[Editor’s note: Part 2 of a 4-part series addressing the integration and history of blacks at the university]
They were ready to do it — ready to burn down buildings if they had to.
The university officially integrated in 1950, but it hadn’t really. You could go days without seeing a black student on the campus. The administration wasn’t doing much to fix things. And then there was that house on Fraternity Row adorned with a giant Confederate flag, just rubbing it in.
University President Wilson Elkins would listen, and he’d explain why these things take time, but what kinds of changes were being made? It was 1969 — years after the Civil Rights Act. The Brown v. Board of Education ruling that officially desegregated public schools was just a memory. The university’s black students didn’t have “time.”
Behind Black Student Union leaders like Hayward “Woody” Farrar, black students marched into Board of Regents meetings or the administration building clutching a list of demands. Dressed nicely, he’d tell them in a soft, calm voice that changes were necessary.
And if the changes weren’t made, well, they’d have to burn the place down.
“We had a good number of students who were quite frankly willing to get kicked out of school, if not die, for the cause,” recalls Farrar, 55, now an associate history professor at Virginia Tech.
They challenged everything — from racist home economics programs to WMUC’s hiring policies to off-campus housing issues, shaking up the university as the Vietnam War crisis mounted.
They were persistent, and by the time they graduated they’d made a mark on the university.
STUDENTS BEGIN TO UNITE
One of the first instances of black and white students banding together was in 1954, when a black student went to lunch with three white students and was turned away.
Using a half-page, Diamondback editors wrote the most honest assessment of the campus climate to appear before the mid-1960s:
“On campus, all is as it should be. If prejudice is present to a great degree it has yet to show itself. But in College Park, where the business firms operate, the scene changes somewhat.
“Some businessmen — and we hope they are few and far between — treat Maryland’s Negro students as if they were not yet members of the human race.
“Perhaps all of us are somewhat prejudiced. We can’t help that, and frankly, don’t try to. We grant a little prejudice to all, but somewhere within us there must be a spark of common decency and justice. When a fellow student, regardless of his color, is turned away from purchasing a meal, there should be something done about it to convince the establishment that the person has as much right to eat as all of us.”
Protests began in fall of 1960, according to university historian and history professor emeritus George Callcott, when black and white students boycotted a bowling alley where Lupo’s Italian Chophouse now sits. The act of blacks and whites picketing together made an impact, Callcott said, and students began protesting neighborhood restaurants and facilities. It was well after Rosa Parks, but it was only a start in the area.
With the Civil Rights Act in Congress in 1963, Diamondback Editor R. Stewart Baird not only endorsed it but provided students with a petition to show their support for its “swift passage.” Coverage spread to black issues throughout the state. Writers Jim Spears and Dick Shafer wrote an on-the-scene account of major sit-ins, lie-downs and violent demonstrations at the Princess Anne campus (now the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore), complete with a two-page spread and color photos.
And in 1966, the university hosted a historic sporting event at which the first all-black starting lineup in college basketball history — Texas Western College — defeated an all-white University of Kentucky team for the national championship in Cole Field House.
Still, the university’s black enrollment was dangerously low. The university did not keep track of minority enrollment until 1970, though black students were “barely more than a rumor” at the time, The Diamondback would later write. “If you came across another black person on campus, you’d be like, ‘Hey!’ and start chatting with them,” said William Sedlacek, 66, a white faculty champion for black students during the period who is now assistant director of the Counseling Center.
From black students’ point of view, the university was not the place to be. Even Bill Cosby knew about its reputation.
Interviewed by The Diamondback before an on-campus show in 1969, the comedian detailed how he “rescued” his future wife from the university.
“Camille, my wife, used to go here. She went to Maryland when it wasn’t too cool to go here,” he said. “They give you a lot of bulls— around here.”
A PRESIDENT UNPREPARED
Overseeing the university during this turbulent period was a quiet man from Texas, raised during segregation and educated in Europe, who had never done a radical thing in his life.
Wilson H. Elkins, a short, bespectacled man known as “Bull” in his college football days, took the university’s helm upon the departure of Harry “Curley” Byrd, another ex-football player who had fought attempts to integrate the university for 20 years. He left the university on the eve of Brown v. Board of Education with a championship football team but crumbling academics that threatened to have the school’s accreditation withdrawn.
That put the responsibility to integrate — and simultaneously prop up the university’s academic standing — in the hands of Elkins, an experienced educator and Rhodes scholar; a man who called black people “Negrahs” in his Southern drawl and who was deeply troubled by the student “radicalism.”
“He was a guy who wasn’t really prepared either mentally or through experience to deal with the sort of disruption that came up,” said Sedlacek, whose office in Shoemaker Hall was formerly the president’s office and where Thurgood Marshall once confronted Byrd about admitting a black student into the university’s law school.
“I would not by popular definition call [Elkins] a racist, but he did not understand the structural problems of the university. His view was that bringing in folks that were less qualified would destroy the university.”
Elkins had felt the rumblings of the Civil Rights movement, but the discontent was about to boil over.
SHAKEN OUT OF APATHY
At 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn.
As news spread, students black and white had a spontaneous but peaceful rally of 700 on the steps of the Administration building. Classes were canceled, and violence swept the nation as civil rights supporters struggled to understand.
Students held vigils and several hundred marched up Elkins’ driveway, demanding classes be canceled that Tuesday — the day of King’s funeral — as arson, looting and violence surged in Baltimore and Washington, resulting in mass destruction and the arrests of thousands. The university’s tennis team even had to cancel a trip to South Carolina because of the racial tension. The Diamondback extended its number of pages to 28 to include as many Associated Press stories from across the nation as possible.
R. Lee Hornbake, the vice president for academic affairs, however, saw disingenuous motives in the student protests. Calling them “disrespectful,” he said, “I think the spirit is not reverence to Dr. King … but a completely selfish expression.”
Regardless, black university students saw an opportunity to assemble and initiate change. There had been a black student group on the campus in the early 1960s — the Congress for Racial Equality — but it was seen as too militant and too radical by administrators and had its charter revoked.
“CORE [was] aggressive, tough-talking, and they were expelled from the campus for being too militant,” Callcott said.
But in May 1968, the group returned, albeit under a different name — the Black Student Union.
It organized, electing a president — Early Wynn — and voicing its opinions on various black issues out of a “broom closet” office in Cole Field House, Farrar said. Sedlacek, a white faculty member recently out of grad school, assumed an unofficial adviser role. The group wasn’t strong in numbers but it was effective at getting the school paper to pay attention and thus reach a wider audience.
“There was a growing awareness that the racial issues were underrecognized on the campus and we certainly made a conscious effort to shed more light on it” said former managing editor Jim Day, 61, a former (Baltimore) Sun news editor who now lives in Severna Park.
Elkins agreed to meet with the group. The meetings were strange, Sedlacek recalls, with the radical black students demanding immediate change from a mystified white-haired administration. “Black students didn’t want to hear ‘We’ll think about it’ … The student movement was that the students wanted to change now, while they were here,” he said.
‘99 PERCENT WHITE’
While the group gained steam, the federal government came out with a scathing report that showed the university had a racial imbalance and was “99 percent white.” The Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services) placed the entire state under a desegregation mandate, which remains in place today.
Shortly after the report, the university hired two black workers an admissions officer and an assistant to the director of admissions — and Elkins set up a University Senate committee to investigate diversity issues. The BSU wasn’t satisfied. It was gaining prominence on the campus and had the ear of The Diamondback. Threats — although perhaps empty — became increasingly common.
One incident occurred during Elkins’ annual convocation — which was similar to the current State of the Campus address, but attended by 7,000 students — where the president spoke about the role of the university and its direction. First interrupted by a student group playing kazoos, Elkins was later confronted by 20 BSU members who charged the floor and demanded he grant a list of guarantees.
Elkins asked those who wanted him to continue to stand. Nearly all did, and the BSU was escorted out by police, followed by 130 other students, The (Baltimore) Sun reported, and some thought the police were too aggressive.
“This is the last time I will ever see one of my women get smacked to the ground by a honky,” one member told The Diamondback at the time. “We went in there peacefully, and they showed us violence, so we’re going to show them violence.”
“We weren’t intimidated. We didn’t feel we didn’t belong,” recalled Farrar, the second elected president of the BSU. “We felt we did belong, and had every single right and privilege [the white students had], and we determined we’d do whatever was necessary to get those rights and privileges, and for the most part, we did.”
Farrar said his demeanor played a role in negotiations.
“Since I talked like a college professor, it kind of made for smooth negotiations” he said. “If I had been a militant with a dashiki and a gun in my hands, they wouldn’t have known what to do.”
By the time he graduated in 1971, black students had played a hand in the formation of an African-American studies program, increased hiring and enrollment of black students and faculty, created a black newspaper (the Black Explosion) and established student government funding for the Black Student Union.
“Every time I go back, I think I’m at a black college, full of black students, faculty and staff,” said Farrar, who still has season tickets to the Terrapin football games and hopes to someday return to the university.
“And I don’t want to sound conceited, but me and my friends put them there. We laid the groundwork — laid the foundation — for everything.”
Tomorrow: The tragic death of a basketball star rocks the term of the university’s first black president, and the university fights to maintain a race-based scholarship program.
