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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview L-0133, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Raymond Dawson became the Vice President of Academic Affairs for the University
of North Carolina during the 1970s. In this interview, he describes the tensions
surrounding the desegregation of public institutions of education in North
Carolina during the mid-1970s. Dawson begins by discussing the Adams v. Richardson case, which scrutinized the state of desegregation
in public education in ten southern states, including North Carolina. Focusing
on the role of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and the Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare (HEW) in this process, Dawson explains how the current
and future role of historically black colleges was an especially volatile
subject. During this time, the National Association for Equal Opportunity in
Higher Education (NAFEO) called on historically white colleges and universities
to continue moving forward with integration while also ensuring the preservation
of historically black colleges and universities. In addition, Dawson explains
how debates about whether the new state veterinary school should be established
at North Carolina State University or at North Carolina A&T became a
central focus in the desegregation process. Dawson concludes the interview with
a discussion of the negotiations between UNC President William Friday, Secretary
of Education Joseph Califano, and HEW General Counsel Peter Libassi and his
aide, David Breneman, which were demonstrative of the University of North
Carolina's unique position in federal desegregation orders. Because of North
Carolina's comparatively large number of historically black colleges, the state
became a testing ground for the federal government to explore ways to integrate
public education while preserving historically black colleges.
Former Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of North Carolina, Raymond Dawson, discusses tensions surrounding federal desegregation orders in North Carolina during the 1970s. Because of North Carolina's comparatively large number of historically black colleges, the state became a testing ground for the federal government to explore ways to integrate public education while preserving historically black colleges.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Let's start just by talking about the background of the case. And maybe if you can recall the first time that it began to occupy your time and your attention. Must have been pretty much from the beginning of your—of when you came as Vice-President here?
Yeah. The ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit on
this, on the Adams case, came I believe in the spring of 1972. Just as
we were getting restructured and reorganized. So when I came out here
in, started coming out here in June and July of '72, that was one of the
issues. Now the University had had some correspondence with the Office
for Civil Rights that I remembered over the preceding two or three years
off and on. But it obviously, the whole issue took a new focus and new
direction in '72 when, when the DC Court made that ruling. During the
next, I would say, year, year and a half, I was not very closely
involved in that. It was handled mostly by the Vice-President for
Planning, who was then Cameron West. The Office for Civil Rights was
working, trying to develop guidelines, so things were not moving with
blinding speed, as I recall. But we were put on notice that we had to
develop a plan, and we discussed it at staff meetings from time to time,
very frequently in fact, and Dr. West was doing most of the drafting. He
left to accept an appointment in Illinois. I guess that must have been
sometime along in 1973. And John Sanders became Vice-President for
Planning. And he picked up a major responsibility for the development of
a plan. I can't recall if it was before or after Cameron West left and
John Sanders came that HEW raised questions and objections about the
first plan that we put forward. And so John Sanders, working with Dick
Robinson and a sub-committee of the—or a special committee, I guess it
was, of the Board of Governors—went to work on doing the work for the
preparation of another plan. That was the so-called revised state plan
that was finally approved by HEW in June of 1974. If you will note, this
was running parallel in time to the great debate over medical education,
and I found a large part of my time absorbed in that, and in some other
legislative and other matters. But during 1974 I remember getting much
more closely involved, and I recall that at some point during that year
I went with President Friday and Mr. Sanders and Dick Robinson and maybe
one or two others, to one meeting in Washington with the director of the
Office of Civil Rights, who was then Peter Holmes and his staff to talk
about our plan and to get their comments as to how we could get it in
shape for them to approve it. And then they did approve it; it was
finally approved in June of '74. By that time the issue was beginning to
get sort of right in the center of everything, working out some kind of
accommodation with HEW. It subsided a little when they accepted the plan
in June of '74, though then we had to get some machinery put in place to
start making annual reports and to get regular reporting cycles and
processes designed.
I was just going to ask you about Peter Holmes, the Director of OCR. I was wondering if you could just give me a little bit more detail about what sort of person he was to work with, how he negotiated, how —
Holmes was a very quiet and, overall, seemed to me a very reasonable
person. We—I remember it at that meeting up there, he was raising some
questions about our plans and, and he and President Friday had a very
amicable exchange about—it seemed to me Mr. Holmes accepted pretty
clearly that we wanted to work to the same purpose they wanted to work
toward. We wanted to promote the racial integration of our campuses, we
didn't want to be in a position where there was any discrimination
against blacks in the University system. And, see, their initial
guidelines that we were working
But the next big step was—again, I'm not sure of the chronology—the next big steps were these. There came to be a debate on the Vet School. Then there came to be a lot of pressure on the Office for Civil Rights and HEW to reject not only our plan, but everybody's plan. This seemed to have been occasioned by a motion filed by the Legal Defense Fund, the LDF, in the same U.S. District Court in Washington. See, the case was up there, and it's important to remember through all the discussion that we were not parties to the lawsuit. This was a lawsuit brought by Adams, et. al., supported by the LDF, against the United States government for not enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act in ten Southern states which had historically had de jure segregation in public as well as elementary and secondary—in higher as well as in elementary and secondary education. So the suit was against the Federal government itself to force them to enforce the law. And the LDF attempting to tell them exactly how it ought to be enforced. And not all the states, not all the southern states were named; it was a curious kind of mixture. Maryland was named. Virginia was named. North Carolina was named. Not South Carolina. They were not named. Georgia was named. Florida. Alabama was not. Mississippi and Louisiana were not. Texas was not. Arkansas was. Oklahoma was. I believe West Virginia was, in the initial thing.
Was there any logic to that?
The logic was, in the case of Louisiana and Mississippi those two states simply refused to submit plans. They, as I recall, they said, in effect, "We're not in violation of the law. If you think we are, sue us." And so the Federal Government initiated separate legal action against them. Mississippi's case is still going through the courts. And the Louisiana case, I guess, was settled with a consent decree after ours, and I think it's back in the courts. So those two cases are still going on. I was reading something today about the Mississippi case. The Justice Department has filed another motion in the Mississippi case this past week. South Carolina and Alabama were just out on political grounds. I mean, this was the early days of the Nixon administration, and I don't think there's any question that George Wallace and Strom Thurmond, you know, had some muscle to pull in the Republican party and they were simply not named. And Texas, I think, was the same explanation. Tennessee was under separate litigation, so that was straightforward. So anyway, we were among the main states.
Just to get this straight, the suit went against the government, went against the Federal government. The Federal Government then named the states that were requesting plans?
Right. The suit named the states in a very careful selection, interesting selection of states.
This selection occurred on the part of the HEW, then?
Well, on the part of the LDF.
Yes, in consultation with them.
The essence of a lawsuit is, of course, that there really be a case in controversy. And as time went on, it was not at all clear that it was really a controversy between the LDF as the plaintiffs and HEW as the defendant. And this began to show during '75, I think it was, when the LDF went into court and filed this motion to order the court to overrule HEW and declare all these plans invalid. At about that juncture a man named Martin Gerry—G-E-R-R-Y—became the Director of the Office of Civil Rights. We read the ruling, we read the LDF motion in the Adams case, trying to get all these suits declared—these plans declared unacceptable. The Board of Governors even debated for a time whether we should intervene in the suit because it was a very sweeping brief that the LDF filed. It made no distinctions whatsoever, between public and elementary and secondary education. Higher education and elementary and secondary. It seemed oblivious to all that. It called for some highly punitive measures against the states, and for the first time clearly surfaced the proposition that in the case of public higher education, where you do not have mandatory attendance and you do not have assignment for schools—pupil assignment plans—that you do have as a mechanical device to move students around, the assignment of programs. And that figured pretty prominently in that first LDF brief in '75, saying that, you know, if you move programs, you can tell students to move with them, and that's the way you mix up the institutions. It quoted at one point the Swann decision, the Charlotte case, Charlotte-Mecklenburg case, which said that, "What our goal has to be is no black schools and no white schools, but just schools." Now the people who were really alarmed by that brief was the organization called NAFEO—N-A-F-E-O. That's the acronym. National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education. Now NAFEO is an association of black colleges. That's their group. Public and private. 512 of them. They saw this as a threat to the historical identity of the black college. They filed a motion, a counter-motion in the court against this and said that since they had been themselves —that is the institutions—had been themselves the victim of discrimination and segregation, that they should not be singled out as a part of the remedy. And so their position was that, you know, that they were in full compliance with the law and that insofar as the make up of their student bodies were concerned, they had always been open to all. The fact that they were, were of a clearly racial identifiability was because of the law of the oppressors. And so the dire consequences ought to fall on the oppressors and that what should be done as a remedy was to build up and strengthen the black institutions. Now, as I say, our board talked about, "Should we intervene in the Adams Case?" And wisely said, "No." Said, "We do not want to put ourselves under jurisdiction of a Federal court up in Washington, D.C."
And in the meantime, as I say, came the Vet School this year. The
question came well, why not put the Vet School at A&T? And when
the—let's see, the School of Veterinary Medicine had been authorized
just before restructuring. The old Board of Trustees and the University
under Governor Scott had gone on record, you know, we going to develop
the Veterinary School, and establish the Department of Veterinary
Science at N.C. State. And then, you know, we did a study about the Vet
School, and then the decision was to locate it at State. And then came
the proposal, "Well, let's locate it at North Carolina A&T." So
along in, this would have been late '74, I guess, or maybe early '75, at
a meeting of the Board of Governors, the director of the Atlanta
Regional Office of the Office for Civil Rights, a Mr. William Thomas,
just appeared at the Board meeting and asked to be heard on the issue of
the location of the Vet School. It was an interesting kind of thing,
because in the meantime, see, we were in the process of having to
develop the medical school at East Carolina. And I remember one member
of the Board of Governors asked him, said, "Well you, you've expressed
all this interest in the location of the Vet
How did Thomas get into this, do you think? Where was he —
Well, the, oh, it's clear that the Chancellor of the folks over at A&T were prompted to put in a petition for the Vet School.
Prompted by?
By LDF. And there was a very, there were some very active organizations in those days. Now I would remind you that on the Board of Governors was one of the principal officers of the LDF, Julius Chambers. See, Julius was on the Board of Governors.
He was still on at that point?
He stayed on the Board until 1977. Then there was an organization called the—what was it called? The Coalition of Alumni and Friends. Does that ring a bell?
Black alumni group?
Black alumni group. They were very active. And so there were a lot of people participating in this, and they all had direct pipelines into LDF, which in turn, had direct pipelines into OCR.
They were feeding each other information?
And they weren't going to get involved in the medical school fight, because they knew they would get the hell beat out of them. And they weren't about to lie down in front of a locomotive. Because, you know, the Democratic party has the Board of Governors and everybody else—you couldn't deal with that. You know, that train left the station long ago. But the Vet School—they decided to see if they could derail that. The hook that they finally found in the course of that discussion, was Thomas pointed out that the Board of Governors in this June, 1974 plan, had committed itself to do a racial impact study in connection with the location of any new program. We had not done one since our frame of reference had been the old trustee resolution which initially looked toward the establishment of the Vet School. And so those gentlemen nodded, "All right. We ought to do a racial impact study." So the Board postponed any action, and we did a racial impact study. That meeting must have been along like September 1974, something of that nature. We came back in another month or two with a racial impact study, excuse me, which I guess John Sanders did. And we looked at the program at N.C. State.
As I understand this Vet School, the original idea of the Vet School, was unusual in University decision making and governance in the sense that it came from outside groups rather than being generated from within.
I'm not sure that that would be so unusual in itself, but not entirely.
You see, its biggest proponent was the Governor, who was chairman of the
Board of Trustees, see, under the old structure. And the old Board of
Higher Education had done a study. It had a lot of things going for it.
We probably —you might talk to someone, well, President Friday or Felix
Joyner and
Do you think —
That would have been late '74 or early '75, because then we filed a
supplemental budget request for the Vet School, you remember, for the
'75 session of the General Assembly. And just about that time, see, you
had the Vet School controversy and a lot of stirring on going about our
plan and then came that LDF brief and the reaction of NAFEO to that. And
then HEW sort of fell on us.
By then, we were hot into the elections of 1976 and Mr. Carter won and
appointed Joe Califano as his Secretary of Education. Secretary of
Health, Education, and Welfare. Secretary of HEW. And a new director at
the Office for Civil Rights took over, David Tatel. And we sort of, you
know, stood by him, waited to see what was going to happen. President
Friday knew Joe Califano. Had known him for a long time. They'd worked
together during the Johnson years when President Friday was on the White
House Fellows Commission. And, in fact, I remember in 1970, when I was
Dean, President Friday did us the favor of getting Joe Califano to come
down here and give a speech over in Hill Hall one night. Califano was at
that time one of the key people working with that commission designed to
reform the Democratic party, and that was the subject of his lecture
that night. And I remember I had to find some ashtrays to put up on the
podium of Hill Hall because Joe was quite a smoker in those days.
Anyhow, we hoped that we would have some reasonable people with whom we
could establish a sound working relationship to do what needed to be
done. We now know, and found out shortly after, during the course of our
law suit that Califano appointed a commission and they went to work to
rewrite the guidelines that had been issued back in November of '73, and
made a conscious decision not to consult with any of the universities or
states about those. They were to be developed in secret. But along in
the—I guess the late winter or early spring of 1977, President Friday
was contacted and said that Mr. Califano's special assistant—No. His
counsel, the counsel for HEW. HEW's General Counsel, Mr. Peter Libassi,
and his aide, who was David Breneman, wanted to visit with us. Libassi
was a very prominent attorney. David Breneman was—I guess Dave was an
economist on the staff out at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
And later he became president of, I can't think of the private college
in Michigan, and I think is still a college president. But they were Mr.
Califano's emissaries who were going to come and talk to us about we
assumed, what we were going to be called on to do. Because we knew we
were sitting here with, you know, with a rejected plan, and we knew HEW
was under a court order. It had to do something. And so that was the
first word that we had that they would be coming to visit us. Now I
remember they came, they arrived on a Sunday, and so we had a long
session in that conference room right around the corner. The president
invited the Chairman of the Board of Governors, who was Mr. William A.
Johnson. Judge Johnson. He was present. I was there. Felix Joyner was
there. Dick Robinson was there. Cleon Thompson was there. That's
probably pretty much the meeting—then Libassi and Breneman. Libassi had
a tablet on his lap, and he would speak from that tablet. And that
clearly was a draft, a working draft of what came to be known as the
Criteria, which was, you know, the new guidelines. But they were going
to issue them as—they were called Criteria—gosh, I never tought I would
forget the full name. Let's see, here.
That specifically came from Libassi?
Libassi acknowledged that. Privately, to Friday.
He acknowledged that? To Friday?
He acknowledged it. Now on the one hand there was good reason to single us out because more than any state, North Carolina had a racially dual system. We had five historically black public campuses. Virginia had two. South Carolina had one. Georgia had three. Florida had one. You get my point. I mean, this state came closer than any one in constructing really a dual system. So it was kind of logical in a way. But then the other thing they knew was, here was the most prestigious state university in the South, with the possible exception of Texas, but Texas wasn't even a party to the suit. You see, Chapel Hill had a unique place—At that time there was no member of the AAU except Chapel Hill between Charlottesville and Austin. And then there was the fact that it was Chapel Hill. So that's where we were, and that was kind of the horns of the dilemma upon which we found ourselves. The criteria were finally presented to us in July.
And in fact, they were delivered to President Friday by special delivery or Federal Express, or something like that, but they were delivered to his home on July 4, 1977. Califano had it sent down to him. Califano professed to be very proud of them—something we can all live with and find our way through. President Friday got them, called me. I remember Felix and I met out here. Cleon Thompson. Felix and I went down to the copy machine and made a copy for all of us, and we went off to study them, and we began the meeting on it the next day. And a number of things in it promptly caught our eyes. There were some standards in there, and—oh, and John Sanders was involved in all this, too. So we had our marching orders in one sense in these Criteria. Now, could we pick up there at another time?
Sure.
I apologize.
END OF INTERVIEW