Yes, I feel a strong attachment and strong admiration on many accounts,
but I have felt that I never could live there again, that I would find
so much that was repugnant to me, and that I would probably get in
trouble. And I feel much freer in New York or in New England, though I
blame myself for not having followed the choices of my brothers George
and Morris, who devoted themselves to southern residence and projects.
Morris for a long time was teaching in the South, in North Carolina and
then in Alabama and then after he retired from the Friends World
College, he still had a sort of station of the college in Clarkesville,
Georgia. And George immersed himself in the southern scene in an
atmosphere that was very often hostile, and was trying particularly
because, as he said, he had two daughters who were growing up in Atlanta
in the thirties, forties. [laughter] He
told me somebody was going to visit him from elsewhere and asked for
directions, how did he find George's home in the suburbs of Atlanta? And
George said, "Well, you get off the bus at a certain point and you walk
down the street, and the first white man you see mowing his lawn is me."
[laughter] But he was relieved when
finally he thought he could retire from the Southern Regional Council;
he had been under strong suspicion because he, with great tact and
discretion, but also with great courage, had been extremely candid as a
spokesman for the rights of blacks in education, politically, in
employment, in everything. And in this movie that I
speak of is a scene where he visits a local community, which was
suspicious and hostile and so on. But George said that "The black
children in this community deserve to have the best school that the
community affords, and I believe in that" and so on [UNCLEAR] So the chairman of his little local meeting said,
"Dr. Mitchell, we're not served by a railroad in this community, but we
have a bus, and there's a bus leaving at two o'clock. And I'd like to
escort you to the station and make sure that you get safely on that
bus." See, I mean it was that kind of thing. So he went to Scotland
where [laughter] he was removed from that.
But when he went to Scotland he was asked on one occasion—maybe more
than one—to talk on television in Glasgow, and
[laughter] his wife told us that one of the little girls in
Glencoe, their local community, came running in to her mother and said,
"Come quick, Mr. Mitchell is on the telly. I did not believe it until I
heard him speak." [laughter] His accent
was different, you know. You inquire whether I think that any of our
notions are passing on to the next generation.
It is the regret of my life that at Johns Hopkins University I did not
pursue to the bitter end the defense of the proposal to admit a
qualified Negro graduate student in the Department of Political Economy.
He was Edward S. Lewis, who was the Secretary of the Urban League, of
which I had been the first President in Baltimore. He was a graduate, I
believe, of the University of Chicago and maybe of the Columbia
University School of Social Work; I've forgotten. At any rate he was in
every way a highly qualified, mature applicant for
admission to graduate work. He was a leading black social worker in
Maryland, where there's a large negro population with a much higher
incidence of poverty, disease, and so on than the whites. And he had
been doing graduate work in economics at the University of Pennsylvania,
commuting weekends. He could only get weekends, because he was holding
his position as Secretary of the Urban League in Baltimore. And this was
unsatisfactory and costly and interrupted and so on, so why shouldn't he
come to Johns Hopkins where we had every facility? The notion was
mentioned first, I think, in a little article that I wrote for the
alumni magazine, not mentioning Mr. Lewis because at that time I don't
think he was a candidate, but just in general that we oughtn't to draw
the color line. And this provoked a reproof from one of the trustees,
who wrote me very bitterly that I had made a ridiculous suggestion and
so on. And afterwards I think he was the occasion of my leaving the
University. I pursued this, and my friend Norman Brown, who later was a
distinguished professor of Sanskrit at the University of Pennsylvania,
had an interval without an appointment, and he was asked to edit a
directory of alumni of Johns Hopkins University, and he worked on that
one winter. And we used to have lunch together sometimes, and I
mentioned this to Norman. And Norman said that in preparing this
directory of alumni, he found that an early student in the University
was a black man. Professor Simon Newcomb, who was at the Naval
Observatory in Washington, taught also at Johns Hopkins. He was an
economist as well as a mathematician and astronomer. And he brought over to Baltimore a young black man who was one of his
assistants, one of his mathematical staff. And he said, "Kelly Miller
would like to come over and do graduate work here. What would you think
of it?" And President Gilman said, "He may find that the environs are a
little strange to him. The others are white. But as far as the
facilities of the University are concerned, they are open to any
qualified applicant." So Kelly Miller came. Well, when Norman was
preparing the directory, somebody in the Registrar's office said, "Omit
his name from the directory." Norman said, "I'll do no such thing. He
was here." He took a master's degree, I think, in mathematics. And so he
insisted, as of course he should have. I picked that up and cited that
to the authorities of the University as precedent for admitting Ed
Lewis. I did better. I think it was a little stroke, really, but it
wasn't appreciated. At the time Kelly Miller was there, the University
published the class lists of each class in the University. And I went
back to the publications at that time and found Kelly Miller's name and,
providentially, the name of Professor Robert Gaines, whom I had known as
a child at Richmond College—he was Professor of Mathematics there—who
was also a student, white. And I knew Gaines; indeed, we are remote
cousins. And also, as it happened, both of these men were South
Carolinians. One black, one white, both in the same small mathematics
department at Johns Hopkins back in the nineties. So I wrote to each of
them and said, "What was your experience?" Just such things as you are
asking me now. And they wrote back, and they both
said that, "Oh, it seemed a little strange at first, but we got to know
each other and there was no friction," and Gaines said he and Kelly
Miller had studied in each other's rooms and all that kind of thing. So
I presented these letters to the Academic Council which was considering
the question of admitting Ed Lewis, a black man.
[laughter] I thought that was about as good as you could
offer, really, you see, a reversion to the earlier history of the
University, which was generous and free. About that time I had a falling
out with the President, and I left, but I wish I had stayed and seen it
through. As it happened, Ed Lewis made his formal application. It was
considered by the authorites of the University and rejected, to their
shame. But if I had kept on, I think maybe we could have found a
different termination of it. This thing provoked much discussion in the
University, as you can think. And the head of my department, Professor
Hollander, called me into his office one day, and he said, "I have it
from high authority that if you would let this lapse for a year and not
insist, and the University then refuses to admit this man to my
department, I will resign." Well, that would have brought action,
because he was one of the most prominent economists in the country and
in Johns Hopkins University. Maybe I should have taken a different turn
on it. I said, "In the first place, it's Mr. Lewis's application, not
mine. I can't decide for Mr. Lewis what his rights are." Though, as a
matter of fact, I suppose if I had urged Ed to let it lie over for a
year, he might have done it. The object of the year was, apparently,
some had come to Hollander saying they could avoid the impression of having been compelled to do this, that they
had thought it over and they did it on their own. I said, "I don't see
any reason for waiting a year. What's going to change? And Mr. Lewis
needs the training and he wants it, and why not have it here?" So I kept
on with it, and the situation became more and more tense, and I think
that the President of the University felt that the easiest way to solve
it from his point of view was to get rid of me. And so he became so
abusive and overbearing and so on that I flared up and resigned. But if
I had stayed on, I think we could have worked it out. And Lewis was the
best possible candidate, unexceptionable. He later became Secretary of
the Greater Urban League of New York and took his doctor's degree at New
York University, and he is now Dean of one of the community colleges in
New York. This had happened back in 1939, and some time after that Johns
Hopkins did admit a black candidate to the Graduate School— she was a
schoolteacher in the District of Columbia—in the English Department. And
then others came. So that it wasn't futile by any means.
I think it was one of those instances of a thing that fails in itself at
the time, but then later it bears fruit. But earlier I cited to the
authorities of the University an instance, I believe, that I thought was
discreditable. We had an Engineering School which was supported partly,
at least, by the State of Maryland. And so the University didn't have
the same freedom in rejecting applicants. Two boys came from one of the
Central American countries, they were negroid, obviously so, and the
Registrar of the University took the precaution of taking them before
the Consul of Costa Rica or wherever they came from
and having him certify that they were Spanish. They did very well, by
the way, those two [laughter] boys in the
Engineering School. They actually had them, you see, but they had
"disinfected" them. The Consul shouldn't have made the certification,
but anyway that was the thing. And the Registrar of the University told
me that if she knew an applicant was black, she would not admit him
before having the authority of the University to do so. It had fallen on
evil days, it seemed to me, so far as its outlook and the relations with
the community were concerned. But Goucher College was the same way. I
remember going to a commencement of Goucher College where a friend of
mine was the President of the Board of Trustees, Emory Niles, who
presided at the meeting. And they gave an honorary degree to a woman
from India, a doctor. So I wrote to Emory afterwards and said, "You give
an honorary degree to a brown woman from the other side of the world,
and you won't admit brown women from Baltimore." So he said, "Come to
see me, and we'll talk it over." I should have gone. I had a similar
experience with a man at the School of Hygiene and Public Health at
Johns Hopkins. There was a black man, Dr. Coleman, on the staff of the
Maryland Department of Public Health, and he wanted to enter the School
of Hygiene and Public Health at Johns Hopkins, and they wouldn't admit
him. So I wrote to Alan Freeman or I met Alan Freeman about this, and
Freeman was scornful of my proposal that this black man should be . . .
Alan Freeman was an older brother of Douglas Freeman; I had known him
when he was a student in Richmond. And then I wrote to Dr. Reid, who was the head of the School of Hygiene at that
time, who was a New Englander, and I thought he would take a different
attitude. The School of Hygiene had urged Dr. Coleman to apply at
Harvard instead of Hopkins. And Reid said, "I feel bad about this. Come
to see me. Let's see what we can do." I should have gone, but I didn't.
I felt, "Well, hell, you know what the situation is. You don't need me
to plead for him." If I had gone, maybe we could have worked it around
some way. But they rejected Coleman. That was really a worse case than
Lewis's, I think, because he was dealing directly with the health of the
whole community, because of a high syphilis rate in the black community
and TB rate, both of which existed. And the death rate was double for
blacks what it was for whites in Maryland. This was certainly deserting
the office [laughter] of leaders of
education.