Murphy claims only a limited contribution to desegregation
Murphy downplays his role in the desegregation struggle, especially as compared to pioneers like James Meredith, who entered the University of Mississippi shortly after Murphy left. He hoped that his teaching would influence a generation of students to push for civil rights as lawyers and lawmakers, but was disappointed to find that most of his students failed to do so. He does take credit for being one of a few white southerners who made sure that white obstructionists did not have an easy job of preventing integration.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with William Patrick Murphy, January 17, 1978. Interview B-0043. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- SEAN DEVEREUX:
-
And the same people that had been after your scalp didn't even
have to leave their positions. They were all in position to go after
him, and in a way it was the same battle all over again. I think they
hesitated to bully you, the Governor; they bullied you in subtler ways
because maybe they were a little more afraid of you than they were of
him. But you really prepared the way for him to a certain extent. What
Dr. Hall said was without whites in positions of responsibility in the
late forties and fifties and early sixties, the black civil rights
movement wouldn't have been possible. Would you agree with
that? You held the door open for somebody like Meredith, for
example.
- WILLIAM PATRICK MURPHY:
-
I never thought of putting it exactly that way because what happened to
James Meredith so far transcended what happened to me that, although the
basic underlying conflict is the same, the personal experience that he
underwent was so much more traumatic and so much more of an ordeal than
mine that from that point of view his case reduces mine to a footnote if
anybody was going to write a book about the whole period. Which is not
to say that mine was not traumatic in a personal sense to me and my
wife. Apparently nobody ever tried to kill me, and they
didn't have to send the troops into the state on my account
or anything like that. So Meredith's personal experience and
ordeal was a far more dramatic one than mine. I was white; he was black.
He was the first one who was breaking that
segregated line, whereas I was just teaching and talking and writing, so
it was a difference. But I guess you could say that I like to think I
performed a constructive and a useful role while I was teaching at Ole
Miss. But I've always thought that it was mainly what
influence I might have had on my students, who went back and practiced
law and went to the Legislature and became judges. In other words, the
very influence that these people were afraid that I would exercise, I
like to think that they were right, that I did exercise a little bit of
it. And none of them went back and became crusaders. A lot of them went
back and kept their mouths shut. A couple of them went back and found
that their views made their hometowns unpalatable, and they left the
state. But I have always believed that in times and places that nobody
could ever identify, that a lot of students who went through my classes
were able to exercise an ameliorating influence in their local racial
situations. And I like to think that I had at least some part to play in
the fact that they were willing, instead of being rabid Citizens
Councils people—and they couldn't afford to go to
the other extreme either—but what they could afford to do,
and a lot of them did do, was to try to be reasonable and ameliorative,
and a lot of them did do that. And I like to think that I had some
degree of influence in their wanting to do that. But that's
the only sense in which I think I made any real contribution to anything
down there. And even there I would have to take a back seat to Bob
Farley, the Dean of the Law School, who really did go up and down the
state speaking to bar associations about the duty to obey the Supreme
Court. And of course, you know they crucified him,
too. But he was a truly heroic figure. Or Jim Silver, the history
professor who had been there since the 1930's influencing I
don't know how many Mississippians, and they'd
been after Jim for years. They thought he was a communist. Jim said,
"They used to call me a communist, and now they only call me a
socialist. I must be slipping."
[Laughter]
When Meredith came to the campus, Jim was the only faculty
member who would go sit with Meredith in the cafeteria or would have
anything to do, played golf with him and whatnot. I mean
that's really sticking your neck out. I'm not
trying to minimize the importance of whatever I did, although I
can't really judge it. I think to some extent at some times
and places with some people I did do something useful. But
I'm not in the same league, really, with Meredith or Bob
Farley or Jim Silver so far as the contribution is concerned. I
wouldn't want to be left out of the story completely, you
understand, but I wouldn't want you or anybody else to think
that I was more important than I really was.
- SEAN DEVEREUX:
-
If you view the whole thing as a progression in a desired direction, out
of segregation and into justice and integration, people like yourself
and Dean Farley and Dr. Silver are necessary links leading toward
Meredith and toward… It couldn't have happened,
the chain would have been broken, if somewhere along the line moderate
whites hadn't made that effort to reconcile. And like you
said, what you were doing was ameliorative, and it seems to me that
"reconciliation" is really the key word. You were
trying to make peace between what you considered fundamental principles,
but you were trying to introduce people that you
knew, fellow southerners, to these principles.
- WILLIAM PATRICK MURPHY:
-
Let's put it this way, that I think it was damned important
that during this period when the power of the state and the Citizens
Councils and the governing board of the institution, when all of those
aspects of the Establishment were overwhelmingly on one side, I think it
was damned important that there were at least a few people around who
put forward what I call the right point of view. I think it was damned
important that there wasn't total submission to this police
state approach that these Citizens Council people and Ross Barnett tried
to blanket that state with. And I'm proud of the fact that I
was one of the people who can be identified in that opposition group.
And that is true. All I was trying to say a minute ago was that I
don't think my contribution was as large or important or
significant as some other people that we've already
mentioned. But I'm proud of that.
- SEAN DEVEREUX:
-
That's what I think I mean when I say that you did keep the
door open. Things could have been shut down even more tightly than they
were.
- WILLIAM PATRICK MURPHY:
-
I'm proud of what I did. I don't make any bones
about that. I could have been pusillanimous and shut up. I could have
gone over to the other side. I could have quit when they tried to get me
to quit at first. I don't make any apologies for what I did.
There don't come many times in a man's life when
he really has to test what kind of a person he is and where it can
really be costly to do what he thinks is right. And I have faced that
position twice in my life, and I'm
proud of the fact that both times I did what I thought was right with
the awareness that it was going to be costly as hell in terms of my
personal career and life and my family. And I did it, and I
couldn't have done anything else, and I'm proud of
the fact that I did it; I'd do it again. I'd even
do more if I had it to do over again
[Laughter]
than I did the first time around.
- SEAN DEVEREUX:
-
What do you mean, more?
- WILLIAM PATRICK MURPHY:
-
I mean in retrospect what I did seems so modest that I sometimes wonder
if I really was doing everything I should have been doing at the
time.