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96 the time, thought about teaching all the time and it was endless. I wanted to have a job where things sometimes ended.” But when her mother became ill, Davis thought that she would stay in San Antonio for a year. Thirtyone years later, she found herself still enjoying her time there and still not knowing what happened. At St. Philip ’s, she found a faculty committed to excellence and she Olga Samples Davis, Student in the 1960s Davis, who grew up in San Antonio, was introduced to St. Philip’s as a child. Her mother, a member of St. Philip ’s faculty, played a starring role in some of the plays presented at the college. Davis attended Hampton Institute “right out of high school,” but after Martin Luther King was shot, she received a mandate to come home. She then spent time at St. Philip’s enrolling “in as many courses as I could before transferring to St. Mary’s University” (in San Antonio). Well known in the San Antonio and St. Philip’s community for her writings, her poetry, and her plays, Davis is described by her fans as a bundle of talent. The community and faculty at St. Philip’s enjoyed many performance of her plays performed in the campus theatre. Davis spoke of St. Philip’s with great reverence, for she said, “St. Philip’s was always in our community; always a jewel before anyone declared it such; always a jewel for us.” In her youth, Davis was a regular visitor to the St. Philip ’s campus because her mother, Browning Samples, taught at St. Philip’s. Davis and her siblings were their “mothers’ little cheerleaders, always on the front row.” J. B. Williams was theatrical director at the time and Davis, seeing her mother on stage, became fascinated with theatre. “It was just such a wonderful experience,” she said. Davis spent thirty-one years in education and had this to say about it: “I had said that I would never in my lifetime be a teacher because it seemed that you worked all  Learning to Adjust: Students and Faculty from the 1960s The stories that follow tell of St. Philip’s faculty from the 1960s. “The teachers were committed to excellence. It wasn’t something that someone demanded of them; it was a history and heritage of excellence and a privilege and a pleasure and honor to serve,” explained Olga Davis.The faculty was dedicated. The students felt as if, in turn, they could give nothing less. Olga Samples Davis Learning to Adjust: Students and Faculty from the 1950s • 97 gap between vocational and academic students and gave both groups a common experience. Although the vocational students needed to learn the technical skills necessary for their trade, they were also going to have to interact with people. A humanities course would assist them in getting along with other people and help them to understand other cultures. Slaughter’s department wrote a grant and received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a program that included a multicultural fair. The fair stimulated great interest in the humanities, “but people were very conscious of their territory and we met a lot of resistance,” said Slaughter. Marye Gilford offered to help because she felt that the students in her department needed the kind of experiences being offered by Slaughter and her department and that gave them, as she put it, “a crack in the door.” “We weren’t successful overnight,” said Slaughter, “But because we were eventually successful with that, we developed another course based on Texas history called ‘A Sense of Place. ’ That course reflected the diversity of Texas’s history . We expanded the department to include urban studies , world civilization and geography and later expanded the courses to include the behavioral sciences. We became very busy; there was never a dull moment.” Slaughter’s leadership included serving as president of the faculty senate, chair of the college’s Black Heritage Committee, serving as a member of the Bexar County Historical Commission , Eastside Boys and Girls Club Advisory, the San Antonio Commission on Literacy, and the San Antonio branch of the NAACP. Because the requirements for teaching in the vocational and academic areas were different, an issue developed between some of the academic faculty and the vocational faculty. Some in the academic department felt that they had to have degrees and take additional studies in order to get promoted, while persons in the vocational...

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