Columns:: Worth repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::November 17, 2003

Worth repeating

Last week the university marked the 50th anniversary of a series of editorials in the Red & Black in support of racial integration at UGA. The four editors--Walter Lundy, Bill Shipp, Priscilla Arnold Davis and Gene Britton--eventually resigned rather than submit to editorial control imposed by the board of regents. They returned to campus to discuss the conflict. One of the interviewers asked what had led them to take their courageous stand. Some excerpts from their responses:
Shipp: “I think naiveté had a lot to do with it.”
Lundy: “Yes . . . and student mischief. . . . But we did believe deeply in the stand we took.”
Davis: “I think we thought we had the right to say what we thought. And in my mind I knew that it was our generation that was going to have to do something to solve this segregation of the races, because it was not working and it wasn’t ever going to work and it was quite clear that our parents’ generation wasn’t going to get the job done. . . .”
Shipp: “One thing I think we all ought to be cognizant of. The Red & Black thought of itself as a crusading newspaper. We had attacked the city government, we had suggested the city government was corrupt because of the red-light district right down the street, we had suggested the university administration was guilty of malfeasance, misfeasance and nonfeasance for their failure to keep up veterans’ housing--and no one really responded with great anger. So why not say: Why not integrate the law school? . . .”
Britton: “All the talk about ‘separate but equal’ could only be a fiction. There was nothing equal about it. And it seemed to me even as a high school student there was something wrong with this picture. I don’t know why or how exactly that I became so passionate about that. . . .”

--Cat Holmes

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