In Black America; The 4th Annual Heman Sweatt Symposium, with Samuel Proctor, Part 1

... From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is In Black America. I believe that these circumstances are well described in the statements of three persons among many who are discussing this issue in American higher education today. First, Jamal Dents is president of the freshman class at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri.

Lincoln University is a historically black university founded in 1866 by black soldiers returning from the Civil War. Today, Lincoln University's student body is 27 percent black, 69 percent white, and 4 percent are of other ethnic groups. Reflecting on that campus community, Mr. Dents observed, I think it's really good for our school to be culturally mixed. That's one way to gain an understanding of each other. A lot of problems are basically set on the fact that we don't understand each other. Second, Professor Shelby Steele writing in the February 1989 issue of Harper's Magazine expands on Mr. Dents' theme when he states, on a campus where members of all races are gathered, mixed together in the classroom as well as socially, differences are more exposed than ever. And this is where the trouble starts.

Members of each race, young adults coming into their own, often away from home for the first time, bring very deep fears and anxieties, incite feelings of racial shame, anger, and guilt. All the old wounds and chains that have never been addressed present themselves for attention and present our youth with pressures they cannot always handle. Lewis Wright, Assistant Vice President for Admissions, the University of Texas at Austin. Recently, the University of Texas at Austin held his fourth annual Human Sweats Symposium on Civil Rights. The Human Sweats Symposium is named in honor of Human M Sweat, which applied for admission to the University of Texas at Austin Law School back in 1946, or was denied admissions on the basis of his race. Four years later, in a lawsuit against the University, the United States Supreme Court in Sweat vs. Painter, Mr. Human M Sweat became the first black student to attend the law school at the University of Texas at Austin. I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America.

This week, the fourth annual Human Sweats Symposium on Civil Rights, multiculturalism, different cultures, sharing common ground with Dr. Samuel Proctor in Black America. I think the recipe for it is rather simple. What we've got to do is recognize the dignity and the worth of all of God's children, and know this that persons can be separated from their bad statistics. Working in the Black Colleges for 15 years, you have no idea of how many students we had to pluck out of bad environments, shake them loose from all of that bad data, and then watch them go on. You know, when I came to my office one day and saw a tall skinny fellow standing outside my door with a big round head and Popeyes begging to enter college, I had no idea that that was Jesse Jackson begging me to let him into A&T College. A child of a 16-year-old mother, no father around anywhere,

growing up in a dirty raggedy, housing project in Greenville, South Carolina, had been to Illinois for a year and was totally embarrassed. Couldn't make the football team cold. People didn't like him. Here he came back to North Carolina saying, please give me a chance to start again, Jesse Jackson. Call her back on my football team. President of my student body. How do you think I got to look so old? Jesse Jackson. Jesse H. We've got to learn how to see people coming out of places where there is no long tradition of college going and then let them know that we expect them to be separated from their awful statistics and give them another chance. In 1946, a postal worker from Dallas named Hemingham Sweat applied for admission to the University of Texas at Austin Law School what was denied admission on the basis of his race.

A four-year court battle ensued, culminating in the decision by the United States Supreme Court and Sweat Versus Painter, thereby making Hemingham Sweat the first African-American to attend the law school at the University of Texas at Austin. Now, four decades later, in an effort to pay tribute to Hemingham Sweat's historic accomplishments, a group of students at the University proposed the establishment of a campus-based civil rights symposium named in his honor. In April of 1987, on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, the inaugural Hemingham Sweat Symposium on Civil Rights was hailed. This year marked the fourth annual Hemingham Sweat Symposium on Civil Rights. Today's symposium was entitled, mostly culturalism, different cultures sharing common ground. The symposium opened with a keynote address given by Dr. Samuel Proctor. Dr. Proctor is the Martin Luther King Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University, an author of the books entitled, The Young Negro in America, 1960 to 1980, and sermons from the Black Pool Pit.

Dr. Proctor is also past the Emeritus of Avicinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York. He also preceded the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Crozier Theological Seminary and Boston University. Dr. Proctor's address, focus on the responsibility of creating a truly multicultural world lies at the doorstep of his colleges and universities. Dr. Samuel Proctor. Much of this may be and will have to be autobiographical because I have lived through the moments and the days under discussion. I was a pastor in Providence, Rhode Island, when the Hemingham Sweat case occurred and many other cases very similar. At Oklahoma, at Missouri, and another important universities in America. Alabama, I lived through it all watching the reports daily. Television was not so popular then, we hard to have it except in special places.

But we kept our ears pinned to the radio following all of the discussions. This is not some kind of history that I had to read about. Exist naturally, I lived through every moment of the cases leading up to an away from the Hemingham Sweat case. I want to say that it is an honor for me to be here tonight in memory of and in tribute to this courageous American who made such an important contribution to our land and country. One day I went to school at the Booker T. Washington High School in North of Virginia and found out that our beautiful biology teacher was absent. Her name was Allian Black. This lady was so good looking. She's the reason we didn't drop out of school. Allian Black. The boys just delighted to take biology on the doctor on the Miss Allian Black.

But she was absent that day and we heard through the grapevine that she had been fired. 1935. She was fired because she was a plaintiff in a lawsuit demanding equal pay for equal qualification on the part of Black teachers. I say, Black teachers, we were in black at that time. I forgotten what we were. I think we were colored. But I'm so old, I've been everything. Negro, colored, black, Negro, half-roll, American, all of those things. But I think in 1935, we were just colored. Allian Black. Allian Black had sued for equal pay in Norfolk. Neutral Palmer and J. Rupert Pikeett had sued for equal pay in Hampton and in Newport News, Virginia. And all of them were fired. The interesting thing is that they were highly qualified.

So how they qualified because the state of Virginia did not allow them to do graduate study in the state of Virginia. But the state would offer the Black teachers free tuition and expense money to go north anywhere out of Virginia to do a master's degree. So all of the Black teachers suddenly became intellectually curious and accepted the money and went north to the Teachers College, Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, Boston University, Indiana, some places they particularly liked to go. Penn was one, and NYU and Teachers College in New York City were others. And that was the reason why we had so many Black teachers around in Virginia and other southern states with masters degrees because the states were subsidizing them to leave the south and go. Well, here we had Allian Black with their masters degree and Pikeett and neutral Palmer and they sued.

Not my young friends who are here tonight. I want you to know that these were among the first of 39 court cases that went to the Supreme Court. Not one or two, 39 and significantly earlier than the graduate school admissions cases. The NAACP, the Legal Defense Fund, won 39 cases in a row without a single defeat. 39 cases in a row. And you know, I worry that we studied Black history, African American history, and so few of our young people know about this enormous legal crusade that was conducted. They hard to know the names of the lawyers whose lives were threatened, who couldn't get a hot dog or a cup of coffee, couldn't go to the bathroom in some of these communities.

But Lawyer Houston. Lawyer Houston, a great name in this regard. Lawyer Lubia from Tennessee, Spotswood Robinson, Oliver Hill from Virginia, Jim Napert from Washington, DC, and then the inimitable Thurgood Marshall and the list goes on and on and on. These brave lawyers came all across the South, taking these cases one at a time to the Supreme Court, and they marched around the court by Joshua around Jericho until the walls came tumbling down. The sweat case was one of them here at the University of Texas, but there were 39 of them, 39. Now let me say parenthetically that this is one of the most important chapters in American history, because this represented the watershed of black people saying to one another. We are here after 237 years of chattel slavery, not the kind of slavery that Plato talked about in the Meno,

the dialogue on kind of slavery taught virtue, no. Not the kind of slavery that the Possible wrote about writing to Philemon about his slavery of a Nessimus. This was brutal slavery, chattel slavery, all of those years, and then another hundred years of organized and deliberate separation, segregation, dehumanization, and denial of basic rights, violations, blatant violations of the Constitution, all of that we endured. But at this particular period, the period of human threat and these 39 cases, that was the moment at which black people were saying, we're not going anywhere, we're not going to the Bahamas, we're not going back to Africa, we're not going to Sierra Leone, we're not going to the Bahamas,

not going to Bermuda, we're going to stay right here and work out our salvation. And they waited until the Supreme Court was prepared with the various personnel that Roosevelt had appointed to the Court, waited until the Court was ready, and then black people made their famous assault against legal segregation in this society. It was a very clear intention on the part of our people to say, we're going to be fully participants in this society. We're not going to be marginal, we're not going to be a fraction of it, we're going to stand at the center of it. Whatever integration means being part of the integer, part of the integer, did not necessarily mean denying ourselves of our own ethnic heritage, and that sort of thing, but being a part of the integer, integration, that's where we were headed. We ought to be ashamed of some of the products we've had.

In this great land of ours, so dependent upon a free market, some of the brightest people in the world, and some of the best educated people, from some of the finest schools, have been the biggest malifactors with the stock market. And some of the graduates, some of the most impressive engineering schools in the world, have been built in our big corporations of cheating our government, the Pentagon. It was no moron who tried to sell the Air Force 600-dollar toilet seats. Now, I know some of us are more important than others, but I don't know anybody who deserves a 600-dollar toilet seat. What on earth is the goal of higher education right now? Now, let me say this to you. Higher education has always had some kind of an agenda. If you study the history of it, you will know that in the early colonial days, the dominant theme was to prepare the ministers so that there would be a straight telling of the gospel story. Harvard, no less. Harvard was established. Am I saying it right Dean?

Harvard was established in order to guarantee that when the present generation of clergy had passed on, the colonists would not be beset with an ignorant group of preachers. That's how Harvard began. The guarantee that when the present preachers died, there would be another educated group of preachers to take their places. Yale began to train preachers for the congregational church. Princeton began to train preachers for the Presbyterian church. My own Rutgers began to train preachers for the Evangelical Reform Church, the Reform Church in North America. Look at how clear the purpose of higher education was in those days to train the clergy, the guarantee that the gospel would be interpreted correctly. Later on during the land-grant movement, we knew exactly what we were doing. We wrote it down.

We wanted to prepare Americans to be the great industrial geniuses of the world to prepare our agricultural endeavors so that we would be the bread basket of the world to prepare people in domestic science. And then they added the paragraph in the moral act, not to the exclusion of the liberal arts and sciences, the guarantee that schools would not get so carried away with technical training, but the liberal arts and sciences would be denied. We can put our finger on certain periods of our history and say, now, here were the purposes of higher education at these moments. But what could be saying would be the purpose right now? All of us have been hypnotized that the basketball contested are going on. You know, I love basketball as much as anybody. Some of my best friends are basketball coaches. But I sat down at a table at commencement last year when a certain university was bringing on a new basketball coach. And the president said to all of us that the income for that new coach was going to be $750,000 a year.

And the president's salary was $125,000 a year. Now, that doesn't say something to you about the distorted purposes of higher education. Here's my hand. I don't know what does. I don't know what does. I think, I think, I think we ought to be able to conduct integrally to athletics everywhere and have a good time without vulgarizing and profaning the purpose of higher education by paying coaches five and six times the money that the presidents and the professors are being paid. It says something to students that these people have no conscience at all about what they do. Let me go back and mind my business here now. Now let's talk about the term community because some people are afraid of that. Community does not mean we're all going to look alike, dress alike, sing alike, eat alike, dance alike or worship under the same fine and fig tree.

No, it doesn't mean that. Community the way I'm using it tonight is a recognition that certain values can be understood and shared. We can create symbols for them and talk about them easily. We can write poems about them, write novels about them. We can have great celebrations about them. On college campuses today we have no celebrations at all. One of my sons went through one of the finest. Ivy League University is for four years. It cost me nearly sixteen thousand dollars a year. He did not go to one single assembler where anything was being celebrated. I said not one convocation, Sam, not one data. They didn't ring the bell, didn't blow the whistle and say, you're come not one time. I said, why didn't you convoke one time? Either data, there was nothing around there to convoke about.

I imagine that. In my college days we had to gather two and three times a week to convoke, to listen to somebody. I heard Thurgood Marshall, I heard Merma Cloud Bethune, I heard Channing DeBice, I heard Ben and Maze, I heard Mordekin Johnson, I heard all of the great East-Tandard Jones, all of the great minds came marching through my little raggedy Baptist college and we all had to sit there two by two and listen. So floods right now with the recollection of some of the great ideas that I learned from these great people. I have another son who finished a major state university up in the Northeast. He hasn't been to one assembly of any kind in four years. The fact that it hasn't marched for anything except commencement. The faculty has not put on costumes and march at all except for commencement. Why aren't they in the celebrations? Do we have anything to celebrate? When do we call out the choir and the band and put up flags and say, everybody come.

Nothing to celebrate that ought to say something to us. It ought to say that some notion of community is absolutely lacking. And I'm saying that a cottage community, a university community ought to be a microcosm of the kind of world we would really like to see. This is rehearsal time. These four years of young people spend on campuses are not an intermission from life. They are between ages 18 and 22, 19 and 23. The most important years of their life. They're choosing their careers. They're choosing their mates for life. Choosing their values. They're just left home. Away from the heart of Mom and Dad and Grandma. Many of them have left a whole lot of a weak religion behind. They need to reestablish their religious faith in some kind of way in sync with the new liberal arts education they've gotten. They need to walk away from some of the ignorance that they were taught when they were young and then learn how to blend all of this new empirical matters together with the great theistic beliefs and faiths that we embrace.

It's a big time between age 18 and 22. And ought to be some celebrations. It ought to be some direction there. We ought not let these young people just drift without some kind of corporate guidance, some kind of an idea that we hold up before the time. I'm serious about this community. And I say that one of the goals ought to be that America ought to be on her way to becoming a genuine community. With the quality of opportunity, freedom of speech, freedom of all of these things, press and assembly, but a community and we ought to spend a lot of our time looking for those salient values that ought to be the foundation of a genuine community. When I say genuine community, that implies that superficial community we have already seen. There is superficial community around. We see on television some shows that seem to imply that we are coming together, marvelous to well. You look on television on one single day, there's Brian Dumbled in the morning, and there's Oprah Winfrey in the afternoon, and then there's Bill Cosby, Bill Cosby, Bill Cosby, Bill Cosby at night. And it looks like we've got community going.

And then they now bring on, you see the Asians, members of the Hispanic community, and they make it appear that everything is going along fine. Until we start looking at the hard data about infant mortality, about teenage motherhood, about infants born with the AIDS virus, about income comparisons on the average per capita around the nation. We find out what this huge gap is that remains, and we see that these superficial indicators of community are really very, very superficial indeed. There are communities that we know about, which may illustrate the point. The scientists of the world have a marvelous community. I served on a congressional committee to supervise recombinant DNA research. They said they had to have some people who were not scientists there to watch the scientists. What hope is there that a Baptist preacher can watch a microbiologist is just a joke?

But anyway, I was there, and I enjoyed the meetings. But one thing I did learn was that these scientists have a way of saying, okay, you won't let us do that experiment here? Well, I'll tell you what, we'll do it. The next thing I knew, that experiment was going on somewhere in Europe. How did it happen? They just picked up the telephone, called up some Buddhists somewhere. These physicists, these microbiologists, these organic chemists, they know people all over the world. They're bound together. The horse breeders of the world are bound together. Horse breeders know where everybody in the world is, breeding a certain kind of a horse. They talk on the telephone, they buy each other's horses. The tennis players of the world are glutinated by their love of tennis. They're glutinated by their love of money, of course, but there they are. From anywhere in the world, tennis players will show up. South African, there's a black fellow born in Africa playing tennis for France right now.

Ash, who wants to president of the International Tennis Places Association, played tennis on our campus in Richmond at Virginia Union, black boy from Richmond, Virginia. I'm amazed at how the tennis players represent such a pluralism, such diversity, and how they are bound together, playing tennis together, the year round, all of them together. There are linguistic communities, significantly the Hispanic community. There are religious communities, such as the Roman Catholic community. There are communities with which all of us are familiar. Some people think that community would signify proximity that we would have to be close together, but proximity may facilitate community, but it may not really imply community. I remember being in an airport limousine coming from Kennedy Airport, going to the downtown terminal, and about nine big dudes like me, 200 pounds of peas, all of them about six feet tall, was stuffed into this limousine. And if I pull off and race downtown to the terminal, not one word was said at all. For about 35 minutes, not one word.

You could not be more proxamist than we were. But how could you have had less community? I live in an neighborhood where we have a kind of a mixture. There's one black family in every block. I don't know how they ended up with that, but that's the way we have it. One black family. I'm the black family in my block. It's a terrible burden to be the ambassador to white people for the whole black race, you know. I've got to keep my grass cut. I've got to keep my garbage cans in. I can't let my dog holler at night, you know, and all of my shades have got to be the same height. I mean, those white people on the block don't care about what I think about them, but here I've got the wake up every day, wondering what my neighbors think about my yard and what they think about the way my children look, you know. For 20 years, I've been burdened with being the representative of all the black people of the world on McAfee Road right there in Somerset, New Jersey.

Dr. Samuel Proctor, the Martin Luther King, Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University. If you have a question or comment about this program, write us. Remember views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or the University of Texas at Austin. For In Black America's technical producer, David Alvarez, I'm John L. Hansen, Jr. Join us for part two next week. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing In Black America cassettes, Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building V, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm John L. Hansen, Jr. Join me this week on in Black America.

I started PhD work at Yale and the graduate school and the Divinity School to the Divinity Quadrangle. I was remembering the many days that I came and sat down on a big oak table in the comments and nobody would sit beside me, nobody. Dr. Samuel Proctor this week on in Black America.