Well, they weren't, in the sense that many people might often suppose
there were pressures, there weren't any. I mean, I didn't encounter any
great wave anti-Negro racism when I got here. I benefited from the fact
that there were just nice people in the English department who actually
bending over backwards, it seemed to me, to be sure that I knew that I
was welcome in their department. The man that was head of the department
at the time, Carroll Horris, was also a Michigan Ph.D.
[Laughter] And a very fine chap and
politically a liberal. There was no problem there. The chancellor when I
came here was a man who certainly was anxious for me to get along, and
that was Carlyle Sitterson. I don't want to say anything, and he might
not want me to say, and yet I want to tell you this. 'Course we were
living in adjoining houses, and sometimes we walked home together, not
that often, but sometimes. And we talked. But I had a conversation in
his office once, and I don't know whether he'd want me to tell it, but
the subject of the black faculty did come up in that conversation. And I
could quickly see, I thought, that he did have some concern less I
should suppose that he was at all lukewarm in his attempt to expand the
number of Negroes here. See, we didn't have any, except for wife and
myself.
[Laughter] We didn't have anybody.
So he said something to me that I already knew. That at schools like UNC
if professors, and especially the full professors, were not committed to
a program, that program was in deep trouble.
[Laughter] The head of the school might make all sorts of
pronouncements and exert himself in all sorts of ways, but universities
like Carolina are actually
Page 23 run—and maybe I
shouldn't say this so openly—by the full professors. If you can't
persuade them, if you're in the department of history, for example, and
you can't persuade your full professors in that department to do a
certain thing, you are up the creek without the paddle. I already had
divined this. That what we had at Chapel Hill was a situation in which
there was still left enough of what someone would call the "Old
Tradition" to impede the recruitment of black faculty. It would not be
an open thing. It would be subtle thing. Let us suppose someone in the
department of mathematics—I'll just choose one—brought up a candidate.
Said, "Here, we've found this black professor, and we'd like to hire
him." Nobody would say, "We don't want him because he's black." But some
of the people there would say, "Oh, we'd like to have him, but he's not
qualified."
[Laughter] "We've looked at
his record of publication, and it's just not up to our standard."
[unclear] You get the sort of thing. What
had happened, I think, is that Sitterson was experiencing, finding
departments that were doing this to him. So I could sympathize with him.
I knew he was telling the truth. So I was on the Faculty, whatever they
call it, Council, I think they call it here. And the Faculty Council set
up a committee on the recruitment of black faculty. I'm trying to think
of the fine young man that was here that chaired the committee. The
committee had its meeting, and then when it appointed to the faculty,
the annual report, the man who read the report was a genuine liberal.
Not that every genuine liberal would do this. I'm not trying to impugn
everyone. But he was also a member of
Page 24 the
department of religion. So after he had presented the report, he could
not restrain himself from adding his own speech to it, and in the course
of this speech he did want seemed to me to be a thing that we shouldn't
have had. He dwelled for some time on the sins of the University against
Negroes in the past. Racism, the long standing racism at UNC. Well,
whether or not that was true, and certainly there had been long standing
racism, but some of the members of that Faculty Council were not only
professors—you anticipate what I'm going to say—they were also alumni.
[Laughter] And what was inevitable
happened. After that man sat down, in the discussion which ensued, one
or two of the alumni who were virtually livid with rage
[Laughter] rose to say things. They weren't
going to attack the report that openly, but to defend their university.
I wanted to try to do what I could to get some of the poison out of this
situation. So what I did was to wait until what I considered an
appropriate moment and then made this little speech in which I said that
I could understand how it's easy to think that you're not guilty of a
certain prejudice. It's easy to do that. And it just happened that I had
just gotten from my undergraduate school Wilberforce, it's latest thing
that they send out to the alumni, and the feature of this brochure,
whatever it was, was a description of the dedication of a building on
the campus, the latest building on the campus, and it was called the
Martin Luther King Building. And I said, "And when I saw the name
[Martin Luther King], I got very angry." And then I waited a
Page 25 see, Martin Luther King is a Baptist."
[Laughter]
And of course, what happened….