Keeping the Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives

3. Discoveries and Awakenings

• three • Discoveries and Awakenings Howard College in 1958 was a lot like me. Everything was new and exciting, and it seemed a time of limitless possibilities . After more than a half century in East Lake (where my grandfather had been a student), with inadequate and rapidly declining facilities in a similarly challenged neighborhood, the college had just moved to a new campus in Homewood, an affluent suburb south of Birmingham. After nineteen years as president, Harwell G. Davis had retired. New president Leslie S. Wright and I both entered as “freshmen” that year, though he remained at the school a lot longer than I did. Although thecollegewasconservativeandtraditionalinthewaymost southern denominational colleges were in the 1950s, it contained countervailing tendencies from its early days. One of America’s one hundred oldest colleges, Howard had been established in 1841 in Perry County, deep in the Alabama Black Belt. Baptist leaders named the school in honor of English prison reformer and Baptist layman John Howard, who had expended his life and fortune trying to obtain justice for the poorest and most wretched Europeans. From the school’s earliest days, one could find validation on campus for either the cultural captivity of Christianity to southern traditions or the liberation from culture by the radical teachings of Jesus. The institution survived fires, the Civil War, financial depressions, bank- discoveries and awakenings 61 ruptcy, and the humiliation of a forced auction, before moving to the boomtown of Birmingham in 1887. After a brief interval of prosperity and growing academic experimentation—administrators, faculty, and students alike dabbled in the new biblical liberalism spawned in Germany and the social gospel spreading across the urban Northeast and Midwest—the school settled back into its conservatism. The Great Depression again threatened Howard’s survival before Harwell Goodwin Davis (who, as the state’s attorney general, had been a fervent prison reformer like the school’s namesake) became president in 1939 and barely fended off financial wolves gathering at the school’s gates. Acquisition of a V-12 Navy College Training Program during the Second World War, the GI Bill that followed, unwavering support by Alabama Baptists, and prodigious efforts on the school’s behalf by Liberty National Insurance chief executive Frank Samford, had stabilized enrollment and finances by the time Wright took charge. Although the student body was exclusively white, overwhelmingly Baptist, and mainly middle class, many of my classmates were first-generation college students. Not a few were from poor families who struggled to pay the nominal tuition. Scattered among us were pockets of Greek Orthodox and Catholic students from Birmingham’s diverse ethnic communities, a handful of Jewish students, an agnostic or two, a Hungarian refugee who had driven an ambulance during the just-defeated national uprising against Soviet occupation, and Baptist missionary kids (MKs as they were known on campus), whose world perspective, language skills, and sensitivity to the problems of the global community enriched education for all of us. Football, though a long and revered tradition in earlier years, had fallen on hard times. A resurrection similar to the college’s was under way, directed by new football coach Bobby Bowden. Many of us dutifully attended games and cheered the team, though none of us confused the school’s purpose or identity with an oblong piece of pigskin. When I moved into my nearly deserted dorm in late May 1958, I came in a state of near panic. But two summer terms instilled some confidence in me. My woeful background in Spanish allowed me into second year classes where I did not belong but made Bs anyway from two professors who had long since given up on language facility among their students and were marking time until retirement . Without athletic facilities on the new campus, the only physical education possible consisted of table tennis, the one sport in which I seemed competent . The course introduced me to the capricious professoriate. I defeated 62 chapter 3 football players in the class tournament and on the final exam fully explained the rules of the game. The coach gave me a C anyway and them As. But I received higher grades than I deserved in Spanish, so I figured it evened out. My two Western civilization courses were a delight. George Sarkiss, an Armenian refugee from Turkish genocide, had come with his family to America and earned his Ph.D. He did not teach Western civilization so much...