September 2003: Vol. 82, No. 4

Pioneer of Integration

With George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door in opposition, Alabama was the last of the Southern state universities to be integrated. Forty years later, UGA vice president for public service and outreach Art Dunning was among those honored for desegregating the University of Alabama

by Sharron Hannon

Dunning entered the University of Alabama in June 1966 and remembers weeks passing before he saw another African-American student on campus.

n the summer of 1963, Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes—the first African-American students to enroll at UGA—had just received their degrees. But in neighboring Alabama, the battle to integrate that state's flagship institution was still raging. To fulfill a campaign pledge to block court-ordered desegregation of public schools, Gov. George Wallace traveled to Tuscaloosa to "stand in the schoolhouse door" to try to keep Vivian Malone and James Hood from enrolling.

Forty years later, the University of Alabama organized an "Opening Doors" commemoration of the school's desegregation. To mark the occasion, 40 "Pioneers of Integration" were honored, including Art Dunning, UGA's vice president for public service and outreach, who was among the first African-American students at the University of Alabama. Recently, Dunning talked about those troubled times and the lessons they hold today.

Q: You were in junior high when Autherine Lucy made the first attempt to integrate the University of Alabama. Was there much discussion in your home about it?
DUNNING: Only vaguely. I remember my father talking about the Montgomery bus boycott in 1954 and then Lucy in 1956. One of the things about families such as mine—they did an unusually good job of sheltering young people from what I call the "hard edge of human existence" around color and exclusionary practices. So it was not something that was much discussed. It was discussed a lot with adults, but there was always an attempt to shelter us.

Q: When Gov. Wallace was making his "stand in the schoolhouse door," you had just graduated from high school? DUNNING: I was in the Air Force in Taiwan. I saws photos in Time magazine of U.S. marshals escorting Vivian Malone across campus.

Q: Why had you decided to go into the Air Force?
DUNNING: I grew up in a family with a very deep sense of place about land and family. They also had high expectations about learning. It was in an area where people didn't travel much, but I was interested in seeing other people, other things and—against my father's wishes—I chose not to go directly from high school to college. So I was in East Asia when I saw the University of Alabama in the news because of Wallace's stand in the schoolhouse door. The juxtaposition of what I was there to do versus what was happening in my home state was extraordinary. The Cold War was raging and our task was to respond to any discord in that part of the world, and yet in my home state citizens like me were being denied something basic—to attend an institution that should have been open to all citizens.

Q: Why did you decide to attend the University of Alabama?
DUNNING: When I was out of the country, I had a chance to think deeply about the U.S. and the South. I saw my home in a different light and I felt passionate about being included in every aspect of life with other citizens. I thought I should have the right to attend the University of Alabama.

Q: What was your parents' reaction to that decision?
DUNNING: Deep concern for my safety. I think they understood that I was very well grounded and had a deep sense of self, but they worried about physical safety—because this was in the mid-Sixties and just a few years before, young girls were killed in Birmingham and there were beatings in Selma.

Q: You arrived at Alabama just after Vivian Malone graduated. How many African-American students were on campus then?
DUNNING: Eight or nine. It was three or four weeks before I saw another black student. So it was an odd experience.

Q: Was there any way to find other African American students?
DUNNING: No. I was just attending classes and staying busy with academic work and after awhile I ran into another student.

Q: In newspaper accounts, the dean of men and others were portrayed as working hard with the student body in '63 to keep a lid on things—out of concern about not further damaging the university's reputation. Does that gibe with your experience?
DUNNING: It was my sense that thoughtful people understood that change would occur and that it was important that we not have loss of life. I think the university did a good job, given the times, to prepare the campus for that transition. In hindsight, it's clear that a system that excludes citizens from higher education is not something that can be sustained forever. I think many people arrived at a point where they said this is not a defensible stance—to use laws, policies, customs, and practices to exclude state citizens.

Q: You have said that you felt isolated when you were at the University of Alabama, but did you also face outright hostility?
DUNNING: Absolutely. On occasion someone felt compelled to get off the sidewalk when you walked by or—when you sat down in class or in the dining hall—to get up and move as far away from you as possible. Or you'd hear a racial slur yelled out a window or find something written on a residence hall door. But it wasn't confrontational, it was more covert. Since I had lived outside the country and was just a little older than some of the other undergraduates, I had a pretty keen sense that this was a major transformation for everybody and some would handle it well and some would not.

Two years after UGA marked the 40th anniversary of desegregation, the University of Alabama honored its pioneering black students.

Q: Were you able to participate in student activities on campus?
DUNNING: I was not. At the time, the handful of us on campus would spend our weekends at Stillman, a small historically black liberal arts college across town, because there were no options and choices on campus to participate in activities. We decided we needed to do something to create an opportunity for students coming after us to feel engaged with the university. So we had a number of meetings with members of the administration—on occasion, even the president—to talk about the need to start an association or a group of students to address these concerns.

Q: I heard rumors about you going out for football at Alabama.
DUNNING: In the spring of '67, there was a lot of pressure to integrate the football team. One of the coaches had said they weren't able to find any students who were interested. Five of us heard that and decided to go out for spring practice. It was on national television and we were all interviewed. The senior quarterback at the time was Kenny Stabler. The person with whom I worked was a graduate assistant named Jackie Sherrill, now the head coach at Mississippi State. So we went through that process, and we laugh when we talk about it now, because of the five of us who did that, only two should have been out there. After a few days, the other three of us said, "Look, there are other ways we can contribute to this transition."

But the thing I remember about all that is the intensity of the feeling about participation in every venue of the university. It's hard to understand in 2003 how closed the system was. It's not easy to understand the feeling and passion on both sides of the issue. But if you think about four places—Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery—that's the cradle of civil rights. Each one had an intense drama played out there. In Selma, you had the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Tuscaloosa the integration with the governor standing in the doorway, in Birmingham the bombings where the young girls were killed, in Montgomery the bus boycott. These were all signal events. So as young students we were right in the midst of that.

Q: It must have been an emotional experience to return to the University of Alabama for the 40th anniversary event.
DUNNING: Very much so. For one thing, my wife and I met there. She was one of the other students at the university in 1966. I felt an unusual amount of pride in what the University of Alabama has come to mean to me professionally and personally. On the other hand, I couldn't help thinking about how much energy we have used in this region of the country with certain practices, policies, and laws that did not enhance the intellectual growth and well-being of all citizens—and how damaging that is to society.

Q: Looking back, would you have done anything differently?
DUNNING: I would have worked harder to lower the volume of conversation. One thing that was so much a part of the Sixties was intense rhetoric, and I was never comfortable with that. I was always more comfortable using logic and reason. I would work harder to recast issues in ways people could think about them differently. The issue of race can be so polarizing, but we're in this together. If you want a state to flourish, you need to educate more people. That's hard to debate if you're honest and fair.

Heir to the legacy

Reginald McKnight is both a top-notch writer and a worthy recipient of the new Hamilton Holmes Professorship

by Alex Crevar

eginald McKnight's students call him Colonel. It's not that he ever held that rank. Nor does he bend toward delusional egoism. He just likes the sound of it—or, more accurately, he doesn't like the sound of professor or doctor.

"My request that they call me Colonel was entirely ironic," says McKnight, who is the University's first Hamilton Holmes Professor, a new chair that honors the legacy of one of the first two African-Americans to integrate UGA in 1961. "It's an allusion to an erstwhile popular perception that many mature Southern gentlemen were called Colonel, whether or not they'd actually served in the military. The fact is though, I'd rather students call me Colonel. I've never been comfortable with formal academic titles. They make you sound like you should be leading an orchestra or something."

McKnight is not the English instructor who forced you to diagram sentences. When this acclaimed author and winner of the Pushcart Prize jokes with his class, which is often, his eyes squint with glee and he is genuinely in on the joke. His presence is relaxed, avuncular. He loves jazz and wears T-shirts with the sleeves rolled to the rounded spot where his protruding shoulder muscles meet the tops of his arms.

Today, McKnight—in a Homer Simpson tee—leads an undergraduate creative writing workshop. He asks a student to read her story aloud and afterwards asks for reactions from the other students sitting around a table that takes up much of the Park Hall room. Silence. In this bloated moment, the intensity that grips a writing workshop (especially one for young writers) is palpable. Nerves teeter on edge, eye contact is avoided, and the ego of the reader, whose creative guts lie strewn across the table, hangs in the balance. "I like this very much," says McKnight relieving the tension. "You involved all the senses . . . that's hard to do." Others begin to speak of the story's strengths and weaknesses.

"It's easy to teach writers to write, but nearly impossible to teach those who can't," says McKnight, who also teaches African literature. Among his favorite classes are "White Writers, Black Characters" and "Cross-Racial Literature" because they force students to step outside their comfort zones. "As the teacher, you're always tempted to just write the story for the student but you can't because every story is a road of discovery—there's a kind of spiritual element to all mediums of art. Besides, this is not a trade school and we're not here to put out crafts people. We're in the business of creating better readers—whether that be of literary stories, news broadcasts, or political debates."

That modern students, whose minds are often trapped in a labyrinth of GREs, LSATs, MCATs, and future dollar signs, can shed grade-point pressures in pursuit of humanistic and artistic deliberation is a tribute to McKnight. It is also precisely why UGA lured the author of two novels, three short story collections, and two edited volumes from the University of Michigan to fill the newly created academic chair that is so representative of the University's dedication to diversity and openness.

"[McKnight] allows us to think for ourselves," says Melissa Golden, a second-year international affairs major from Atlanta. "And because of that, you don't kill yourself to meet the highest expectations. He just makes you want to get there for yourself."

fter Hamilton Holmes integrated the University of Georgia, earning both a Phi Beta Kappa key and a bachelor of science degree cum laude, he went on to integrate Emory's medical school and later served as its associate dean. For the entirety of his life, until his death in 1995, Holmes placed a high priority on scholarship.

According to Holmes's widow Marilyn, the University's decision to pay homage to her husband with an academic chair was both appropriate and touching: "It shows a lot about where [UGA] has come and the effort each successive president has shown to enhance my husband's legacy. He believed that lifelong, well-rounded learning was an important part of any life." Marilyn says that the candidate (there were 13) chosen for the professorship needed to have a broad view of society—not just an African-American view.

"Part of the search committee's mission was to find someone who could conduct independent research and be an integral part of the flagship institution. I think with regard to these requirements, my husband would have been pleased with Mr. McKnight."

There's no shortage of McKnight fans both on and away from Georgia's campus. Dean Wyatt Anderson of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences says "[McKnight] is an articulate, personable, and compelling figure—a widely known African-American novelist whose reputation and work are proving a major boon to the creative writing program." When McKnight was recruited to UGA, seven letters followed from other nationally respected writers, including novelist Frederick Busch and Ethelbert Miller, director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University. Busch, the Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University, called McKnight "One of our most important writers." Miller noted that McKnight is ". . . quietly producing excellent fiction without the fanfare that too often turns writers into celebrities."

For McKnight, the Holmes appointment is significant for both historical and personal reasons. "As a kid, I marveled at the courage of pioneers like Holmes and Hunter-Gault," says McKnight. "Holding this chair is like rubbing elbows with the greats."

cKnight has a pleasant, malleable warmth that is often characteristic of service brats. By the time he was 16, he'd attended 15 schools, mostly in the Western U.S. and around the Air Force bases where his father was stationed. But he was also schooled in the Deep South, where he attended one segregated school and others that he and his three siblings integrated. He grew up riding the country's evolving social cusp, on which Americans were challenged to question centuries of accepted sensibilities. These subjects continually appear in McKnight's award-winning stories though he insists he is not a literary change agent.

"America has made blacks the spokespeople for race—but that's not my role," he says. "When I write, I am typically writing to one person, be it my mother or someone else. I use a bow and arrow rather than a shotgun approach when identifying my audience. I've lived a very peripatetic life. I have gained a lot of friends and lost quite a few, and sometimes it feels like my writing is simply a message in a bottle and the hope that those friends get it."

But in both of his novels, I Get on the Bus and He Sleeps, McKnight's main characters struggle with racial identity. In short stories like "The White Boys," race relations drive important themes and there can be little doubt that some story scenes are autobiographical, as when a main character is surrounded by three white boys at his new school in Louisiana. In McKnight's real life, three boys surrounded him at his new, all-black school. "The kids asked me if my mama or daddy were white," McKnight remembers. "When I said no, they asked, 'then why do you walk and talk so funny?' That's the first time I really thought about race. I remember on the way home that day I asked my uncle if there were also all-white schools and he said, 'Sure, there's white schools . . . and brick schools and yellow schools.'"

Aside from that lone exception, McKnight's parents enrolled their children with mixed populations though they could have chosen to enroll them in ones that were all-black, which might have been socially more comfortable. "They just thought our worlds would be too small and unrealistic," says McKnight.

McKnight started writing when he was eight and found that it was the only thing he could do well consistently. "I'd read something and then write a response." He was also an avid reader—a necessity for entertainment and companionship when one changes schools every year His final years of high school were spent in Colorado Springs where, "I completed many of my rites of passage." He received his bachelor's degree from The Colorado College and during his senior year was awarded a fellowship to travel to and research African literature. Almost immediately upon arrival in Africa he contracted cerebral malaria, the world's number-one killer. He recovered, but the illness limited his travel to Dakar, Senegal, where he taught English at the American Cultural Center and wrote for as many as 16 hours per day for 14 months.

"In Africa, I became a writer," says McKnight. "Because of the isolation I had to write and work at my art. There has to be a time in your apprenticeship when you are utterly devoted." That devotion has borne fruit with some of the most prestigious awards in the field: Addison M. Metcalf Award (American Academy of Arts and Letters), Pushcart Prize, multiple Kenyon Review Awards for Literary Excellence, National Endowment of the Arts grant, O'Henry Award, and Special Citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation.

hen class ends, McKnight stands in the hallway to talk to any student who needs a moment of his time. Nobody leaves. They gather around him more like a big leaguer who has come up to the stands to sign baseballs than an English teacher. When alone, McKnight steals away to smoke a pipe and then returns to his office with the students' stories, which he'll read over and over and then write a page or more per story to describe his thoughts about the work. "It's not like math," he says, "where you can stick the test in a computer and it spits out the grade."

Asked about his next book, McKnight will only say (for fear of losing steam with too much talk) that it will be set in the 1940s, different from his past work. On the subject of where he thinks he is as a writer, he replies, "I get better book after book. I still haven't reached my potential—but I think talent is finite. I think I have about five books left in me. After that I'm going to do like Artie Shaw and turn my clarinet into a lamp."

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