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f o u r Confronting the Race Problem: Lincoln University Sunday, June 6, 1961, was a hot and humid day in southeastern Pennsylvania. Rain was coming down in the morning and the big issue of the day at Lincoln University was whether to hold that afternoon’s commencement exercises outdoors or indoors. To be on the safe side in case it showered again, a committee opted to squeeze several thousand people into the college’s cramped, old, wooden, un–air-conditioned gymnasium. The commencement speaker was Martin Luther King Jr., the charismatic young preacher and civil rights leader who had launched the modern Civil Rights Movement by leading the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. I was impressed that Lincoln’s acting president – the school’s librarian, Donald Yelton – and his colleagues had been able to secure Dr. King as commencement speaker, since his national reputation was growing tremendously and he was much in demand. Dr. King was immaculately dressed, polite and friendly to everyone, including me. As the incoming white president of America’s oldest black college, I felt apprehensive about subjecting such a prominent figure to less-than-perfect conditions. But King thrived on precisely such opportunities to transform squalor into splendor. His stirring address that afternoon, titled “The American Dream,” delivered in a stentorian voice, brought a message of hope, nonviolence , and freedom, and overcame the stifling heat and the audience’s discomfort . “It is not enough to struggle for the new society,” King told the audience. “We must make the psychological adjustment required to live in that new society . This is true of white people, and it is true of Negro people. Psychological adjustment will save white people from going into the new age with old vestiges of prejudice and attitudes of white supremacy. It will save the Negro from seeking to substitute one tyranny for another. . . . God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men. God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race and in the creation of [52] chapter four a society where all men can live together as brothers, where every man will respect the dignity and the worth of human personality.”1 Those 1961 commencement exercises and the King speech reinforced my feeling that I had made the right decision in coming to Lincoln. (Addie and I were so impressed by King’s address that later that year we sent a transcript of it to all alumni and friends of Lincoln University as our initial Christmas and holiday greeting.) I had arrived on Lincoln’s rural campus with deeply held views about the malevolent nature of racial segregation and discrimination. I had no doubt that the United States was on its way to an era of cooperation between blacks and whites in which non-white minorities would finally be incorporated into the nation’s mainstream. Lincoln and Morehouse College in Atlanta were the nation’s best-known black male colleges. In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, their alumni accounted for more African American physicians than all the other institutions in the United States. Their traditional curricula, heavy in classics and the sciences, offered good training for professional schools in medicine, law, dentistry, social work, and education. So I imagined that, as Lincoln’s president, I could contribute in some small way to the resolution of what the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, as far back as 1944, had called “An American Dilemma.” The difficulty of this task was abruptly brought home to me during our very first week at Lincoln, in July 1961. Addie and I were invited to the home of Professor H. Alfred Farrell, head of the English Department and a Lincoln alumnus, to meet his wife and three children over dinner. Our daughters, Kathie and Lynn, were then seven and five. They had met very few black people in their young lives at Hamilton and Salzburg, had never made a comment about skin color, and seemed to be fitting into the evening party very well. But suddenly, while we were sipping coffee with our dessert, fiveyear -old Lynn started skipping around the table, tapping the back of each chair while singing, “Eeeny meeny miney mo, catch a —— by the toe.” Was that critical word “tiger,” as Addie had taught her, or “nigger,” as some white schoolchildren recited it? Addie and I couldn’t be sure; we were too busy raising the level of our own...

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