not "joining in." Nothing was wrong, it was just part of the process.

 About guns at the Fisk Hall takeover. They were there. There were Black Panthers from New Haven and Hartford coming to campus. These outsiders wanted to use us so they could make something happen to help the folks in Middletown. Black students had to make very important decisions. It was a frightening situation. These guys had guns and they were serious, but we knew that if we were not a part of the process, it was going to get out of hand. We knew if we let black outsiders come in here, it was going to make life immensely difficult for those of us on campus. 

 And also we felt that Wesleyan was our home, that we were part of the University and we were not going to let people come here and burn buildings or create trouble that would have tremendous and detrimental consequences.

 We knew that we would fail alone or succeed together--and it was the most civilized takeover you have ever seen! We decided that we would take the risk, and we literally put ourselves between these people and this University. I think some people in this University understood that, and it is one of the reasons the University acted with the grace it did during and after the incident. 

 This was a time of personal valor for a number of the black students; it was appreciated by the University. 

Reflecting a National Political Agenda

When Edgar Beckham returned to Wesleyan in 1961 to teach German and Freshman Humanities, then to design and later direct the language laboratory, he had found the campus changed and changing, stimulated by visions of social progress: "There were people here who were very committed to the civil rights movement, among them some new, young, and radical faculty members."

One of those radical new teachers was John David Maguire, who joined the Religion Department in 1960.

As an 18-year-old student at Washington and Lee, Maguire had by chance met and become a close friend of the then-21-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. A few years later, while studying at Yale Graduate School, Maguire began serving as a kind of booking agent for King, traveling many weekends with him to speaking engagements at New England college chapels. Maguire spoke at King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and joined him from time to time on his circuit.

"We were imbued with a passion for social justice," Maguire recalls. "We didn't talk about multiculturalism and diversity in those days. We spoke of equity and fairness and inclusion, of social justice and human rights."

Maguire first visited the campus on a speaking engagement in 1959. The response he felt, and the intellectual sympathy he encountered in conversations with Victor Butterfield, encouraged him to accept a job at Wesleyan when it was offered.

 Once on the faculty, Maguire reacted strongly to the racial imbalance he saw at the University. "It seemed to me that for Wesleyan, which was so superb in every other dimension, to fail to be sensitive to and more reflective of the changing American society was just an anomaly." He developed a reputation as a firebrand and was a leader among those who spoke forcefully to President Butterfield, the Board, and other faculty members of their conviction that the University had to change. "We were kind of a political action group, young Turks, and we put a lot of pressure on the administration whenever we could."

Maguire and his department chair, Professor of Religion David Swift, created strong personal links with the black community in Middletown, involved themselves in the rededication of the local chapter of the NAACP, and attended black churches. "We needed the validation of the black leadership," he says, "but we also established good and close--and highly effective--friendships."

David Swift, a conscientious objector in World War II, had taught for many years at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the first black college founded in the United States, before coming to Wesleyan in 1955--the same year that bus boycotts by blacks began in the South. He is the author of Black Prophets of Justice: Activist Clergy Before the Civil War, which includes the definitive biography of Charles B. Ray.

 Today, Maguire and Swift are probably best remembered by those who were on campus in the '60s for their trip to Montgomery, Alabama, in May of 1961, as part of the first group of Freedom Riders.

 On Mother's Day, Maguire; his divinity school classmate, Yale University Chaplain William Sloan Coffin; Swift; Yale Divinity School Associate Dean Gaylord Noyce; and Yale law student George Smith traveled south. In Atlanta, Georgia, they collected two black students from southern colleges and rode into Alabama in an integrated Trailways bus. "We were sitting where we shouldn't, some blacks in front, some whites in the back," Swift recalls. "There were police cars ahead of us and behind us and alongside us; white crowds waited to mob us at bus stops; the governor of Alabama called out the National Guard. We were arrested for integrating a lunch counter in Montgomery."

 Arrested on charges of breach of the peace and inciting to riot, they were sentenced to fines of $100 each and thirty days in jail. Jack Paton '49, then editor of the alumni magazine and an adjunct professor, mounted a telephone campaign to raise money from faculty and administrators to pay the fines and legal costs. This effort secured the prisoners' release after only five days.

 The case of these first Freedom Riders moved up from local to district to state supreme court. Each time they were found guilty, and each time they appealed. Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the verdict.

 This incident, which attracted national media attention, focused campus attention on the racial issue as nothing had before. When Maguire and Swift returned, five hundred people crowded the chapel on a Saturday afternoon to hear firsthand of their experiences. "We felt terrific social support from our colleagues," says Maguire, adding, however, that there was also some objection to their absence at the end of the term. "We went during reading week, so no classes were disturbed," Swift noted dryly, "and we came back to a bunch of exams to correct."

 President Butterfield "took hell from old alums" who did not approve of faculty engaging in such public action, says Maguire, "but he gave me to understand that he was personally very proud of us for doing this.

 "You felt that his decision came from some deep well of principle; he was a man of great virtue and rectitude. He didn't go looking for fights, but didn't duck them; and if he believed that something was right, nothing could force him down. While he was not as far out there on this issue as we were, he was right there with us. You might think he was canny, that he saw where the tide was running, but at that time the tide wasn't with us at all. It was a very risk-taking thing to do. Once he determined that what we were advocating was morally right, he was unwavering in support."

 By 1963 institutions across the country were embroiled in action and debate on racial issues. Members of the Wesleyan faculty were participating in demonstrations, marches, and trips to the South. Few remained entirely passive, but among the most active and vocal were T. Chadbourne Dunham, Philip Hallie, David MacAllester, John Maguire, Richard Ohmann, Karl Scheibe, David Swift, Richard Vann, Carl Viggiani, and Richard Winslow.

 According to William Kerr, "They helped turn Wesleyan from a preoccupation with itself to a strong participation in national issues. Their departures, their returns, their narrations, their sermons alerted the campus to this national outrage."

 Maguire brought Martin Luther King to Wesleyan several times, notably on King's thirty-third birthday. His appearances were dramatic and influential, but he was only one in a long procession of civil rights figures who introduced broad-ranging educational and social challenges to the campus.

 Thus the stage was set, the atmosphere was receptive, the commitment to a multiracial student body was in place. All that was missing was the students themselves.