John U. Monro: Uncommon Educator

6. Moving toward Miles, 1962–1964

83 6 MOVING TOWARD MILES 1962–1964 Returning from Cranbrook, Monro wasted little time mourning the absence of the Peace Corps training program at Harvard; instead, he flew to Miami and attended a weeklong conference of the American Teachers Association (ATA). There he met ATA president Lucius Pitts, who was winding up his first year as president of Miles, a hardscrabble, historically black college on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama. After Monro addressed the group, Pitts challenged him to match his “pretty speech about educational theory” with action and come see for himself what a black college was like (Long). The two men spent a good deal of time together during the conference, and Monro resolved to take Pitts up on his offer as soon as he could get away (Monro, letter to Merrifield, 1992). A FAMILIAR, SAD STORY Monro did not need Pitts to introduce him to the challenge that faced blacks seeking higher education; he had repeatedly met it face to face. As a member of the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students board of directors and awards committee, he knew that budget constraints frequently forced the board to turn down worthy applicants; one student was in such dire need that each board member personally contributed fifty dollars to create a scholarship for him when the organization’s budget could not be stretched to include him (Monro, “Grand Lodge”). But the lesson that made the deepest impression on him came from Harvard ’s few black students, who described the “dreadful new pressures” they faced at a predominantly white institution. It began when an associate dean told him This interested me very much. —john u. monro JOHN U. MONRO 84 that all the black freshmen were sitting at the same table during lunch. He asked them to come to his office, and in the discussion that followed, one student compared leaving his dormitory room every day to “going over the top,” a military phrase for trading the comparative safety of the trenches for the exposure of the battlefield. The student explained: “Sometime during the morning or sometime during the day I’m going to catch it from behind. . . . There are very tough moments here that you don’t know about. And so, come lunch time there’s a bunch of us like to take off our shoes and just be folks, if that’s all right with you” (Aubry 20–21).1 Monro did not try to break up the black lunch table again, and he sometimes sat there himself, first asking if he could “intrude.” The reply was invariably, “Sure, we’d be happy to have you intrude.” It was a lesson he never forgot, and it made him particularly receptive to the challenge Lucius Pitts flung out in Miami. Lucius H. Pitts Lucius Holsey Pitts was the seventh of eight children born into a sharecropper family. His mother died when he was young, and the family moved to Macon in search of better job opportunities. By the time Pitts graduated from high school, he was a seasoned preacher in the Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church, having been named after one of its founders, Lucius Holsey (Conley). While attending Paine College and working as a dishwasher, Pitts suddenly went blind and had to drop out of school. Eventually, he partially regained his sight and returned to school, working as a teacher for $47.50 a month. After graduating from Paine, he went to Fisk, where he served as assistant dean of the chapel and earned a graduate degree in religious education. He was formally ordained as a CME minister, and after a decade of teaching, preaching, and youth work, he moved to Atlanta in 1955 (“Tribute” 2). From Atlanta Pitts became increasingly immersed in the civil rights movement . In 1958 the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. asked him to become the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s first executive director, an invitation he declined in favor of heavier involvement on the local level (Eskew 194). He was executive secretary of the Georgia Teachers and Educators Association, vice president of the state’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and president of the Georgia Council on Human Relations, which collected dues for the NAACP (Egerton 108). 85 MOVING TOWARD MILES, 1962–1964 One of his most important assets as a civil rights spokesman was his striking physical appearance; according to...