Interactions with the Office of Civil Rights over desegregation
Friday discusses his interactions with the Office of Civil Rights during the 1970s, focusing particularly on his professional relationships with Secretaries Joe Califano and Patricia Harris. In particular, Friday emphasizes tensions between the federal government and the university system in the process of desegregation. As Friday briefly describes here, he believed that the OCR did not understand the complexities under which the university system operates, which led to some disagreement regarding the best approach.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with William C. Friday, December 3, 1990. Interview L-0147. 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
- WILLIAM LINK:
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Your dealings with Califano were quite smooth in this period, at least?
- WILLIAM C. FRIDAY:
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Yeah. It was actually one of serving the President, you know. But
I'd say one time later Joe called me one day and said,
"I want to bring my group of people down to have supper and
let's just talk about some ideas." Doug Cater, who
is now the Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center, was in that
group. Joe. I think Doc Howe. And he flew down in one of those jets, and
we ate dinner in the Morehead Dining Room, and we went back and I led a
rather large group of people had come from all over the state here. And
it was not until the Carter years that Joe got to be secretary. And it
got to be matter then, I guess, of what David Tatel, his director of the
office of Civil Rights, wanted to see done, and Joe had to support him,
of course. But when they took a position that to
implement what they believed had to be, which was you had to show more
numbers, just plain numbers. And that you could do that by taking
institutions that were contagious, duplicating departments, and close
one in one place and one in another. They never understood what an
intrusion that was into the academic structure of a university, you see.
They gave no credibility to any kind of tenure contract that a faculty
member might have. They saw no reason to worry about admissions
policies. They saw no reason to worry about the relationship of the
applicant and the demanding curriculum that they might have to
undertake. And they couldn't understand why you needed both
programs to get to the ultimate objective of an educated human being.
And it was just numbers. Whatever it took. Tear down whatever it took to
do it. It was a very misunderstood argument. I got accused of being a
segregationist, preservationist, or whatever word you want to use. And I
never shall forget. I was having a difficult time in the Board of
Trustees at the time, because they wanted just to standoff and have a
really hard-nosed law suit. And I took the chairman of the board, and my
colleagues and I went to Washington to meet with Patricia Harris, who
was then Secretary. Now remember, she and I had spent six years
together, as I told you before. Did I go into that experience about the
phone call?
- WILLIAM LINK:
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Yes.
- WILLIAM C. FRIDAY:
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And our relationship?
- WILLIAM LINK:
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Yes. You mean where she ߞ
- WILLIAM C. FRIDAY:
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Well, she was so untoward and so uncharacteristic, that the chairman of
the board was obviously convinced that he was dead right, and I was dead
wrong. And from that experience, if that was the only one you had, you
would have believed that. But I had worked, by that time, through at
least six secretaries, in the process of this. It went all the way back
to Casper Wineberger. And you had to take it as you could deal with the
Washington hierarchy. But ߞ
- WILLIAM LINK:
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Why do you suppose sheߞ
- WILLIAM C. FRIDAY:
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I guess because she was the secretary. She had to prove herself.
- WILLIAM LINK:
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She had to ߞ
- WILLIAM C. FRIDAY:
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She's a lovely woman. She had a wonderful man as a husband.
Her husband's a lawyer there in Washington. Bill Harris. And
I reallyߞwe never discussed it after that. Never saw her until
she died, regrettably, much too soon. But when I got that call that
night, that was a very revealing thing. To say to meߞhere was
the senior staff people had met, and they wanted us to understand they
didn't agree with any of that. Which told you, you see, what
was going on. So when Joe wrote in his book that President Carter felt I
was like the Mayor of Boston and some other peopleߞliberals
who were tender skinned. And he kept trying to send me messages through
Juanita. That was not the way it was. It was the fact that they
weren't having it their way. And I didn't yield to
their strategy. Now, it's no pride for me. And I'm
not proud that it took eleven-and-a-half years, and two million dollars
of tax money and lawyer fees, and that we won with the Supreme Court of
the United States. Because it was perfectly obvious why it had to be
won. It was not a racial question. It was a question of the integrity of
the University. All the time we were carrying them on our backs, we were
doing more to integrate these institutions than
anybody else in the South. And the state of Georgia accepted the table
plainly and did what they wanted done in Savannah and produced disaster.
Anybody who goes down there and examines it now will tell you that. But
they quickly acquiesced because the President was from their state. And
I could understand that. But it was a piece of contrived strategy that
they thought everybody would acquiesce in and just lie down and let it
work. It hadn't worked yet.