My previous life as a 'radical'
This week's column (expanded from an earlier post).
The Black Student Movement at UNC-Chapel Hill is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.
That makes me feel both a sense of pride and old age because not only am I a UNC alum, but I'm also a former head of BSM.
I hadn't yet arrived in Chapel Hill when BSM was founded in 1967, but I did come along only a few years later.
I never expected to be in that position. I'm shy by nature and have always found public speaking a tortuous proposition.
What's more, you could be kicked out of school. A previous BSM head, Algernon Marbley, was taken before the university's Honor Court for leading a protest during which BSM members shouted down an attempted speech by KKK leader David Duke during my freshman year in 1974.
Marbley ultimately wasn't expelled, but the whole saga made headlines around the nation.
Four years later, there I was, a graduate student in journalism and BSM chairman (that's what they called it back in those days; today it's president).
I'd like to say we were as active on real-world issues as previous BSMs. (Our predecessors had supported a cafeteria workers strike.)
By and large we weren't.
Still, I led my share of student protests, and we made sure to do our homework before taking to the pavement.
Some people considered the organization separatist, but that was far from the case. In fact, during the time I was chairman one of the organization's officers was a white student. After all, an affirmation of black culture wasn't a put-down of anyone else's.
Plus, if not for BSM, I'd never have met a number of people, many of them white.
I got to know Jim Phillips, then student body president, now chairman of the UNC Board of Governors.
I also got to know then-Chancellor N. Ferebee Taylor and I'd like to think we built mutual respect for one another.
I recall a meeting we had with Chancellor Taylor over very serious allegations a former admissions director, Hayden Renwick, had made that the university was turning away qualified black students, some of whom were getting into Ivy League institutions.
We sat around a thick wooden conference table in the chancellor's office suite in South Building. Chancellor Taylor served us Cokes and regaled us with a couple of folksy stories. Then he motioned for his secretary to hand out neatly stapled documents containing yearly admissions statistics.
I believe he had underestimated us and expected to politely show us the facts and then show us the door.
But we had our own plan. I motioned to our secretary to do the same. In preparation, we'd asked the admissions people to provide the same numbers.
The chancellor's numbers and ours didn't match. We wondered how that could be, since the numbers presumably came from the same place. And I suggested that we call in Dean Renwick to help clarify the discrepancies.
Chancellor Taylor declined.
The university never fully reconciled those admissions "mistakes." But black enrollment significantly rose in subsequent years.
Without BSM I wouldn't have met the late Cole Campbell, then The Daily Tar Heel editor, who went on to become a News & Record colleague. Cole occasionally would visit BSM's Carolina Union offices with his baby daughter in tow.
And years later I got to know a poor white guy named Alan Johnson, who attended UNC with me (I didn't know him back then) and who got occasional calls meant for me. Alan and his wife, Beverly, are my neighbors today (what are the odds?).
My affiliation with BSM led to some funny moments as well. As part of my initiation into a campus honor society some guys in hoods (as was the tradition) came to my room at the Wesley Foundation and solemnly asked the whereabouts of Allen Johnson. "Who wants to know?" my protective (and nervous) white suitemates asked.
I appreciated them not giving me up so easily.
Comments (1)
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One can certainly understand your nostalgia Allen,
for those days when you actually fought the status quo.
We feel for you, bud.
Posted on December 10, 2007 10:34 AM