And Dr. Frank came down and said . . . brought the letter down . . . to
the church, . . . I had an office in the church then . . . brought the
letter down to the church and said, "Will you tell those kids, the Jr.
Highs in the church, if they will find a place for Kei to live, then
evidently that will clear it up . . . the reason they're giving. Try
that. So these kids found a home for Kei . . . it was just wonderful the
way they met her and everything . . . prepared everything. But then the
Admissions Committee, even though they had no comeback to that . . .
well, evidently Warren had gotten the story that Dr. Frank had just
bucked the whole shootin' match . . . and said that we'll have her. Well
he didn't do that. And you see, it would have missed all the educational
kind of thing . . . different things they say he said . . . and he had
demonstrated it . . . the same kind of fair . . . in relation to when
Dr. Maynard concerted with Chapel Hill . . . ah . . . Dorothy Maynor was
married to Shelby Rooks, a Christian minister in New York, and at this
time Dorothy was just at her tops in Metropolitan Opera, and Shelby
Rooks was, at that year, Chairman of a committee in New York to raise
money for the Fellowship, and some of us went up every year to talk with
him . . . and so finally he told me, one day he said, "I'll give you
Dorothy for a concert, if you'll give us Dr. Frank." So I said, well
we'll see. And so we began to work on it. The Fellowship has never had
anything, and never while I was there, and I'm sure it must
Page 9 have been segregated before . . . never had a meeting, never
had anything anywhere that was segregated. And so the first place we
tried was Charlotte and they were so thrilled to have Dorothy Maynor
there, in I've forgotten what auditorium, but then when they found that
it could not be segregated they said they couldn't do it, they said the
same thing happened in Atlanta. And so finally, we went to Dr. Frank and
asked him what about the Fellowship, if we had it there, and he said
again, the same thing . . . it would be wonderful but we had to go
through the channels and let them place this. Well, the Fellowship had
refused all of . . . (oh and Richmond is another one) . . . all of these
other places because they had to be segregated, and we weren't about to
have a concert that was segregated in any way. Bill Poteat, who teaches
now (you can check this with Bill), he teaches at Duke University, ah,
Bill was teaching at Chapel Hill at the University of North Carolina
there, he was on that committee . . . The Fellowship was having an all
day executive committee meeting at Livingston College, and the Board was
meeting in Chapel Hill, and we just kept breathless all day long to see
as to how it would turn out. And finally, at 4:00 o'clock, when we were
just ready to close, Bill called and said the Board has said, "Invite
Dorothy Maynor. There will be no segregation."