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80 CHAPTER THREE White Students, the Campus, and Desegregation IN THE EARLY DAYS of the Atlanta student movement, Constance Curry, Southern Project director for the U.S. National Student Association (nsa), tried to recruit students from Atlanta’s white colleges for sit-ins. “Somehow or other I scraped up a white representative from every college, even Georgia Tech,” she later recalled. “They only came to one meeting because they were terrified. . . . [T]hey took one look at [Morehouse student] Lonnie King and all those students and never said a word and went home that night and we never heard of ’em again.”1 Curry’s failed effort was not an isolated event. The vast majority of white southern students sat on the sidelines, either because they did not sympathize with the cause or because they feared the potential price of involvement in terms of entanglements with the law or consequences imposed by college officials or parents. But nonviolent direct action nevertheless had a profound impact on the political mobilization of white students and the political culture of southern campuses. A handful of white southern students crossed the most fundamental line of regional orthodoxy by acting to support integration. The controversies of the desegregation era presented all white students with choices, even if they did not participate in the movement. Most remained silent, but some publicly supported integration, airing their opinions in campus newspapers or associating with black students on recently desegregated campuses. When white students publicly supported integration, under whatever circumstances, they set in motion processes of personal and regional change. For individual white southerners , the decision to reject segregation could be the first step on a political journey that would lead some to involvement in the southern New Left. For the colleges and universities they attended and for the region as a whole, desegregation in all its guises served as the linchpin of a political awakening that expanded the political spectrum and opened up new possibilities for mobilization. White Students and Desegregation 81 The politics of the desegregation era cut in more than one way. Since the mid-1950s, opposition to integration had manifested itself on many white campuses , generating what might be considered informal college chapters of the massive resistance movement. The campus politics of massive resistance manifested itself in a number of ways. Riots against the matriculation of Autherine Lucy at the University of Alabama established one model that would be followed in the early 1960s at the Universities of Georgia and Mississippi. But the early 1960s also saw conservative students refine their arguments against the disruptions caused by nonviolent direct action and an intrusive federal government that stepped in at key points to secure the end of segregation in higher education. As was the case with the emergence of activism from black campuses, white students’ responses to desegregation affected both southern politics and southern college campuses. White students who participated in sit-ins, wrote editorials encouraging the acceptance of integration, or visibly associated with black students played a role in wrenching southern liberalism away from its traditional embrace of gradualism and toward immediatism. At the same time, student participation in on- and off-campus clashes over desegregation exposed the limits on academic freedom that blighted southern higher education and laid the groundwork for a more thoroughgoing critique of higher education later in the decade. Southern Students and Academic Freedom In the early 1960s, the University of Alabama remained both under judicial order to admit black students and segregated. Moreover, the Lucy episode continued to cast a pall over the university. In 1961, Asa Carter, national grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, told the campus newspaper, “If anyone can stop integration at the university, the Klan can do it.” A prominent figure in John Patterson’s 1959 gubernatorial campaign, Carter embodied the power of militant segregationists in Deep South politics, and his comment underlined the vulnerability of colleges and universities to reactionary forces, which prompted some faculty to depart the South for friendlier surroundings. Most, however, stayed. “The place to fight for a principle is where it is a living issue, not where it is an accomplished fact, and still less where it has become a mere object of sanctimonious self-congratulations,” declared Iredell Jenkins, a philosophy professor at the university.2 Clashes over race were not new to southern college campuses, but they appeared with greater frequency in the late 1950s and early 1960s as the wave of reaction against integration clashed with the black...

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