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U.S. legislator and civil rights leader Julian
Bond spoke at Commencement 1969.
Photo from the Hewlett Diversity Archive
From Personal Experience:
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.
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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. |