Scalawag: A White Southerner's Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism

17: An Activist Professor in a New University in the Old Capital of the Confederacy

17 An Activist Professor in a New University in the Old Capital of the Confederacy W hen I left MCV for graduate school in Lexington, Fred Spencer and I both assumed that I would likely return to take a position in his Department of Preventive Medicine. At that time Virginia Commonwealth University was little more than a glimmer in the eyes of those who wished to see Virginia get serious about higher education. But in July 1968 the Medical College of Virginia merged with the Richmond Professional Institute to form VCU, and the administration was frantically looking for faculty and staff to launch this new institution. So they were glad to get a guy like me: an alum known by many old RPI faculty; a veteran of teaching at MCV; a PhD candidate with good references in a field in which they needed people; someone with credentials that could be recognized in the Medical School; and a guy with a gung-ho, “Where do you want me to start?” attitude. So the job was low-hanging fruit. I showed up with my family a month after the merger. It was a year of pivotal events around the world At home, Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the presidential campaign in the wake of massive protests against the war in Vietnam. A month later Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and riots broke out across America. Abroad, student protests in Paris and strikes by some ten million French workers nearly brought the de Gaulle government to its knees; Alexander Dubček’s reform efforts, which came to be known as the “Prague Spring,” ended with the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviets; free speech movements erupted among students and workers in communist-controlled Poland and Yugoslavia; and open 144 combatting old injustices in new finery revolts against Francisco Franco’s despotic policies were ratcheting up in Spain. I was in Yugoslavia at a Quaker-sponsored meeting of international activists that summer, never suspecting how my own life would be touched by such developments. The merger of RPI and MCV by the Virginia General Assembly and the upgrading of other colleges and universities had resulted from a veritable revolution in higher education in the state. A new generation of assembly members saw that Virginia needed reform to prosper. Events like the Prince Edward County school closures embarrassed many state leaders in their efforts to bring new business to the commonwealth. Due to miserly funding for education, we had severe shortages of skilled and educated workers. We placed near the bottom in national rankings of commitment to higher education. Education advocates in the state frequently lamented, “Thank God for Mississippi.” Yet the merger of the two institutions did not happen easily, because many of the MCV faculty and alumni had little regard for RPI. Since its beginning at the end of WWI, RPI had offered opportunity to Virginia’s working class, military veterans, older students, artists, and others not usually welcome at the state’s elite schools. MCV was a more prestigious institution because it had a medical school and a distinguished century-plus history, including pioneering work in heart transplant surgery that earned it a worldwide reputation. MCV partisans were embarrassed to be affiliated with RPI, because they imagined it as filled with the kids of the proletariat, late bloomers, and artsy-fartsy Bohemians . In their view, the whole school was like our crowd at the Village. In those first few years, I may have been the only faculty member appointed to both campuses. I held positions in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the School of Medicine at MCV and in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the former RPI campus. As a consequence, I took a lot of heat on the Medical Center campus for defending RPI and the merger. But I welcomed the challenge because of my unique experiences on both campuses and made strong arguments about how both would benefit from the change. VCU came into being during the demise of Jim Crow, which made the moment exciting. Senator Harry F. Byrd’s political machine had begun to rust away. Putting civil rights reforms to work, black Virginians were stepping up their pursuit of opportunities that before were reserved for whites. And some whites, especially young people, were now enjoying association with blacks. An Activist Professor 145 The worst expressions of white supremacy were being...