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https://blackgeneral.omeka.wlu.edu/files/original/0f3a8167481562a8d8dffaa18ea80265.pdf
05d6138dc833de7bc35a28ed8b63aaaa
https://blackgeneral.omeka.wlu.edu/files/original/95c99178a6de18ea5e773c8a603743fb.pdf
834200fa703c8afaab6bcbea8c497ff4
Dublin Core
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Race in the Ring-tum Phi
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Discussions of race.
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Accounts of race within the university's undergraduate run newspaper, The Ring-tum Phi.
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Title
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Article: "SABU Stages Sit-In"
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SABU stages sit-in covered in Ring-tum Phi article.
Description
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A black male student was unfairly accused of violating the White Book. The Student Association for Black Unity (SABU) stages sit-in to protest unfair treatment of black students at the university.
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Joe Fitzgerald
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Ring-tum Phi
Date
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1977-01-20
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This material is made available for use in research, teaching, and private study, pursuant to U.S. Copyright law. The user assumes full responsibility for any use of the materials, including but not limited to, infringement of copyright and publication rights of reproduced materials. Any materials used should be fully credited with the source.
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PDF
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en_US
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Text
-
https://blackgeneral.omeka.wlu.edu/files/original/ab8449d8cfb3405702a5e017210eae0d.jpg
950455c7f9ae6deaaea56ece5dfe31f4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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The Faces of Black Generals
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Black Students, Faculty, and Staff at Washington and Lee.
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University Photographer
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Photo
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800x533
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Title
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Photo: Ted DeLaney
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Ted DeLaney
Description
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Professor Ted DeLaney standing on colonnade. Photo taken before his opening convocation speech, August 2018.
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Kevin Remington
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The Columns, Washington and Lee
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Washington and Lee University
Date
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2018-08-28
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jpg, 800x533
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Photo
-
https://blackgeneral.omeka.wlu.edu/files/original/ad2407fd4633f2f01e27004cd442d948.pdf
ba0497348eff7957bbd3031f27500a2a
https://blackgeneral.omeka.wlu.edu/files/original/5ba4476350f3effb716d41fadfce77ca.mp3
cc5bcfb42a197104f2a1d979e549f0ae
Dublin Core
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Title
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Oral History Collection
Subject
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Oral Histories
Description
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This collection contains the Oral Histories of African-Americans at Washington and Lee. The voices shared within this collection are a mixture of staff, faculty and alumni.
Creator
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MaKayla Lorick
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mp3
Language
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en_US
Oral History
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Interviewer
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MaKayla Lorick
Interviewee
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Theodore DeLaney
Biography
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Ted DeLaney is a former employee, class of 1985 who was born and raised in Lexington, VA. He is an '85 graduate and now Professor of History at Washington and Lee University.
Location
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Leyburn Library, Writing Center
Transcription
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INTERVIEWER: Hey. Hi, my name is MaKayla Lorick. It's July 5, 2018. I'm in Leyburn Library, in the Writing Center. Could you please state your name?
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: My name is Theodore Carter DeLaney, Jr.
INTERVIEWER: So I know that you sent a document kind of going about growing up in Lexington, but is there anything else you'd like to expand on about the climate in Lexington, about how you understood and perceived Washington & Lee as a community member before you came?
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: Well, I think that, first of all, we ought to talk about the Black community in Lexington, which was probably six times bigger than it is now. And the Black community in Lexington was the largest Black community in Rockbridge County. And it was large because Lexington had the only Black high school in the county.
And that high school was slow developing when my mother was 15 years old. She did not have the option of going to the high school, because the county did not provide high school for Black kids at the time. So my mother got essentially two years of high school education, which was all that was offered.
And so when she was 15 years old, she had gotten as much education that was available. And so that was sort of a fact of life in Rockbridge County, is that people had moved into town because the school had opened in 1928. And they moved closer to make sure that their children were able to get access.
And my mother's family, it was kind of unusual, because my mother was born in Lexington. Her mother was born in Lexington. My grandfather was born in Brownsburg. And as the notes that I gave you indicate, my fourth grandparent was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. So, I've got strong Rockbridge County roots. I've got strong Lexington roots.
But the one thing that I would make absolutely crystal clear is, that even though Lexington was a small town, and it was small enough that Black and white people knew who one another were, and a lot of Black people did domestic work which means they worked in white people's homes as maids, cooks, butlers, whatever, a lot of Black people also did service jobs on the campuses of the two colleges, but essentially, it was a community in a Jim Crow era where white people and Black people did not know anything about each other-- I mean, zilch. Black people and white people might think that they knew each other, but they did not.
And Black people were very, very careful what they said in the presence of white employers. They were very, very careful not to let white folks know their business. And so, it was like two worlds apart.
And so, perceptions of Washington & Lee in the Black community were not very good. There were always rumors of Washington & Lee students hitting on Black women. There were rumors of Washington & Lee students raping Black women. There were certainly Black women who were hustlers, who were peddling sex to Washington & Lee students. Washington & Lee students were seen in the Black community as pretty much well-to-do white men who were privileged in a way that most other people were not, including most local white people we're not privileged in the way Washington & Lee students were.
That is not to say that there were not Black people who were very appreciative of the jobs that they had, because it was also a society in which Blacks occupied-- and this is true all over the South and true for most of the United States. Blacks were members of a permanent social caste. And there was no understanding that Blacks could move outside of that caste or could be productive members of American society.
So, I grew up in an era when this was the reality in the Black community, that we lack equal opportunities. And we lack equal education. And I want to expand on that education a lot.
But one of the things that is absolutely paramount in this is to make absolutely crystal clear that some of the problems that exist in today's society were certainly a part of my growing up experience in a different era that was completely segregated. And Lexington was completely segregated, even though-- in ways that are very, very difficult for a lot of 21st people to understand.
One of the things for instance is, Black parents had the same fears about their children coming of age that many Black parents have today, and the same fears, particularly with Black sons coming of age, that many Black parents have today. For instance, when I was 12 years old, or maybe hadn't turned 12 yet, there was the most famous lynching of the 1950s.
And that was the murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. And my mother lived in a situation where she was always cautious, as were many Black parents, to remind us that if we didn't watch ourselves or if we didn't stay in our place, the same thing could happen to us. And so anyone who has a pie-in-the-sky view of what those years were like is absolutely mistaken, because those years were very difficult.
Now, when we talk about my family, my family was pretty much a middle-class family, although my grandfather was a productive member of the family as a barber with a shop on Main Street, which was the only integrated business in Lexington. And he boasted of being able-- of having the skills to cut both Black and White hair. And so there were both Black and White men in his barber shop.
The only thing that he had to give to his seven children was to pass on his trade. And my mother was one of his barbers in the shop, as well as three of her sisters. But my grandmother-- and you probably read the part about her going to college that really wasn't a college at all, but because Virginia, the State of Virginia had eviscerated the college of its collegiate courses and its name. But that is the institution today that we call Virginia State University.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, wow. I didn't know that.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: And I think I cited the book that you can look at--
[DOOR OPENS]
--with regard to that. Is someone coming in?
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, it's Kevin.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: Hi, Kevin.
KEVIN: How are you?
INTERVIEWER: How are you?
KEVIN: I've got to get something.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: Now, with regard to Lylburn Downing School, then what we can do is talk about a very, very special place, but a place that is probably not as special as a lot of Black people my age might remember it. It was human institution.
The teachers were mostly very good, but not all of them. And Black teachers had a reputation for being very nurturing, but not all of them. And they were absolutely well-trained, and mostly did a good job.
The problem with separate education was this. When I was a senior in high school, the school had a total enrollment of 422 students. The high school division with about 121. There was a lot of attrition in the student body when people near the high school years. And sometimes, you couldn't understand why people decided that they wouldn't finish their high school years, but there were a lot of dropouts.
For 422 students, there were only 16 teachers. And so-- well, I should say 16 faculty members, which would have included the principal, who did not teach. And so that's a lot of kids to be taught by a faculty so small. When I taught at Asheville School, the faculty was 43. And there were 200 students, but that was a private school.
So you're looking at a very, very different situation. So the state was only going to supply the teachers who were qualified in certain basic course areas. And some of those courses that should have been offered in a high school were not.
For instance, the only foreign language at a Lylburn Downing School in the '50s and the '60s was French. And French I and French II were offered in alternate years. And so, if you were in the wrong sequence, you didn't get a chance to get a foreign language course at all. And surely, by the late '50s, foreign language courses were required for college admission.
The other thing that is also true is that there were only two or three math courses. And for a high school to only have two or three math courses is very unusual. The basic one was Algebra I. And the other basic one was plain geometry. Mostly, Algebra II was not offered. I never heard anything when I was in high school about courses that were called things like Math Analysis, or Pre-Calculus, or courses like that. There was nothing like that there.
The only two science courses-- well, there were three science courses. They only three science courses there were General Science, Biology, and Chemistry. There was no Physics. And so when you have minimal courses like that, students are coming out with the mere basics that they will present to, and of course, in those days, historically Black colleges, because those were the only places that people were going.
Now, Black teachers were mostly great, because-- I'll give you an example. You couldn't get away with anything with a Black teacher. I mean, they didn't think you were special because you were cute or Black, but they were oftentimes concerned about you being the best-educated person you possibly could be. So they were hard as nails. And some of them were terribly intimidating.
On the other hand, when I was doing my desegregation research, I interviewed a guy who taught at Booker T High School in Stanton who was the epitome of what Black teachers were like. He was the science teacher. And he was the basketball coach.
And he would go to the office in the morning to see who was absent. And if it was one of his basketball players, he would call their house to find out what was wrong. Ah, coach, I didn't feel like coming in this morning. Well, you better get in the shower now, because I'll be there 15 minutes to pick you up. And so that is the kind of assertiveness that was often part and parcel of Black teachers.
Now, you will hear a lot of Black people in my age group saying that, with desegregation, we lost more than we gained. That's ridiculous. Yeah, we lost a school as the central social unit in the community that we all had in common. We lost absolute access to these nurturing Black teachers.
But we gained in its place equal access, equal opportunity, opportunities that were not there before. We gained opportunities for scholarship. We gained opportunities for a large variety of college admissions. We gained opportunities to enter careers that we could not have dreamed of entering.
Most college-educated Blacks, when I was in high school, they became school teachers. Well, the Black community could hire but so many school teachers, right? I mean, well, the Black community didn't hire them-- the local school board. But there were a finite number of jobs for Black school teachers.
Now and then you had Black people who would go to law school, or become preachers, or whatever, or go to Meharry Medical School in Tennessee. But most Black people, if you went to college, you were going to be a teacher. And so other fields were just simply not an option.
So for people who think that they lost more than they gained, I don't think they are thinking very deeply. And they are thinking in sentimental terms. And there is no point in wallowing in sentimentality.
Yeah, I loved going to an all-Black school. Yeah, I saw the advantages of being in an all-Black school. But I don't think that I would have ended up with a career like the one I have today had desegregation not come along. And so that's an important thing to consider.
Now, with regard to the Lexington Community, probably what I should do is just maybe talk about something that I haven't discussed in the document I sent you, and that are what my own career aspirations were and what my jobs were, what my local jobs were before I ended up at this place. Even though some of my cousins disagree vehemently when I say we were a poor family-- and I often think they are crazy, because we were poor.
My parents were divorced when I was 10. And my mother's second marriage was worse than her first. And my mother ended up with two sets of children, and two divorces, and was largely supporting herself and five children off of barbering and dressing people's hair.
And that is not being middle class. That is worrying about where your next meal is coming from. And even though my family was never on any kind of relief, I know that my mother often times was not sure where the next dime was coming from. So we were poor.
And my mother was very protective. She insisted on knowing where every each of her children were at every moment of the day or night. Her mentality was that we had a job to be obedient, and that we went to school.
We must not get in trouble. We must do our work, et cetera, et cetera. But there was no push, as poor as we were, for us to have anything other than paper boy jobs when I was growing up. And paper boy jobs, you know, you'd be lucky if you got $5 a week in your pocket out of such a job.
So basically, until I finished high school, I didn't have a real job. And jobs were not abundantly available for Black youth in Lexington, anyway. And so there was a real concern about income.
There was a real concern about what the future held. And when I came out of high school, the only test, college admissions test, that Black kids took as a rule was the United Negro College Fund Test, which looked exactly like an SAT exam. So you never heard of the United Negro College Fund Examination--
INTERVIEWER: No.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: --but that was what we took. And usually what would happen is that the United Negro Colleges would look at those test scores. And they would offer scholarships based on the scores. And so one student might get a letter. You have $750 scholarship that you can use at Morehouse College. That was my experience, OK? And then you look at a letter like that. And you think, and where is the rest of it going to come from? Were you waving at me?
KEVIN: Sorry, yeah.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: OK, good to see you.
KEVIN: Good to see you. Sorry, someone was waving behind you.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: Oh OK, I'm sorry.
KEVIN: I am from the class.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: That's OK. So where's the rest of the money going to come from? And knowing that your family is poor as church mice-- there was no such thing as federally guaranteed student loans in 1961 when I came out of high school.
There were no State of Virginia school loans. There is nothing like that. All of that would be an innovation that would come later, largely under the administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, his good society-- or Great Society, rather.
So the other thing that added to my apprehensions about where the future held was-- I said my mother was protective. So were most Black parents. But one of the things that Black parents learned very quickly is that, when their kids went off to these historically Black colleges and got caught up in the Civil Rights movement, they ended up landing in jail. And jail is something that Black parents feared more than anything.
And what my situation was, I come out of high school in 1961. I was 17 years old when I graduated. And my mother said, you're not going to go down to Atlanta and sit-in on lunch counters for the next four years and worry me to death. And so gee, here is that little $750 offer from United Negro College Fund that can only be used at Morehouse. It goes flying out of the window.
And so then I had to find other options. And the other options at first were dire. And they were gloomy. And they also gave me a chilling experience about what black adults had historically gone through in this town.
The first job I had was the job that lasted about four days, which was as a butler at a fraternity. And as I recall, it was Kappa Sig, which was, at that time, located on South Main Street. And I was only in someone else's place.
So there were four men, four Black men who worked there. And that was these men's lives, cooking and cleaning for college boys. And during those years, even on campus and Graham-Lees the Blacks that made peoples'-- students' beds.
So people went in and cleaned students bedrooms every morning. And I did not really see myself in a role where I was going to be a domestic to white male college students. And so there was nothing that was problematic about the job only being a four-day temporary job, because I didn't want the damn job in the first place.
My second job was secured by one of my mother's friends who was, I guess, a waiter at the VMI mess hall, which is what they called their dining hall. And that one was so crazy that it is something that I could write a sitcom about. I got there and I was assigned to work in the vegetable room.
And so it was me and another guy who was probably about my age, maybe a little bit younger. And as I say, I was about 17 at the time. And he was White. And I was Black.
And so there we were in the vegetable room together. And he was sort of a cocky show-off, showing me how to use these machines. And I'd never seen things like potato peelers before, which looked like a clothes dryer that had a rough surface. And these potatoes rumbled around on the rough surface. And the peels got taken off-- and choppers that were chopping salads, and all of this stuff.
And as I recall, this job, it was getting close to-- it was either a parent's weekend, or commencement, a time that a lot of people were on campus. And so as this cocky guy is operating this equipment, he loses a finger in a vat of salad.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, no.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: And the thing that was just absolutely crazy to me is, all the people in charge, these White men who are in charge of the food service at VMI at the time were trying to figure out what they were going to do about it. And so there was a kid bleeding. And they are undecided as to whether they're going to discard this vat of salad that there is a finger in. And so when you're a 17-year-old kid who is relatively intelligent, then you're standing there thinking, this is crazy. Surely, you're not going to keep that salad.
INTERVIEWER: It's like, why would you serve me a salad.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: But it took them a long time to decide that, suppose a cadet finds a finger in his salad. So the salad had to be tossed. And I don't even remember them getting the kid out to the hospital.
And I thought, do I really want to work in a place like this? Do I really want to work in a place where the leaders of this company-- and VMI, Washington & Lee both had food services at the time-- where leaders of this food service are debating whether they're going to serve this salad or not? And so these kinds of job experiences were so dire and depressing that I thought that, there's got to be a better life than this. There has got to be something really, really radical that I can do to find a place for myself in the world so I don't repeat this cycle of Black men and women in Lexington who spend their lives in dead-end jobs like the ones that I was seeing.
And so my mother at this point is very, very concerned about me and very, very concerned about what happens next. And so several years before, I had gotten very, very interested in going into the Catholic religious life. And I was no longer interested in doing that, but she suggested that as an alternative. And certainly, it would not have been any cost to my family.
And what had happened when I was 15 years old when I talked to my parish priest about this, he had suggested, not the brotherhood, which is what I was interested in, but the priesthood. And he had taken away the brochures that I had managed to collect and replaced them with one that had to do with his religious community, which is the Precious Blood Fathers. And both of my parents-- and very seldom did my father voice an opinion about anything-- but both of my parents vetoed it. And so, you're not going to do that.
So here, two years later, oh, it's OK for you to do this. And so I went to the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement, also known as the Graymoor Friars. And I was there for seven months of my life. And I have no regrets. Oftentimes, I have had regrets about not staying there.
INTERVIEWER: Really?
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: But it was probably something that was the most important thing that I ever did, one of the most important things that I ever did. And I experienced something that was very human when I was there that I didn't have the wherewithal to understand. But I had a crisis of faith there, where-- I think everybody goes through a period in their maturation where they doubt the existence of God.
And I had such a doubt. And I went from being somebody who is profoundly religious and certainly a profound believer to someone who is reduced only to the desire to believe, but could not convince myself that I really did. And the life was too challenging to be there for no reason at all.
And I can't remember what I read about St Therese L-I-S-E-U-X-- I forget how to spell it-- a French saint who went through the same crisis of faith during the latter part of her life. She died in her 20s. She was a nun. Her prayer was, dear God, help my unbelief.
But I came home at the end of seven months, and came home. I read things like Darwin's Origin of the Species, and other stuff, and found that the crisis of faith was over, that I was still a believer. But moreover, by this time, I'm 18 years old. And I need a job. And I need to either come to grips with life in Lexington, or to find some way out.
And so when I came home, I ended up landing another job that-- with a comic proportion. The Mayflower nursing home then was the Mayflower Hotel. And it had a restaurant attached.
And the people who ran the restaurant were John and [? Marcella ?] Spanberg. I think that S-P-A-N-B-E-R-G. And they were Northerners. They had a very, very prominent Northern accent, an elderly White couple. And their daughter, Dorothy, was the cook. Dorothy was in her 40s.
And it was a, once again, a strange situation to be in. The Spanbergs were as "Catholic" as you could possibly be. And I say that in quotation marks, because one minute, they would be boasting about what good Catholics they were. And the next minute, they might be cursing one of the waitresses out and calling her everything but a son of God.
But I got special treatment, which was really weird, because this was in 1963. And I got special treatment. I am the only waiter. All the others were waitresses. And I am Black. The waitresses were all blue-collar White.
And the difference was that they would send me on errands to do the banking, for instance, and other such things, and would add the caveat, we know where he prays. And so needless to say, these blue-collar White waitresses were Protestants, or-- but they weren't Catholic. So I got treated like a King, because I was Catholic. And I think the fact that I just left the monastery helped a great deal.
John Spanberg's sister was a nun. And nuns are the oldest living profession in the world. And now and then, she would show up visiting. And she would come and work in the restaurant too. And I can't remember what her name was, but she would be in full habit, but the old-fashioned full habit.
They were an erratic family. Mrs. Spanberg was the best baker that I-- her pastries were just to kill for. But they lived in a past where they had owned a couple of hotels in Florida and had lost them during the Great Depression, et cetera, et cetera. Whether that was a pipe tale, a pipe dream, I don't know.
Mr Spanberg was-- walked like a stroke victim. And he was very crippled. And the story was that he had been picking up trophies for a tournament for Catholic high schools and was in a car accident that left him that way.
So he was the maitre d'. And he mostly sat on a stool, and when he got upset, screamed and yelled at people. And I never got screamed and yelled at. As I said, they treated me like I was super special.
And then there was the evening that I thought, I can't do this anymore. There was a tour group that pulled up. A bus pulled up. And business was usually pretty slow. And this was the summer.
And all of a sudden, the restaurant is full. And Dorothy has not anticipated this. And so there were not-- there is not enough food.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, no.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: And the old man hobbles into the kitchen. And he's screaming and yelling at his daughter. And these White people on this tour bus are looking at each other like, what kind of place did we-- and should we go, running out.
And I'm trying to nervously take orders. And I am thinking, this is crazy. This is crazy. And at one point, I hear screaming. He picked a whole tray full of fried apples up and hurled it at his daughter and one of the waitresses in the kitchen. And they were screaming.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, no.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: And I don't even remember how the evening turned out, but I decided, I'm not going back. I am not going back. And I didn't.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, God.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: And I, at the same time, I had landed this custodial job over here that I wasn't happy with either, but it had benefits. And it paid me more than I was making at the restaurant. And I needed a job. And so I settled into that job.
And settling into that job was probably one of the things that needed to happen to me, because the job ended up having promises that I had not anticipated. The Biology Department was a really strange place at the time. They had growing pains. And they wanted to-- they needed a full-time lab technician. And they could not have-- they didn't have the budget.
There wasn't a budget that was large enough to allow them to hire somebody who was college-educated to do the technical things that they needed. And so they were teaching me and requiring me to do some of the stuff that was not in the job description of cleaning the department. And so it didn't take long to clean the department, but it-- I was spending a lot of time helping them prepare lab demonstrations, and other things for different biology labs.
It was also the last year that Dr. Kenneth Porter Stephens was department head. And at the time, there was a mandatory retirement age. And he was 65. And that was the mandatory age that you can no longer be a department head.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, really? At just W&L, or was this--
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: All over the United States-- those mandatory laws got overturned in the '70s. And so there is no such thing as mandatory retirement laws in the United States anymore. You can look up that kind of thing. And there is a congressman named Claude Pepper, who was from Florida, who was an old man, who is responsible for getting rid of those laws.
So Dr. Stephens was going to be replaced at the end of the year. And he was replaced by this guy named Henry S Roberts, who was brought in to be the head of the Biology Department. And he was from Duke.
And so the offer was made to me that I become the department laboratory technician. So I was taken off of the buildings and grounds staff.
INTERVIEWER: How long did you work the buildings and grounds--
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: One year.
INTERVIEWER: One year?
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: And the thing that I resent about some of the news articles-- and I've got more papers that you need to see-- is that some of the news articles that made too big a deal about it, because it was a job I had when I was 19. A lot of White guys do construction when they are 19, but it's not, oh, well, gee whiz, he went from being a construction worker to being a college professor-- so what? He was 19 years old.
So what the department did is, they started training me to do everything they needed me to do. And they said that they wanted to hire somebody who was bright enough to learn the job. And so I met their criteria.
And so for the next 19 years, I was the laboratory technician. I prepared solutions for the labs that were more biochemical in nature. I set up demonstrations for the labs that were more phylogenetic-- well, phylogenetic is not the term I want, but the labs that were more taxonomic, like zoology and botany. I cultured fruit flies of different kinds and genetics.
I mean, I cared for the microscopes. If they were doing a demonstration in zoology this week on malarial parasites, I usually found the organisms that were needed on pre-stained slides and set up the slides on oil immersion, which are the highest power lens that an ordinary microscope could have. So I became pretty adept at doing that, learned a great deal of biology.
I had responsibility for the greenhouse. I had work study students. And students were the same age as me. The unique thing about it was, W&L was segregated. And so all the students were White.
But W&L did have a kind of diversity that was interesting, because anti-Semitism was rampant on this campus. And so the Jewish students were treated like dirt oftentimes by other students, and sometimes by faculty members. The Jewish students were also ghettoized into two Jewish fraternities, because the other fraternity charters read White Christians.
And so the Jewish boys couldn't belong to anything but Zeta Beta Tau, or Phi Epsilon Pi I think with the other Jewish house. And the Jewish houses were right over on Nelson Street. The house that is now Kappa Sig was built by a Jewish business man, whose name was Weinberger, who was local, and-- Weinberg, I'm sorry.
And that was the Zeta Beta Tau house. And the Zeta Beta Tau house provided carpooling for them to temple on Friday evenings. It had Passover Seder. I used to get invited to Seder even though I'm Roman Catholic. And right across the street where KA is now, that was the other Jewish national and the peep house.
But those were the only two fraternities that the Jewish kids could belong to. And the one thing that I noticed about the Jewish houses then that set them apart from the other fraternities is that they did not have the same kind of camaraderie as the other fraternities did, because they didn't have the selection. So it was like, oftentimes, they didn't like some of their brothers in the fraternity.
But you know, we experienced that as Black people. We don't like everybody who's Black just because they're Black. And so those Jewish kids didn't like everybody who was Jewish just because they were Jewish.
I got to be friends with a lot of Jewish guys, because-- and not to stereotype them, but the most popular major among the Jewish kids was pre-med. And so a lot of the biology majors were pre-med. And this is how I ended up getting invitations to Passover Seder.
But that was the obvious discrimination that existed in the student body. I worked directly with students in the general biology lab, particularly when they were doing things like dissecting frogs, and others. And I can remember that, because these kids were the same age as me, oftentimes the camaraderie across racial lines is a lot easier, especially if you're the same sex.
The thing that was not easy though, or for the few Northern students-- And this was the Southern Regional School at the time. The few Northern students didn't really understand the culture, because Southern Black and White boys had grown up playing sandlot ball. And you know, they went their separate ways when the ball game was over, but they were used to playing together. And you didn't play after puberty with people of the opposite sex who were not in your race.
So anyway, the Southern boys were very friendly with me and didn't seem to have any hang ups. And I had this one Northern student and I will never forget, although I can't remember his name, who came up to me after a lab or something one day. And he said, I really like you. I just want you to know that, when you see me on campus and I'm with my Southern friends and I don't speak, it's because, when in Rome, you do as the Romans do.
And I didn't respond. But a few days later, there was this funny thing that happened. I was walking across campus. And there he was with a bunch of Southern guys.
And they were together but not all in the bunch together. Every one of them spoke to me. And I spoke back. And when he spoke, I didn't. You know, I was making a point--
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, of course.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: --a point that, you don't know what being in Rome is all about, and especially if you're 19 years old. And so it certainly was complicated.
The other thing that was very, very interesting, especially where my family house was, which was down close to those fraternities, the music, the music of choice by White male Washington elite students was Motown. And you know, I could go to bed at night with my window up. And I could listen to the Combos. And the music that I was listening to was music that our people listened to.
And Dionne Warwick was here a lot. She performed on this campus a great many times. The Four Tops performed on the campus. The Temptations performed on this campus.
INTERVIEWER: Wow.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: And so it's not until the late '60s, where you end up with the hard metal, and all of that, the psychedelic music, and all of that stuff that sort of divides the students with regard to the culture of what a dance is like, et cetera--
INTERVIEWER: Oh, that's interesting.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: So anyway, the desegregation decision takes place while I'm here. And you've read about that in Blaine Brownell’s book, which I think he does a great job with, except the book doesn't deal with students. It's a top-down book only. And he certainly indicts the school and the board of trustees for the way it was handled.
But the very first student was a kid that I knew. And it would be interesting to see whether you can pursue this at all. The very first undergraduate was a guy named Dennis Haston.
INTERVIEWER: Right.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: Two of his brothers work on campus.
INTERVIEWER: Right now?
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: His youngest brothers, Ricardo Haston is a janitor here on this campus. And gee, I'm forgetting the other-- Francis Haston is a janitor here on this campus. I think Francis works over in the gym.
Dennis was one of six boys. And so I don't think Dennis has ever contributed anything about his year here. I can imagine how awful it must've been.
There is a tape, or there is an interview. I can't remember the guy's name right now, a Jewish guy who was roommates with Leslie Smith, who was the first Black law student, who was also here in '69. And this Jewish guy gave me this interview about how bad the situation was for Leslie. And of course, Leslie Smith was murdered in Washington after graduation.
But so Dennis is a mystery. I know he transferred to, I think, Hampton University, and finished. And what he's doing now, I-- well, I'm sure he is retirement age. But as I said, his two youngest brothers worked here for years. And most people don't even know that.
INTERVIEWER: That's fascinating. And it's not really in circulation, too. I don't know why they don't mention it.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: Well, you're certainly not going to single out a couple of working guys because they're brothers-- their brother was one of the first black students here. And the other two that came in '68 have both died. And they were younger than me, Linwood Smothers.
But his family remains here in town. His mother is probably in her 90s. And she lives on Preston Street. And he has a brother named Paul, who I think is retired from the Sheriff's Department, or may still be working. I don't know.
And the other guy was a guy named Walter Blake, who, as far as I know, he has no family left here. And so the first three students actually were from Lexington. And they lived really, really strange existences, because they never lived in a dormitory. And Linwood Smothers and Walter Blake, however, pledged Zeta Beta Tau, which was a Jewish National.
And I don't know what arrangement W&L had with them. I know that, when I was a student here, there was something called a Rockbridge County Scholarship, which meant it was 50% cheaper for me to go to school here than it was for people who weren't from Rockbridge County. I don't know whether the Rockbridge County Scholarship existed when they were students here, what kind of arrangements were given to them with regard to aid or anything like that.
Linwood was an engineering major. And W&L at the time had a joint program with Columbia, where you could do your undergrad part here and get-- end up getting a Master's degree from Columbia. I don't remember what Walter Blake's major was.
My views about Washington & Lee during those years changed a great deal, but my views about Washington & Lee were not the views that maybe a lot of people expect me to have. For all practical purposes, my 19 years in the Biology Department, I was treated well. My benefits were good. My salary was mediocre.
And much to the credit of some of the members of the Biology Department, there was constant encouragement for me to get a college degree. And the college degree thing could have been easier if I had been psychologically ready to do that. But there was this great fear of falling on your face in front of your friends when you knew faculty members very well. And I'm not talking about students, but I'm talking about faculty members.
Because faculty members across the campus treated me very well. And I got to know a lot of faculty members very, very well and was on first-name basis with a lot of faculty members. And do you really enter a collegiate situation where you want to have that kind of relationship with people who are friends?
Because there is need for professional distance. One of the things that I had written about Black teachers being haughty, that I was going to change, that I didn't change yet, is that, I'm sure that a lot of those Black teachers who were haughty were very conscious of the fact, in a small town where everybody knows each other, that there has to be a professional distance between you and the parents of your students. Professional distance, when you are an adult and you decide to enroll in a college where you know the faculty, and everybody knows you is problematic.
The other source of influence was my wife. I got married in 1973. And so I've been married for 45 years. And we were married at the end of my wife's junior year in college.
And she went to Emory & Henry. And she went back to school at the end of the summer we got married. And so we had a commuter marriage for that school year. And that was the year of the Arab oil embargo, so gasoline wasn't easy to get. And Emory & Henry is three hours away.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, wow.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: But my wife was also-- you've got to get a college education. You've got to do this. You've got to do this. And so my wife was the other encouragement.
And so in the late '70s, I began to become amenable to this. And the very first college course I took was not here, but was in an evening division that was sort of a community service to Lexington that VMI offered. And so local people could take college classes at VMI.
So I took a history class from a very good history professor at VMI named John Barrett. And it was just a collegiate-level intro US History class that I enjoyed a great deal, and got an A in it. And so that was my very, very first collegiate course.
INTERVIEWER: Could I ask, why did you choose to take a history course instead of perhaps biology?
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: Because I'm a bad math student. And so the one thing that was not an option with being a science major, as much as I like biology, is that I wasn't going to do calculus. There was no way.
And plus the fact, the thing that's very difficult for any student is that math skills deteriorate when you don't use them. And so I start collegiate courses after being out of school more than 15 years. And one of the things that I know is a handicap for me starting collegiate courses is all things mathematical.
And I never thought of myself as being a particularly good math student to begin with. And I found math intimidating. And so, besides, had I gone to college when I was 18, I would've been an art major.
INTERVIEWER: Oh really?
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: And so it would not have been biology, nor would it have been history. And when I was a W&L student, I took four courses in studio sculpture. But I was a wood carver before I became a W&L student. And that's another story.
INTERVIEWER: I never knew this.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: But I sided in the material, my famous great uncle, who is very prominent in the art world, who died in '78, my grandfather's youngest brother. But I really enjoyed the art courses that took here, and probably, if I had been in school another semester, I might have been able to work toward finishing an art major. But double majors weren't popular then. And aside from that, if I had been an art major, I probably would have had a divorce. My wife didn't think I was going to find a job with a history major, much less an art major.
So then I began taking courses here. And I discovered something that was possible at W&L that no one had ever done before, that somebody on the staff could take a course a term for credit with the permission of their supervisor, and at no cost. And so I started doing that. And I took three courses in French. I took at least one course in journalism. I took-- oh god, I can't even begin to remember all of the courses I took as a part-time student. I took, certainly, some history courses when I was part time.
But what happened as a transition is that, one day, I was walking along campus. And I ran into Dean Bill Watt, who is a chemistry professor, but he was Dean of the College. And he said, you know, you've done really well in these courses you've taken, but if you ever want a degree, you're going to have to quit your job and be full time for two years.
And so I did. And I was fortunate enough that my wife had the job that she still has. My wife has been the treasurer of the City of Lexington for nearly as long as we've been married. She was able to pretty much support us while I was a student.
And so I became full time for two years. And during my two years here, probably, my sanity courses were the studio courses in sculpture. And that's not that I wasn't under a lot of pressure to produce projects, because I was, but you think differently than you do when you're writing papers. And you think differently than you do when you're preparing for a test.
And oftentimes, when baby-sitting broke down because my wife had to work, guess who came to classes with me? And taking him to art classes was a lot easier, because I could give him a lump of clay and sit him on a stool.
INTERVIEWER: That's adorable.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: But I can remember, in the history class one time, and Newcomb Hall, he climbed out of the window during the-- we were sitting in the back of the room. And he climbed out of the window. And I could see him running down the mall.
But there were times that, you know, not only-- and I was not the only adult student. There were two other adult male students when I was an undergrad. And I guess they didn't have-- well, one of them was divorced. And he had a son the same age as mine. And the other one was a guy named Chris Bowring whose wife still works in the Psychology Department. But the Bowrings I think had two or three children.
But I guess the funniest story about being a student was, when I was finishing up here, there was one day on the way to the post office I was walking in the company of Bill McHenry, who was the Athletic Director and an alumnus, a really nice guy. And he said to me, he said, you know, you three guys were such good sports. He said, we waive the PE requirement for you all. And you took it anyway.
And it was the first time I'd heard anything about that. But it just seemed to me that that was so typical of W&L, because it was sort of a macho place, because I remember the days when people couldn't graduate if they couldn't run a nine-minute mile.
INTERVIEWER: How was that being an adult student, having to compete with, like, these--
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: It was interesting. It was interesting. The students really seemed to like me a great deal. And some of them already knew me from the fact that I wasn't new to the campus.
I can remember one student very inappropriately accused me of having an unfair situation because he was sure that, because I was friends with all the faculty, I didn't have to do the work. And that was certainly not true. And even if there had been an element of truth to it, that I certainly had my own work ethic.
And I made five Cs when I was a W&L student. And I'm not ashamed to tell anybody that. But I can tell you what my grade point average was, it's-- and I don't think I'm misremembering. But when I finished, it was a 3.375, which is pretty decent, given the fact that I had five Cs.
INTERVIEWER: Yes.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: And so, I never felt like anybody handed me anything. And I certainly wasn't graduating with a 4.0. And I certainly wasn't-- and a 3.375 did not permit me to graduate magna cum laude. My diploma says cum laude, which is good enough.
But I had a good time. And I guess we can talk about the dynamics of all of this further, but I'm beginning to think that, probably, it's necessary to get something to eat, or something.
INTERVIEWER: Yes, I think so too. OK, I'll stop it right here.
Dublin Core
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Oral History: Theodore DeLaney Jr. Pt 1
Description
An account of the resource
Listen to an account of Ted DeLaney's life growing up in Lexington and time spent working for and attending Washington and Lee as an undergraduate.
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2018-07-05
-
https://blackgeneral.omeka.wlu.edu/files/original/47388ceca3f29761a2674473a0c68388.pdf
6441518bb35121aa5be3b44024bee3b7
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Race in the Ring-tum Phi
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Discussions of race.
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Accounts of race within the university's undergraduate run newspaper, The Ring-tum Phi.
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A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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Article: "Exploring Diversity at Washington and Lee"
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Washington and Lee Ring-tum Phi journalist records the experiences of black students, faculty and staff at the University in 1999.
Description
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Washington and Lee staff writer Elianna Marzianni recounts the desegregation of the university, interviews Professor Ted DeLaney, student Tomi Olubunmi and Dean Anece F. McCloud.
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Elianna Marzianni
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Ring-tum Phi
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1999-02-01
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PDF
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en_US
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Text
-
https://blackgeneral.omeka.wlu.edu/files/original/65f70865d241a8de023453975b9320df.pdf
19667f4c481da528a62a58d7cdfba2bf
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Race in the Ring-tum Phi
Subject
The topic of the resource
Discussions of race.
Description
An account of the resource
Accounts of race within the university's undergraduate run newspaper, The Ring-tum Phi.
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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Article: "African-American Studies Established at Washington and Lee"
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Faculty establish Washington and Lee's African-American studies program.
Description
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Ring-tum Phi journalist Sarah Murray writes on the official African-American studies program at Washington and Lee, in response to a request made from the Black Female Alliance.
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Sarah Murray
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Ring-tum Phi
Date
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2005-02-28
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This material is made available for use in research, teaching, and private study, pursuant to U.S. Copyright law. The user assumes full responsibility for any use of the materials, including but not limited to, infringement of copyright and publication rights of reproduced materials. Any materials used should be fully credited with the source.
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PDF
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en_US
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text
-
https://blackgeneral.omeka.wlu.edu/files/original/6aab11a088ccd73487ac3764c778a2e0.mp3
e878d2fd4b584f75562b1474f7a85eb5
https://blackgeneral.omeka.wlu.edu/files/original/42710d7ba774823ab48bc68c296e05a8.pdf
a858d4f545c3327486d15645f1bcb104
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Title
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Oral History Collection
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Oral Histories
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This collection contains the Oral Histories of African-Americans at Washington and Lee. The voices shared within this collection are a mixture of staff, faculty and alumni.
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MaKayla Lorick
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mp3
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en_US
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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MaKayla Lorick
Interviewee
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Ted DeLaney
Biography
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Ted DeLaney is a former employee, class of 1985 who was born and raised in Lexington, VA. He is an '85 graduate and now Professor of History at Washington and Lee University.
Location
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Leyburn Library
Transcription
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MAKAYLA LORICK: Hi. My name is MaKayla Lorick. Today is July 6. We're in Leyburn Library in the Writing Center. This is part two. Could you please state your name?
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: My name is Theodore Carter DeLaney. I am a Washington and Lee faculty member, an alumnus, and a local townsperson. Yesterday, in our conversation, we had begun to talk about desegregation at Washington and Lee. But we had also focused a little bit on my personal experiences as a student.
And I had sort of recapped the fact that, at the end of my career here, I was walking to the post office one day in the presence of coach Bill McHenry, who was the athletic director. And he observed, as we were walking along, that you three old guys, who were students, were such good sports. We waived the PE requirement for you all, and you took PE anyway.
That was the first I'd ever heard that the requirement had been waived. And one of the real challenges of my life was taking PE courses with people who were 20 years younger than me. But I had no regrets at all. I was in the best physical shape of my life. And at the time, I felt like I'd really accomplished a great deal, not only surviving the PE requirement at W&L but also having completed degree requirements.
The experience, however, was unique. I approached my studies in a way that 18-year-olds don't approach their studies in that I had a mission to accomplish, and I had a family that was accommodating me doing this-- the wife who had a job that was enabling the support of our family while I pursued this degree. Incidentally, we had sold our house as a way of accommodating my being a student.
But at the time, my mother-in-law had died, and my father-in-law was going to work in New York for a couple of years. And he let us live in his house rent-free during that period, which made things a little bit easier for us financially. But nonetheless, I was under an obligation to get finished as quickly as I could so I could go back to gainfully supporting my family.
The interesting thing about Washington and Lee is that it did not have evening classes. And evening classes usually accommodate older students who may need to work during the day. I would go to class with a tape recorder, particularly the history classes. I would have permission of faculty members to use my tape recorder to take notes. And I would be writing in my notebook the whole time the lectures would be going on.
But after class, I would come to the library, and I would rewrite my notes while listening to the tape recorder. And so my notebook ended up being like a transcript of the lectures and were in high demand from undergraduates at study period. And so my notebook got photocopied a great many times, which I didn't mind.
I had great camaraderie with these 20-year-olds, which is extraordinary when you're 40 years old, that you're sort of in the same kettle of wax, trying to finish your coursework. And one of the most pleasant things and one of the things that flattered me the most was when they would ask me to be part of their study groups. So the fact that I was considered worthy enough, or at least mentally sharp enough, to be a part of their study groups was incredibly flattering to me, and I enjoyed it immensely.
And the study groups, I have very fond memories of, particularly the study groups for art history. And basically, the art professors would give you these slideshows as your exams. And so they would project these images of art. And within a five-year range, you had to be able to date the piece, and you had to be able to talk about the artist who painted the piece and give a little bit of context of the artist and what the painting was about.
And these study groups were almost comic in proportion. Because they were students who would find these incredible mnemonic devices for remembering all of this trivia about these paintings. And there was this guy in my class from South Carolina. His name was Ted [? LeClaire. ?] And he was notorious for being able to find, in a brushstroke, say, the date of the painting.
And this was so ridiculous that we would all be dying laughing when everybody remembered, gee, that was painted in 1857. Because he found 1857 in this brushstroke that nobody else could see. And so you would go into the test, and you would remember all of that stuff because you'd have so much fun laughing at the fact that these mnemonic devices were ridiculous.
And so you'd come out of these sessions, and you'd think, gee, what a fun evening this was. And the thing that began to occur to me at the end of these sessions was how separate and apart from the group I was. Because at the end of the evening, they would plan to go to The Cockpit, which was the student center at the time, which is now where the mailroom is.
And it was a tavern sort of atmosphere. The wallpaper was burlap. And it was dark blue, and it had red fighting cocks on the wallpaper. And it was, I guess, certainly a commentary about it being an all-male institution.
So they would go over there to relax after these study breaks because beer was legal then because it was 18-year-old drinking then. And it was 3.2 beer. And the university had a tavern that sold beer. And I never got invited for the beer breaks afterwards.
And after having such a good time at the study sessions, it became a little bit of a painful experience-- not much of a pain, but a little bit of a painful experience to recall. I'm not being asked to go over and have beer with these kids.
And "kids" is the operative word here. Because I thought to myself, well, if I was 20 years old, would I be inviting a 40-year-old to go to have beer with me? And the answer was, no, I wouldn't. And so I understood it being completely normal that they weren't including me.
I did not understand it as age discrimination. But I understood it as, well, we're going now to have some real fun. And we're going now to have it around beer. And we don't really have anything in common around beer with somebody who's old enough to be our father.
And so I found that to be something of a lonely experience. But it also seems to me to be an exact parallel to what W&L struggles with with regard to diversity and inclusion, and what does diversity and inclusion mean. And if you go by the fraternity system, it means including people that you have everything in common with, including friendship, and not necessarily reaching out to a school's wide-reaching goals of including everybody.
And so there have been other people since me who have been adult students at W&L. And I don't know what their experience has been like. I know that I'm friends with Carol Rendleman. And I've never talked to her about the experience at all. But her husband, Doug Rendleman, teaches in the law school.
And I guess I had already left Washington and Lee. I might have been working at Asheville School at the time, or I might even have been at graduate school, when Carol Rendleman was an undergraduate here. But she graduated Pi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude. And so she obviously had a good experience here.
And I think Carol may be my age, or she may be a little bit older than me. I tend to not like to speculate about ladies' ages. But I do know that I was at her 50th wedding anniversary party about six years ago. And so I think she's a little bit older than me. But there have been people like Carol and others who have come to Washington and Lee.
And the one thing that Washington and Lee might do well to think about, and I say this with an ulterior motive, given the audience, is it might be interesting at some point to see a feature article about Washington and Lee's non-traditional students over the last some years, at least since 1985. Because I know that there have certainly been more than the three of us who have been a part of that category.
But there also seems to me to be a part of being a student at an advanced age is having to realize the merits of education while you're young. One of the things that I carried away from the experience was that it was an experience that I did not want my son to have. I wanted my son to be educated right out of high school. And I wanted his education not to be interrupted until it was completed.
I was not one of those who agrees with the old saying that education is wasted on the young. I don't believe that at all. Now, as a faculty member, I would say that education is wasted on some young people who take for granted that this is a gift that they're being given that they don't really have to actively participate in. But it's the ideal time to be educated is when you're young and your mind is fresh, et cetera, et cetera.
The other side of that is that I taught nontraditional students when I taught at the State University of New York at Geneseo. And my experience with nontraditional students at a state university was somewhat different. And it might have been because this was a private school, and those of us who were non-traditional students here were invested in our education to a much larger extent than people were at a state university that had a very, very low tuition rate when I taught there.
I'll give you an example. One year, much to my surprise and amazement, I was assigned to teach the women's history class. And the only thing that qualified me to teach women's history is I'd taken one advanced seminar in women's history in graduate school. And my dissertation had been about a 19th-century Southern woman.
There was sort of a historical gadfly in the department who, they knew he wanted to teach. And he had been teaching women's history, and he was retiring. And so the department had automatically thought that my office mate, who was a Civil War historian and a young woman, would teach women's history. And she was highly effeminate.
And she refused to teach women's history, which I certainly could have applauded. But little did I know that I was going to be, then, drafted to teach women's history. And I had these five adult women in the class, although most of the class were-- I think I had about 30 students-- and most of the class were people your age. And there were two or three men in the class, who largely didn't say anything.
But these five women in the class had agendas. And one of the women was out to trash-- and I'm having a senior moment, she was out to trash, and I'm still having a senior moment on my name-- Sanger. I want to say Margaret Sanger, but I may be wrong.
But this is a woman who had been a social worker/nurse in New York City. And she had worked with a woman who was in a desperately poor situation and couldn't afford to have more babies. And she violated the law by disseminating birth control information to this woman.
And history courses should never be to ratify your political prejudice. Was I right? So Margaret Sanger. It's never meant to be something that, oh, I'm going to take this history course because it gives me a chance to vindicate my views about Margaret Sanger and that birth control is wrong.
And when I read this paper, I realized that she hadn't learned anything in the history class at all. It was a hatchet job on Margaret Sanger. And I didn't care what she thought about birth control or abortion or any of those things. What mattered to me is that she learned something in the class.
And I was so angry. And I thought, how dare you do this in a college class when the college class is to open your horizons and to make you look at all sides of an issue rather than the one narrow perspective that you're bringing to the table? And so I had to deal with this one woman. And I found dealing with her completely painful in ways that dealing with an undergraduate is never painful.
And then there was another woman in my class who I really liked a lot. And she brought other issues to the table that I had not anticipated but I'd seen on undergraduates on the same campus. And these two women ended up sort of being what is the bane of a teaching profession.
Rather than remember the students who really do good, you remember the students who are somehow problems. And those students occupy so much of your thought time and enable you to forget all of the other wonderful kids that you had in a class, or kids, but all of the other wonderful students that you have in a class.
And so this office mate of mine, who I highly respected, and I'm still friends with her-- Judith Hunter-- Judith was sitting at a desk. We're back-to-back in this very large office. And Judith was sitting at her desk, and I'm reading this other woman's blue book.
And it was so hard to read. And she didn't write within the lines of the pages in the blue book. And it was just a mess. It was just an absolute mess. And I'm reading the book-- the blue book-- and I turned to Judith, and I said to her, look at this. And I want you to give me your stereotypic view of the student who wrote this exam.
And Judith, who's not one who's given to stereotypes, chuckles as she turns around, and she looks at it. And she says, an 18-year-old guy with a baseball cap on backwards. And I said, try a 45-year-old housewife. And her eyes were about this big.
I mean, the blue book was just an absolute mess. And I'm sitting there thinking, how in the hell did she get in college? I mean, what is going on here? And so it completely defied the experience of having been an adult student myself.
But that's not to say that I didn't encounter adult students-- male and female-- in a public institution who were good. Because I did. But there was just those two people that I really, really could not get over.
But there, again, there was the other experience of a public institution as opposed to a private one that was also very interesting. Because I thought I was doing some good work being at a public institution, that I was helping students who could not afford to be at places like this.
And ideally, that is where I would have preferred to have spent my entire career. And that is not what happened at that particular school. That particular school had a side to it that this place doesn't have and, in retrospect, a side to it that might have been healthy for me to have stuck out.
I had faculty members who were friends who had restraining orders against students. And I'd never heard of that before. And the idea that there was this fear of the people you were teaching, to the extent that you would actually go to the sheriff's office and get a restraining order against a student, was something that I did not understand until I found myself in a similar situation.
And that situation had everything to do with diversity. It had everything to do with the complications of race and what race means. And once again, it was a high-handed kind of thing that had happened at this particular school. Because I had not been trained to teach African-American history. That was something that I would have to develop myself later, mostly here.
But when I applied for that job, I was a 19th-century American historian whose focus had been the South. And they advertised for a Civil War historian, and I thought that was what I was hired for. And I get there and find out that I'd been hired to teach African-American and that my office mate had been hired to teach Civil War.
And so I was told that I would teach a 20th-century African-American history class through biography. And that just seemed all wrong. In the first place, great men of history was out of vogue.
So teaching any kind of history class through biography was not what modern social historians were doing. To teach an American history class, for instance, through the eyes of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, et cetera, would be to teach American history through the eyes of elites and those people who are simply privileged to be American leaders for whatever reason.
And so I was told that, even though I was going to teach 20th-century African-American history this particular year, that I was going to teach it through the eyes of, well, biographies of African-Americans of the 20th century. I was going to have to start with Rochester's own Negro-- and I'm being nasty when I say Rochester's own Negro-- who's Frederick Douglass. And of course, Frederick Douglass, when he runs away, he ultimately ends up in Rochester. And he operates his abolitionist newspaper from Rochester, New York.
And so first day of class, I start with Frederick Douglass. I really like to teach Frederick Douglass because Frederick Douglass is a problematic figure in American history that, I guess, some scholars are really afraid to question. But there are so many things in Frederick Douglass's narrative that are completely not plausible.
And Frederick Douglass, if you read his third narrative, he admits to all of that and that Frederick Douglass is not in the first narrative, which is certainly the most interesting. He is not really giving you a biography of himself. He is developing an argument against slavery. And he is using every tool in the book to make a cogent argument against slavery.
So when Frederick Douglass creates a situation where-- well, I'll give you a perfect example. Frederick Douglass has a runaway scheme, at one point, where he and these other slaves are going to run away. And when the scheme is discovered, he's punished by his master. And his master is very unhappy. And usually, the penalty for such a thing is you get sold into the lower South.
Well, Frederick Douglass lives in Maryland. Well, instead of selling Frederick Douglass into the lower South-- who, it's not his first time that he tries to run away-- he sends him back to Baltimore to live with his brother, Hugh Auld, which is spelled A-U-L-D. And then you think, you're sending him to Baltimore, the easiest place in the East from which to escape, and he's just had this scheme to run away with other slaves? That doesn't make sense at all.
But not only do you send him to Baltimore, but you send him to Baltimore and Hugh hires him out. And so he's able to be hired out. So he's living virtually as a free person who's bringing certain money to Hugh at the end of the week. And so the question begs itself, did the Aulds set him up to be able to escape?
And in the third narrative, there's this conversation when he goes to visit his old master. And his old master said, we knew we couldn't keep you in slavery. And so he tells it later. But the students had not the benefit of reading the third narrative.
But I'm raising all of these questions about the veracity of Frederick Douglass's story. So this black, big old student comes to my office after class. He is so angry he can hardly stand it. And he tells me that, first of all, I know nothing about slavery.
And he's a sophomore in college. And I have, at that point, not finished writing my dissertation, but I certainly finished my doctoral comprehensive exams, and think that I do have some expertise. But the sophomore is telling me I know nothing about slavery.
But he goes on to tell me, also, in this conversation, that I give white people too much credit in my lectures. So I've got this sophomore who's telling me that I can't be balanced in my interpretation of history. But then he also tells me-- the ultimate insult-- is that, and you're the kind of African-American professor who is an embarrassment to African-American students.
And I always give people the benefit of the doubt. And I tried to explain to him what I was doing with the lecture, only to have these three things reiterated after I finished. And I expected this young man to go and drop the course. And he did not. And he stayed there to be the thorn in my side for an entire 15-week semester.
And the winters are very long in Western New York. And the students' common name for that campus was "the tundra." You could go all over that campus underground if you knew how to do it. And I didn't.
And so there was this animosity in my class the whole time. And something that was very unlike W&L, something that was very, very different from W&L, happened at the end of the term. The student turned in an absolutely absurd term paper that likened Stokely Carmichael to Benjamin Franklin.
And you only needed to read one page to realize that he knew nothing about either Stokely Carmichael or Benjamin Franklin. And why anybody would think that this was a worthy intellectual endeavor was something that was just beyond reason. And I always write in the margins of students' papers what's wrong with the paper. And I turn the papers back.
And I must confess to having been a coward. I'd been on the campus long enough to know that people had restraining orders and that relationships with students were fraught with danger. And so the only thing that I had the courage to do-- and this is something that's horrible to say on tape and certainly something that I would never do again-- is I gave him a B minus for an absurd paper, for an absolute absurd paper. And I should have given him an F in the first place. Because the response was the equivalent to an F.
And so once I was back at my office, my office mate was there, and so was a friend of mine who was an adjunct-- her name was Carol Lockwood-- who was using my computer. Because the adjuncts didn't have computers. And later, I was really thankful that these two women were witnesses to what would happen later.
So this guy comes to my office, and he has to be at least 6' 6". And he's big. He's not skinny at all. He's a great big guy. And he comes in, and he says, we need to talk about my paper. And there are nice, wide hallways, and there was nobody in the hall. And we went across the hall and sat on a bench.
And I started explaining to him, as politely and as gently as I could, the problems with his paper. And then, his response was, no. I got this grade because you don't like me, at which point I said, conversation is over. This is not based on what I think of you. This is based on the fact that this is not good work.
And I went back into my office, and he followed me. And he is like a madman. He's screaming and yelling at me. He called me a house nigger. It was unbelievable. My office mate was on the telephone while this was going on. My friend, Carol, was using my computer.
And finally, I walked over to him, and I gently put my hand on his shoulder and said, please leave. And then he started screaming that I had laid hands on him, which made me even more pleased that there were two witnesses.
And from my office, he went down the hall to the department head's office and told the department head that I had dissed him in front of two secretaries-- and, of course, the two women were not secretaries at all, they were faculty members-- and went on to denigrate me to the department head, who disappointed me greatly when he called me in and told me that the kid's mother would be coming down to see me.
And I said, I am not dealing with a college student's mother. And she may be coming to see you, but she's not coming to see me. And he went on to tell me that he doesn't trust you to grade his final exam.
And I said, well, I guess that's a problem for you. Because I don't know what the alternative is. And he says, well, I'm going to read over the final exam. Well, this guy's field was Latin America.
And so then, I thought, the crazy thing was I didn't give the kid an F on the paper. That was the absolute crazy thing, that I'd been too much of a coward to give the kid an F. And a few weeks later-- oh, no, that same day-- the affirmative action officer called me, who was the only black administrator who chimed in-- the dean of students.
I got the impression she was afraid of this kid. The affirmative action officer said, you're going to have to file charges against the student. Because if you don't, no other student on the campus will ever respect you.
And so I found myself in a real dilemma. The school year was ending. And a few weeks later, a friend of mine in the history department had an informal party at her house, to which I was invited. And I met this woman at the party from the English department who was from Brazil originally.
And she started telling me about an incident that had happened the year before on the campus that, strangely enough, involved the same student. And he had intimidated a male student from Puerto Rico who was dating a black woman. And he had imposed himself on this male student and said, leave our women alone. And the tension had become so great between he and the Puerto Rican student that the Puerto Rican student had armed himself.
And the last time this kid intimidated the Puerto Rican student, the Puerto Rican student had used a straight razor and had cut this guy from here to here. And I'm a pacifist. And I was thinking, gee, I'm lucky I didn't have that kid's straight razor because I probably might have been tempted to finish the job.
[LAUGHTER]
And so here's the situation I have with a black male student. And I think, this is so crazy. This is so idiotic. And he was a bully. He was an absolute bully. And even though I didn't go out for a restraining order or anything like that, I got a telephone call within days from Robert [? McCarron, ?] my former professor here at Washington and Lee University.
I was just at a meeting in the administration, and they are perplexed that they can't get more black faculty members. There was only one black faculty member here at the time in the undergraduate division. And so I let them put their money where their mouth is, and I said, I know somebody you can get pretty quick who is completely qualified and all of you know. And they gave me permission to call and approach you about a job.
And with the turmoil that was going on in my life at Geneseo, it didn't take me five minutes to say yes. And then the other shoe dropped-- but we don't want you next year, we want you for the year after next. And I thought, another year on the Geneseo campus.
And the Geneseo campus was unique. It was a good school. It had good kids. Sometimes, the kids did things that were un-W&L, but so what? The student body was as liberal as the W&L student body is conservative, which was also interesting for me.
But there are students I will never forget. There was one young woman who was taking my intro to US history class one year. And she wasn't taking any of the exams. And I had 45 people in a section. And I kept thinking, how am I going to get ahold of her? Because I have no grades for her.
So one day, I positioned myself at the door before the class was over so I could stop her before she left. And I said, you haven't taken any of the tests in this class. And she said, oh, I know. I'm just doing it for a dry run this time. A dry run? You enrolled in the class. Oh, I was so blown away by that.
And so the next term, I'm sitting at my computer, working in my office, and I hear two colleagues out in the hall talking. And one guy says to the other, there's this woman in my class who's not taking any of the exams. And I got up, and I went out in the hall, and I offered her name.
And he said, how did you know that? And then, he said, no. She didn't do that-- yeah, she did do that. How do you do that without flunking out? So you would get things like that that were laughable but also very sad.
And then there was the morning-- well, the mornings of a test were always interesting. Because the excuses for why I cannot take your tests this morning-- I've never heard these excuses at W&L, never ever. But oftentimes, it's hail to grandmother time.
MAKAYLA LORICK: Oh, no.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: And I had this colleague named Meg [? Stohli. ?] And one morning, Meg had three students in a row who showed up on a test morning in her office and said, my grandmother is dead. And when the third student came in, Meg had a temper tantrum. And she says, it's sexist. Why don't you kill your grandfather sometimes?
And a little while later, the dean calls and says, Meg, what have you done? That child's grandmother really was dead. And it's like Peter and the Wolf kind of thing. You keep hearing the same lie over and over and over again. And then you believe that every time you hear it, it's a lie.
And so there were those kinds of challenges. I'd never had, to my knowledge, a W&L student lie to me on the day of a test. In fact, usually W&L students would come and say, may I take your exam early because I've got an athletic event or whatever, but not to find some convoluted reason and, particularly, if it involves a family tragedy.
So it was a different kind of job that, on a conscience level, I kind of regret having left. Because I oftentimes thought that those students needed me worse than students at Washington and Lee needed me. But there were also some really great kids there. And there were kids who had gotten in here, but their families couldn't afford W&L, and so they were at Geneseo.
There were some wonderful experiences that I had with students there. But there was a place that also says a lot about the problems that W&L deals with. I guess it became very quickly known in the town of Geneseo, which was smaller than Lexington, although the college was 5,000, that I was there, whether people knew me or not. Because I actually commuted from Rochester since my son went to high school in Rochester.
And so one day, this very nice white teenager shows up in my office to talk to me about Washington and Lee. And his next-door neighbor was a member of the history department. And I said, well, what do you want to talk about? And he said, well, I want to go to a really diverse school. And so I thought that I ought to come and talk to you about Washington and Lee.
And I would never have been rude enough to say, well, what gives you the idea Washington and Lee is a diverse school? And because I'm thinking that he's thinking because you came out of there, Washington and Lee has to be a diverse school. And so finally, at one point in the conversation, I just said to him, I said, I want to be honest with you. I said, I want you to go out, and I want you to walk around the campus and pretend you're at Washington and Lee.
And this very smart kid then looks at me, and he says, you mean, it's white? And I said, Washington and Lee is as white as the SUNY college of Geneseo is. And I said, it may be a state school, but there aren't many black students at Washington and Lee, and there aren't very many students of color who are other ethnicities at W&L.
And he and his mother came down for an interview. And the campus tour just was something that neither of them could phantom . The mother never got over all that she heard about fraternities and sororities on a campus tour, which was enough to blow her away forever.
But so diversity is a problem. And I have rambled and wasted people's time with stories of my life at other places. But I think that Washington and Lee certainly faces a dilemma that other campuses face.
But the problem with the dilemma that Washington and Lee faces is that when I was a student at Washington and Lee, and my prior time of working at Washington and Lee as a nonprofessional person, Washington and Lee was a Southern regional male school. And the monumental thing that happened in 1985 that changed Washington and Lee forever was coeducation.
And when Washington and Lee coeducated, whether they wanted it or not, it catapulted them into the major leagues, and no longer was it a Southern regional male school, but it was a nationally-ranked school and a university that included women. And the one thing that Washington and Lee did a hell of a good job with, and a much better job than they ever did with desegregation, was coeducating the school.
And the first year of coeducation, President Wilson said, with regard to hires, let there be women. And so there was a priority given to recruiting female faculty members. There's never been a priority given to recruiting faculty members of color. There's never been a priority given to recruiting students of color.
And it seems to me that one of the things that blesses W&L over a place like the SUNY college at Geneseo is that Geneseo, the population was 98% New York. And so there were very few out-of-state students on that campus, as well. But I don't know. I've rambled. Do you want to ask questions, or do you want to lead in a different direction?
MAKAYLA LORICK: You can keep going. I liked when you began to talk about W&L's efforts of recruitment for women versus students of color. And I'd kind of like to know your sense of their efforts to recruit when they first integrated and their efforts to recruit now.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: OK. Well, I don't really have a great deal of knowledge of how Washington and Lee recruited blacks in the '60s. I know that the first three undergraduates recruited were from Lexington. And they did not live on campus. And so I don't know what the dynamics for finding three local guys to be a part of the college.
Now, according to Blaine Brownell's chapter on desegregation, that once the decision is made that the faculty can admit whomever they wanted, the trustees would not let them give that information to the newspapers. And so the faculty concern was, well, how do you get black applicants if black people don't know that that school is integrated? And I told you yesterday that, according to Brownell's book, the president leaked it to The Ring-Tum Phi and the national press was able to get it via The Ring-Tum Phi.
With regard to the female thing, one of the things that President Wilson wanted to make sure was that there was going to be no scandal with regard to coeducation. Coeducation of some previously all-male schools had been a rough experience. And his idea was that if you put female faculty members in place as part of this coeducation thing, then that helps to create a better environment.
In the first place, female students are able to see women as role models on the faculty, et cetera. But the other thing is that W&L had experiences with female students in a very, very token way before coeducation that I witnessed when I was a student. Those students were exchange students from places like Hollins and Sweet Briar and Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Mary Baldwin, et cetera.
And they could come here for a year and take classes for credit. And Washington and Lee students could matriculate and take classes on those women's campuses, as well. How many men actually went to take courses on those women's classes I have no idea. But when I was taking courses, there were always a contingency of women who were here for the year from the neighboring women's colleges who were taking classes.
I can remember, in one of my French classes, there was a woman who was really a very, very conscientious student who was also working part-time at one of the local restaurants. And one of the funny things I remember about her in French class was that she had brought one of the lunch bags-- it was the white lunch bag from the restaurant-- that she had written her speech out she had to give in class on this lunch bag.
And the course was taught by an elderly professor named Dr. Drake, who I really loved. And he was the only person left in the French department who would teach the course in English. He did the exercises in French, but everything else was in English. And so the particular day that we had to give these speeches, he was going to be away. And he had Professor Knudson to substitute.
And Professor Knudson changed the rules immediately-- en francais, en francais-- so there was nothing going to be said. And so this woman that's trying to give the speech comes. And she goes up, and she sits next to the desk. And there's a tape recorder because all the speeches are to be delivered into this tape recorder. And she pulls out this paper bag to give a speech.
And Professor Knudson reaches over, and he snatches the paper bag, and he yanks it open and starts blowing it up like he's going to pop it. And she's screaming no, no! Don't pop my bag! And he's, en francais! En francais! But anyway.
And that must have been really intimidating. Because every other student in the class was male. The professor was male. And here's this poor woman at the center, and her written-out speech is going to get destroyed by the professor, who's going to blow the bag up and pop it.
But there were these women who were brave. And they came, and they endured a year here. And then, suddenly, it's OK to enroll and to be a part. And I was not here in 1986, when there are actually living, breathing women in the different classes who are full-time W&L students.
When I came back here to teach for the first time-- I had finished my comprehensive exams but not the dissertation, and this is before I go to New York-- I taught a seminar on early American history. And there were 12 students in the class, two of whom were women. And I was amazed by the dynamics of the class.
Because one of the things that I quickly learned is that the women's credentials were so much better than the men's. And that was because the trustees had protected male enrollment by saying that the admission of women could never exceed over 40%. So it's like out-of-state students.
So women were competing only against women for a finite number of seats in the class. And so when you look at your grade book, the women's scores were up here, and the men's scores were here. And so you thought, well, this isn't really an ideal situation.
But one day, I was getting ready to begin class. And there was this woman student from Roanoke. And I won't use her name, but I really, really admire and respect her. But she got on a roll. And it was one of those moments where you don't have control of your class, and you're wondering what's going to happen next.
And she was on a roll about how much better female students at W&L were than male students were. And I'm sitting at this table, a big table like this, and I could see all of the guys. And none of them were reacting to it. And I'm also sitting there thinking, am I going to have to stop her, or when is she going to finally bring her rant to a conclusion?
And I didn't stop her. And she concluded. And then I realized, there's probably not a man in here that disagreed with what she had to say, which was astonishing to me. And the other woman, who was also very bright, she never uttered a word. She just remained very, very silent while this went on.
And so I had come back to something that had slightly evolved in the maybe six or seven years that I'd been away. And so what I was seeing was a dynamic in the classroom that I hadn't seen before. And when I thought back to my years at W&L, as a W&L student, I brought a different perspective into class discussions because I was old, or older, and because I was black. But my perspective was still male.
And so the discussions were very, very much richer than I had heard at W&L before because there was a female perspective. And those people who deny the merits of a diverse classroom don't know what it is to teach. Because students learn as much from one another as they do from a faculty member. And there is far more learning about the content of a course that takes place in student discussions outside of the classroom than there is within the classroom.
So I really appreciated coeducation but also had a little bit of resentment that the same kind of systematic approach had not been taken in the 1960s when the opportunity was there with desegregation. And that had not happened in the '70s, either. But maybe if John Wilson had been the president at the time of desegregation, maybe that would have happened. I don't know.
So I think that we lost opportunities. Because anybody who knows the history of the civil rights movement, they know that, certainly, when you get into the 1970s, there is this accusation of reverse discrimination. And the Bakke-California, Davis case happens in the 1970s.
And then there becomes a lost opportunity where the Supreme Court narrows the definitions, or the limits, of what an institution can do with regard to their attempts to diversify. So I don't even remember whether I stuck with your question or not.
MAKAYLA LORICK: You did. You did. I also wanted to hear a little bit more about your decision to leave W&L to go to Asheville.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: OK. We didn't talk about my decision to leave W&L.
MAKAYLA LORICK: We didn't talk about that.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: Oh, boy. That was loaded, too.
[LAUGHTER]
God. And you know, here's a guy who teaches African-American history. That was a horrific year. And one of the disadvantages of having friends on a campus when you're finishing up is that friends see possibilities for the university that are not shared by your family and are not completely shared by you.
And the year that I was finishing up my work, President John Wilson fired John White. I guess he was director of minority affairs. I don't think he-- well, I guess he was called dean of minority affairs or something. And John White just recently died, so I want to be really respectful of him when I talk about this.
John White was sort of a Robin Hood in his office, which W&L had tolerated for some time. And being a Robin Hood can get you in trouble. And the black male students here were poor. Their social life was extremely limited. And oftentimes, they found themselves in financial tight spots.
And John White, apparently, would do what he could within the funds that he had access to to help them out. And John White, oftentimes, when there was an accusation of impropriety with regard to the honor system, John White would intercede with, well, it's my fault. I told them that they ought to work together on this. And so it was sort of take the blame and cause faculty members to back away.
So there was an honor trial that year. And the honor trial ended up becoming a public honor trial. And it involved a black student who had cheated on a final exam. And the evidence against this black student was indisputable.
His blue book contained segments of paragraphs, verbatim, from the textbook. He had disappeared from the room with the test. And the defense in the honor trial tried to claim that because he was a journalism major, he had the ability to memorize that way-- even the punctuation.
And so, at one point during the break in this trial, there was a altercation that should not have happened. Steven Hobbs, a old, black law professor at the time, as I understand it, had advised John White that he really should not be taking an active role in the trial since he was not only a law student-- a part-time law student-- but he was also in the dean's office.
And as I understand the story-- and it's been a long time ago, and so I apologize if any of my facts are not correct because memory does deteriorate-- but there was an altercation. And one of the white male students involved said something about "you people," and John lost his temper and grabbed this kid and threw him on the floor.
And the kid went to the president. And the president fired John. And the president's justification was that a dean certainly couldn't violently react to a student comment.
And so there were people who thought that I should apply for John White's job. And I did not have a lot of enthusiasm applying for John White's job because my own views are a lot more practical than John's were.
And John was married. He didn't have children. But I certainly wouldn't have been the Robin Hood that John was. And I would certainly never make excuses for people who should know better than to commit an honor violation.
But at the time, I had no job prospects in line. And I was applying to independent schools at the same time I was applying for this job. And my wife did not want me to have this job. And my wife, oftentimes, is far wiser than me.
And the day I interviewed, I was to go to lunch with two or three of the black, male students. And I was to meet them at Chavis House. And I get there. John White is there, which is not really appropriate because he's already been fired. But there's a whole group of kids going to lunch with me. And the lunch was probably one of the most nightmarish things of my life.
And one of the questions I got over lunch was if a black student committed an honor violation, and you knew he was guilty, to what extent would you go to defend the student? And I was so taken aback by the question, and I just looked at him, and I said, not even if it was my own son. And I said, I can't believe you're asking me that question. This is the very reason that your friend, Dean White, is out of his job.
And so I came away from that lunch pretty shaken. And I knew that there was no hope in being in this job when faculty and people in the Dean of Students office would like to have me in that job, but the students wouldn't. And so that afternoon, there was an interview with a faculty member on the committee in the Alumni House.
And someone in the alumni office called and said, your wife is on the phone. You need to talk to her. And that really startled me. Because my wife knew what I was doing, and I thought that her calling at this time, there had to be something horrible going on. And did something happen to our child?
So I go to the telephone. And something was going on that had nothing to do with our child but everything to do with what my wife thought I should be doing. And she said, the headmaster at Asheville School just called to offer you an interview, and you need to call him back. And I thought, she interrupted this interview to tell me that. It could have waited.
And so that evening, I talked to this very nice, gracious headmaster from Asheville School who wanted me to come interview. And within a few days, I had a job offer, and I retracted my name from the mix for the job here. It would have been a difficult thing for me. Because my heart was certainly with black students at W&L. And my heart was certainly with the institution.
But people have to grow up. And one of the things that my son can tell you is that never in his life did I ever lie for him. It was a funny time when he was at McQuaid Jesuit High School in Rochester. He didn't want to participate in a mandatory walkathon to raise money for the school. And he was in honors classes. And he wanted to study, like a lot of his friends were, for the Advanced Placement test.
And so I overheard him saying on the phone to somebody, well, my dad will never lie, so I can't use that as an excuse. And I said, you mean, their parents are calling in, giving fictitious reasons that their kids aren't going to-- and he said, yeah. And I said, and this is a religious school?
And I said, you're right. I will not do that. And I said, I want you to do well on the Advanced Placement tests, but you're right. Your dad is not going to lie for you. And so that was where I was with the students I was talking to. And if there's something wrong with me because of that, I certainly cannot be stereotyped as some Uncle Tom DeLaney who's really ultra-conservative. Because I'm not.
But when I was a teacher at Asheville School, I knew a white male teacher there who had busted his own son on drug charges. And I thought, wow. Now, when it gets to busting your own son on something criminal, that is a biggie. And I hadn't even thought that far.
[LAUGHTER]
Fortunately, I never had to worry about that. But that was pretty much who I was. And nobody took up for me when I was growing up. My mother would never have told a lie for me. My mother would have seen me rot in jail rather than tell a lie for me.
So I didn't identify with any of that. And so to pose a question of that sort to me was just not who I am. And my heart bled for a lot of these kids. And a lot of these kids that come from that era have been alienated from Washington and Lee and have never, ever found their way back, although I must say I did meet somebody at a black reunion the last time that I was just completely blown away by, never encountered before.
And then he offered a reason that I didn't know him. And the reason just bowled me over. And he said, I actually had to withdrawal on an honor violation. I thought, and you came back for a reunion.
MAKAYLA LORICK: That is so strange.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: I recently told Beau Dudley about that, and his eyebrows raised. So I don't know. It's an interesting question. It makes me wonder about the lack of Washington and Lee's understanding of what the needs of these students were that they were recruiting. And if you have a dean who's having to go into his petty cash drawer to help people out with paying their bills, then obviously they didn't have sufficient aid to operate here well.
During those days, and until recently, Washington and Lee did not have much money for need-based scholarships. And so I don't know what the circumstances were. I do know that a lot of these students who came in ended up being very prosperous later. There are any number of people who ended up being lawyers and judges.
John Hargrove comes to mind. He ended up-- he's a retired judge now. Bill Hill comes to mind, who was superior judge in Atlanta. And his two daughters came here to school. His daughter, Morgan, was my advisee. And Morgan has a law degree from Harvard. John Morrison from Easton, Virginia, who has a W&L law degree and undergraduate degree, and I taught his daughter here at W&L.
So there are a lot of these guys from the '70s and '80s who left here and excelled in law school. And there are some doctors. I'm friends with a guy named Tyrone Daniels, who is a medical doctor. I think he's now in Texas, but Tyrone's medical degree is from the University of Iowa.
So many of these men managed to somehow survive-- whatever. And one of the reasons that I don't think you hear a lot of black alumni criticize W&L about what they went through when they were here is because they look at it from hindsight and what they achieved after they left.
And perhaps the reason I don't look at it from hindsight and what I achieved after I left is because I never really left, OK? And when you never really leave, then you are part of the ongoing conversation. When I got back to W&L as a full-time faculty member in 1995, the first conversation that I find myself in is, well, will you be on the Shepherd Committee?
Well, the Shepherd Committee had nothing to do with poverty at the time. Tom Shepherd, the trustee, and another trustee whose last name was Hubbard-- his initials are escaping me right now-- they were very interested in diversity. And Tom Shepherd was very honest about the reason he was interested in diversity. His daughter had married a black guy.
And so by his daughter's intermarriage, he was learning, himself, about race and diversity. And he's a Northerner, and a Northerner who was wealthy enough to use his money in very productive ways at Washington and Lee. And so there was this university effort to have this diversity committee in '95, when I came back here, that included trustees, administrators, faculty, and students.
And there were literally students who refused to be a part of the committee because they came to W&L, in their own words, precisely because it wasn't diverse. And there's always been that reality. And that reality continues to exist. I'm not going to call the names of any organizations, but I'm sure you could supply them.
[LAUGHTER]
Those students are still here. And we attract those students in large numbers. So it's a conversation that has troubled me for 23 years. And it's the reason that I got on my soapbox at a faculty meeting that I did a few months ago. Been a long time since I said anything in a faculty meeting.
But this was when Professor/Provost Conner called a meeting to explain his rationale for recruiting Dean Hill. And it was the most amazing faculty meeting that I'd ever been to, where a provost is there defending himself when he hadn't done anything to violate a bylaw of the university. I mean, the bylaws are vaguely written that gave him all sorts of leeway.
But I was so surprised. He was the whipping boy at that meeting. I had never seen anything quite like it. And my response to it was, to start off-- and I'm sure that there are people who thought that my views were short-sighted-- but I started off by observing, because he said he tried to do something laudable, and I said, you did do something laudable. And you got boxed on both cheeks for it.
And I said, he did something bold. And for 23 years, I've been listening to this conversation, and we haven't gotten past square one. And now, you've done something and you're in trouble for it. And process and merit and all sorts of things become excuses not to do anything.
And so the conversation now is a lot harder than it could have been in the '70s or the '60s, and a lot more complicated. And the people, then, who make the excuses are people that surprise me and people that I thought I understood better. And so I don't know how Washington and Lee gets out of the situation that it's in. I don't know where it goes.
I gather that Will Dudley is completely committed to diversity, maybe in a way that former presidents have not been. I don't know. I don't want to put words into his mouth because I've not had this conversation with him. But if that is part of his agenda, then all I can say is godspeed to him.
Because unless he is going to really put some muscle into it and act boldly, it ain't going to happen. And I have great respect for him and certainly hope he does well. I may not be around to see him doing well, but I certainly hope that he does well.
MAKAYLA LORICK: One in my last questions, I suppose, is could you maybe talk just for a little bit about your ideal W&L?
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: The ideal W&L. Hmm. Well, the ideal W&L seems to me to be a place where, as an alumnus, I would think that the alumni need to withdraw somewhat. I don't want to see them withdraw their financial support. But I want to see them at least trust the people who are running the place more than they sometimes seem to do.
I wish people would stop using the threat to stop giving as a means for the school not to change and evolve. All human institutions have to change and evolve. So I'd like to see the alumni sort of withdraw a little bit with regard to their criticisms but not with regard to their financial support. And I realize that most of them would say that was a really foolish thing to say, but so what? But you're asking for the ideal place.
I also think that in an ideal place, then, there have to be faculty members who are consistent in their views. As a member of the commission, when we talk to faculty about diversity, they wanted the university to do something bold. Some of those same faculty members were highly critical of the bold move of offering the job to Lena Hill, which really caught me off guard. So I think that faculty members need to think about what they are seeing and doing and the things that they also espouse.
I would hope that Washington and Lee would be able to sort through the things that are part of our mission and our values that are worthy of sustaining and the parts that are just merely traditional. They don't really mean a damn. And it seems to me that one of the things that I have marveled most about over the course of my life and affiliation with this place is its civility.
And it seems to me that civility was caught up, in part, by the speaking tradition. And the speaking tradition, even back in the '60s, when things were segregated, is much more alive than the speaking tradition is in the 21st century. And the idea that the Alumni House, or the Alumni Association, would put out T-shirts for freshmen that say "Speak" and have "Speak" on the back of the T-shirts rather than the front of the T-shirts, there's something wrong with that concept.
[LAUGHTER]
When "Speak" is on the back, it doesn't really mean as much. But the idea that you are civil enough to speak to people-- when I see students who are in my class, and they find ways of diverting their eyes rather than speak to me when I pass. And I think I'm not sure that, at 18 years old, that would be what I would be doing. I would be so interested in knowing whether he noticed and acknowledged me as a human being.
I've had students to tell me that other students oftentimes use their telephones as an excuse, whether they are actually texting or talking, not to speak to people. I don't know. I used to run after students-- not run after them, literally-- but I used to confront students on the colonnade-- young lady, I just spoke to you.
[INAUDIBLE] turn around and sheepishly say, good morning, Professor DeLaney. Once, Dean Keene, she gave the opening convocation-- and watch out for Professor DeLaney. If you don't speak to him on the colonnade, he's liable to challenge you on it.
Well, you kind of lose the energy for doing that. Because I'm usually a pretty congenial, low-key person. And then, you've got to get in a different mindset when you're stopping and confronting somebody because they didn't speak to you.
So if I want to speak in tradition now, I take a walk over on VMI's campus. Almost every cadet makes eye contact. Good afternoon, sir. And you think, gee, that used to happen at W&L. It doesn't happen at W&L. But they aren't allowed to have cell phones-- or not to be walking around campus using them.
And so I think that it seems like a petty tradition. It seems like a small town parochial tradition. But it seems to me that it's a tradition that highlighted civility and the fact that we are community and that we acknowledge each other as human beings, a tradition that's worth preserving.
The honor system-- I think that the idea that we're an honorable community and that we are people of honor is important. But the thing that bothers me, as somebody with a brain in his head, is that but what is the honor system? The only thing that it pertains to is lying, cheating, and stealing.
What about the women who get sexually assaulted on this campus on weekends? That's not honorable. What about the people who go to the liquor store and buy booze for underage people. Is that honorable?
And so are we somehow deluding ourselves when we have an honor system that basically assures the faculty that they're not cheating on his exam or that they are not lying to him or that they are not stealing each other's property-- a narrowly-tailored honor system? And then I hear students come back as alumni who are self-righteous about it and how W&L made them honorable people.
And it's like, did you ever go to church before you came to W&L? Did your parents, even if you didn't go to church, did your parents teach you any values before you came to W&L? What do you mean W&L made you an honorable person?
And then, did you ever put a young woman in a uncompromising position while you were at W&L or after you left? Or did you do other stuff that was not honorable? And I just hate to get in these alumni conversations about honor. And I think, they're plastic conversations. They don't mean a damn thing.
And so if we're going to preserve an honor system, let it be real honor and let it be honor that goes a lot further than lying, cheating, and stealing. Let it be honor with regard to how you treat other people or what you will go out of your way to protect with regard to other people's liberties.
I don't know. I'm sounding preachy, and I apologize for that. But an ideal W&L would be a W&L that does that. Do I think that social life at W&L is somehow a problem? Yeah, I do. I sent a kid to the College of William and Mary. There were many more social options on a campus on weekends than there are here-- or every day, for that matter.
It seems to me that you have a system where male social fraternities can have parties but female sororities can not. I mean, there are all kinds of double standards and all kinds of crazy junk that seem to be a part of our existence. And we never talk about those things.
And then there's the whole concept of institutional history and, particularly, institutional history where the lost cause is concerned. And as one of my colleagues observed not long ago, if our students wrote history papers that were like the institutional history that we get taught at W&L-- and I don't mean the institutional history I teach in my classes, but I mean the institutional history that gets sold to students as a bill of goods-- we would give that student an F.
If we were not able to look at Robert E. Lee from both his merits and his flaws-- and there seems to me that if you want the flaw, all you've got to do is to read President Robert E. Lee's 1866 testimony before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction where he says Virginia would be a better state if you could remove all the blacks. And then it's like, ah, what did he just say?
And is that the perfect ideal of the institutionally historic person that we need to emulate? Because even people in his era questioned racial injustice. And I know that. And I'm not painting the present onto the past when I say that.
So the ideal W&L comes to grips with its own story, its own traditions, and it also comes to grips, too-- well, what does the university look like? Does the university merit from diversity at all? And if Washington and Lee's education is such a good thing to have, do we want a much larger segment of the world to be able to experience that education as a student then presently does?
And do I want to see somebody, for instance, from Uganda come here and leave with a W&L degree? Do I really want to see, as I have seen, somebody from the inner city of Chicago come here and leave with a W&L degree? Do I really want to see the white kid from Idaho-- and I've had a few of them-- who leave here with a W&L degree? Yeah. That W&L degree, if we really think that it's worth it, we ought to be offering it to as many people as we possibly can. And that's an ideal university.
But I don't know what would make it ideal-- maybe a lot more money, so nobody had to pay to go. And God knows, I wonder if my grandchildren will be able to come to Washington and Lee. And I should not even presume to think that they might want to, growing up in California. But both of their parents are alumni, and their grandfather is. And so why not? So anyway. You're probably sick of me by now.
MAKAYLA LORICK: I'm not sick of you. I love talking to you. Do you have anything else that you want to record?
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: No. The only thing is that I find myself in a very, very unique situation right now. Because I told the dean last spring, last winter, that I would retire in April. And so this is the twilight of my W&L career.
And unfortunately, it might even be a greater twilight to my W&L career since I find myself with pancreatic cancer. So I don't know how much longer I will be at W&L. Because I don't know what my future holds.
But the one thing that I think that I really hope is that W&L continues to at least try to resolve some of the issues that we find, things that are problematic in this little community. And hopefully, under Will Dudley's leadership, we will. But we'll see.
So probably, my health has caused me to be a lot more introspective of where W&L is and what this particular year means for me. I'm really excited because I get to do one thing that is very, very special this fall. And that is that the president and the provost want me to give the opening speech at convocation.
And they want me to talk about coeducation and desegregation. Because these are the two chapters in the Brownell book that the freshman will read. And they also gave the caveat that I could talk about any other thing I wanted to. But I think that I'll probably stick pretty closely to coeducation and desegregation because those are things that are part of my institutional memory.
And even though I said I was not here when the first official female students arrived, I was here during the years that led up to it, and then I came back here to teach in the 1990s and saw the benefit of coeducation in the 1990s. And I have met a lot of great students, like you and Maggie Gray, who will graduate next spring.
And so I'm excited. And I'm excited that I get to give some observations about those two things at the opening convocation. And we will see where it goes from there.
But it's certainly been a good ride for me, even though my heart says to me that the kids at Geneseo and I probably were a better match for each other with regard to the fact that we both were from lower income backgrounds and that Washington and Lee students didn't really need me that much. The 23 years here has been a great ride, and it's been a lot of fun.
And the one thing that I'll give W&L students, you might not agree with all of them ideologically, but they are polite as hell. And they know how to charm you like crazy. And I even had to stop one student in seminar this year from, when he wanted to prove a point, pulling his Bible out every minute. You don't need to take your Bible out.
[LAUGHTER]
So. But anyway. And I'm not anti-religious, but anyway. It's a unique place to be.
MAKAYLA LORICK: Yeah.
THEODORE CARTER DELANEY: So thank you.
MAKAYLA LORICK: Thank you so much.
Duration
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1:43
Dublin Core
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Title
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Oral History: Theodore DeLaney Jr. Pt 2
Description
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Listen to an account of Ted DeLaney's life during his decision to leave W&L and become a faculty member at SUNY Geneseo and the return to his alma mater.
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2018-07-06
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mp3
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en_US
-
https://blackgeneral.omeka.wlu.edu/files/original/ecc5a6eb6d6def691eeea8a962c533ae.jpg
fd3f0d428bb2e9b37ecb6e6952d72591
Dublin Core
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Title
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The Faces of Black Generals
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Black Students, Faculty, and Staff at Washington and Lee.
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University Photographer
Text
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Photograph
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Title
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Photo: Reginald Yancey
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Reginald Yancey, former accounting professor at Washington and Lee.
Description
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Reginald Yancey became the first black faculty member at Washington and Lee in 1977. This photograph is of Yancey and his Accounting Department colleagues.
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Calyx Yearbook, 1980
Date
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1980
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PDF
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en_US
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Parker Roberts and Ken Robson, Calyx Photography Editors
-
https://blackgeneral.omeka.wlu.edu/files/original/026ab889d38817d7edae8c56fd5721f8.jpg
12a43d6d391ecd39930aeca68867b352
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Title
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The Faces of Black Generals
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Black Students, Faculty, and Staff at Washington and Lee.
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University Photographer
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Student Association for Black Unity.
Seated L to R: Alex Yancey, Greg Coy, and Todd Howe
Standing L to R: Greg Kendrick, Wesley Payne, Ira Puryear, Ron Wilhelmsen, Michael Early, Wayne Johnson, Bill Rhinehart, Bryan Johnson and Kim Brunson.
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Title
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Photo: SABU 1983
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The Student Association for Black Unity (SABU)
Description
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SABU poses for the 1983 Calyx Yearbook Photo.
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Patrick Hinely
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1983 Calyx
Date
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1983
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PDF
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en_US
-
https://blackgeneral.omeka.wlu.edu/files/original/ee32cd352d885390e45a9a7f6ddb54f8.pdf
c567aa9564e47b4eb8a656f4d9480cfa
Text
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Original Format
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Newspaper Article
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Title
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Article: "SABU increases black social life on campus"
Subject
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The Student Association for Black Unity (SABU)
Description
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Leaders from the executive board of SABU work to increase social life of black students and awareness around black student life at Washington and Lee.
Creator
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Ned McDonnell
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Ring-tum Phi
Date
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1977-09-03
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PDF
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en_US
-
https://blackgeneral.omeka.wlu.edu/files/original/9a38769efa335faec7901f3ce254bcd6.pdf
8da22dc9a8fbed3b67afd40ce5ba11c1
https://blackgeneral.omeka.wlu.edu/files/original/5dd04b414f91002eb894017cbc876ba7.pdf
c35d50e4d50cef93c34a1194ca57cca5
Text
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Newspaper article
Dublin Core
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Title
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Article: "SABU's 1983 Black Ball Grand Success"
Subject
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SABU Black Ball
Description
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The Student Association for Black Unity hosts one of its most successful Black Ball's. With a gathering of students and community members, combined with the assistance and security for the event, the success is evident in the numbers drawn to the dance.
Creator
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Greg Coy
Source
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Ring-tum Phi
Date
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1983-03-24
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Format
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PDF
Language
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en_US
Type
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Newspaper Article