From the Fall 2018 issue of EHS Magazine
The Past
“WE’RE JUST LIKE ANYONE ELSE”
1968 is remembered as a pivotal year in American history, a year that saw the eruption of a tumultuous string of events that had been brewing since the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement. While the nation wrestled with one of the most transformational years in its history, Episcopal High School opened to its first African American students.
Those roommates were friends and cross-country teammates David Hatcher ’84 and David Forsythe ’85. As a new sophomore, Hatcher was paired initially with another Black classmate. The two didn’t get along, and Hatcher remembers visiting then-Headmaster Sandy Ainslie ’56 – widely regarded as integral to advancing integration at Episcopal – to request a room change. According to Hatcher, Ainslie met him with open ears to explore why the two Black boys weren’t compatible. Hatcher asked Ainslie to think about all the times that his own sons, with so much in common, didn’t get along. Ultimately, with Ainslie’s understanding and approval, Hatcher moved into a single room for the rest of that year and the year that followed, before joining Forsythe, a junior, in a double his senior year.
“I think there was a lack of understanding of the fact that we’re just like anyone else,” Hatcher says. “There are people we like and people we don’t like, and if you think we’re more comfortable being with ‘our own,’ that’s not necessarily true.”
A RESOLUTION IS PASSED
By the time Episcopal’s first two African-American students – Regi Burns ’72 and Sam Paschall ’72 – joined the community in the fall of 1968, integration was largely embraced as a moral imperative by the School’s leadership and faculty.
Nearly three years prior, on December 4, 1965, the Board of Trustees had unanimously passed a resolution that declared: “Any and all applicants for admission shall be considered on an equal basis after giving due regard to their scholastic preparedness and their ability and desire to meet the standards of the school.”
This resolution was passed amidst a year that saw the assassination of Malcolm X in New York City; the march from Selma to Montgomery; the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and the deadly Los Angeles Watts riots.
THE SCHOOL ADMITS ITS FIRST TWO AFRICAN-AMERICAN BOYS
Resolution turned reality, thanks in great part to the Anne C. Stouffer Foundation. The Stouffer Foundation was established in 1967 by Reynolds Tobacco heiress Anne Forsyth, to promote integration of independent Southern schools. In an interview published in the December 1970 issue of Ebony Magazine, Forsyth said, “I remember remarking to a friend that it seemed as though the only thing in this country not yet integrated was the Southern, white prep schools and that I’d sure like to take a crack at it.” At the time of the interview, the Stouffer Foundation had awarded more than $1 million in scholarship money to more than 140 African- American students.
Among the first beneficiaries of the Stouffer Foundation were Burns and Paschall, who were awarded scholarships based on their academic merit. In a letter to the Board dated March 5, 1968, then-Headmaster A.R. (Flick) Hoxton, Jr. ’35 shared the news that two African- American boys would join the School’s ranks that fall. “By accepting these boys, I think we will better fulfill our role of serving the country, the South, and ultimately the boys both white and black, who will attend EHS,” he wrote. “I pray that the move will be a success.”
As Episcopal looked toward its first year of integration, the nation was reeling from the events that had been transpiring over the course of what is now considered one of the most consequential years in modern American history.
“America was kind of exploding at the same time,” says Tony Chase ’73.
1968 brought the Orangeburg Massacre at South Carolina State University; the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1968; the murder of presidential hopeful and civil rights advocate Robert Kennedy; mounting opposition to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, including riots at Chicago’s Democratic National Convention; and protest at the Summer Olympic Games.
THE YEAR THAT CHANGED THE NATION...AND EPISCOPAL
“I remember as a freshman I had the poster of John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising their black-gloved fists at the ’68 Olympics,” Chase says.
And, of course, 1968 brought the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which ignited riots in more than 100 cities around the world.
“I remember those few days, watching D.C. burn, being restricted to campus for at least one weekend,” wrote Walker Moore ’68, in correspondence with classmates in March 2018, as the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination loomed. “One of the few memories that the whole class will have.”
In a letter to the editor of The Chronicle, signed by ten students and faculty and published on April 27, 1968, the authors condemned a group of students whose muffled cheers and laughter were detected upon the news of King’s assassination. “The policies and methods of Dr. King may not have met with approval on all sides, but we were disappointed by the reaction of a small part of the student body to the announcement of his assassination and the complacency with which that reaction was greeted,” they wrote. “The school has only just begun on the path to integration, and unless we are ready to learn and benefit from the experience, we shall not reach our goal. Fear, ignorance, and prejudice can have no place in a school dedicated to the ideals of Christian love and honorable behavior.”
In that same issue of The Chronicle, Hoxton formally informed the student body of the acceptance and imminent arrival of the School’s first two African-American boys. “When the Faculty Admissions Committee decided to accept two Negro boys next year, I felt strongly that we must shun newspaper publicity, because they should be permitted to enroll without fanfare like any other new boys — and also, EHS deserves no halo. However, the story did reach the press, and I have accepted the Chronicle’s request for this short letter to the student body,” he wrote. “The important part of this undertaking lies ahead when the two boys arrive in September. It is my fervent hope that they will be accepted by you as warmly as any other new boys, and that they will be made to feel just as much at home.”
THE EARLY DAYS OF INTEGR ATION
While the school administration, Board, and faculty believed in the why behind the decision to integrate, the how posed many challenges.
Veteran social studies teacher Mike Miller, who joined the EHS faculty during the School’s second year of integration, recalls, “Flick Hoxton assumed that everyone would do the right thing; he believed in the goodness of human nature. There wasn’t any talk about training for faculty. We were too busy talking about the length of students’ hair.”
And, according to many alumni, people did do the right thing the vast majority of the time.
“I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Episcopal,” says Kevin Wallace ’76, who, among other achievements, served as a Senior Monitor, made the High List, and earned all-prep honors for football. “I felt they were open, they were very warm, it was an honor for me to be there, and that they honored me also,” he says of his peers and the School.
Wallace doesn’t recall experiencing much in the way of overt racism, but that did not preclude him from feeling out of place now and then. “There were lots of little rules, ‘Southern gentlemen’ things, that I had never been exposed to,” he recalls. While his classmates arrived at Episcopal knowing when (and when not) to wear socks with their boat shoes, or that one should stand when a woman entered the room, for Wallace it was learn as you go.
He recalls one notably uncomfortable moment from the classroom, when his history teacher asked him, the only Black student in the class, to share with his classmates his view on slavery. “What was I supposed to say? That I was happy about slavery?”
Wallace progressed through Episcopal alongside football teammate and roommate Clarence Gaines ’76, who also remembers his years at EHS as an “incredible experience.”
While the School’s first Black students achieved remarkable successes in the classroom, in athletics, and as student leaders, many dealt with unique social challenges. “From a social standpoint, the most negative experience was that I had no interaction with females my entire time at EHS,” says Gaines. “I never went to one dance at Episcopal or at any other school.”
EHS Chief Financial Officer Boota deButts ’76, who played football with Gaines and Wallace, recalls catching up with Gaines at a Reunion Weekend and learning for the first time about one of the ways that Gaines’s Episcopal experience differed from his own. “The social difference was remarkable,” says deButts. “We didn’t have girls at Episcopal, but we had mixers. We would go to girls’ schools and girls’ schools would come here. The social outlet for African- American students was practically non-existent, because there were not many African-American girls at other schools...I was completely oblivious to that.”
Jim Chesson ’79, who retired last year after 32 years in Episcopal’s science department, says, “I think there’s probably a whole lot that, even those of us who were good friends of Mike Ammons ’79 or Rodney Rice ’79, were just unaware of in terms of what their experiences were like. I’m sure there was a lot that they just had to take a deep breath and ignore.”
While many of the ways Black students were treated differently than their White peers through the years were subtle or unintentional, there is no denying that a significant number experienced acute racism while students at Episcopal.
“I was a running back and I got tackled out of bounds, and the coach from the other side was screaming ‘get that monkey, get that monkey.’ I just didn’t know what to do. I was dumbfounded,” says Chase, who also remembers opposing players targeting him with racial slurs.
“There were days I would be sitting by myself upstairs reading, and students would be making n-word jokes, knowing that I was in earshot. And then they’d be laughing about it,” Hatcher remembers. He also recalls a teacher using the term “colored” to describe the members of a professional basketball team that they were chatting about over dinner. “I never made an issue of that, because when he was growing up, that’s the term that people used. I would say it was a reflection of the atmosphere and what was accepted at the School,” he says.
Rodney Robinson ’86 remembers, “I was a proctor in study hall on the third floor of Hoxton. Some kids were acting up and being disruptive, and I had to ask them to quiet down. It was hard to get them to quiet down, and one student yelled out ‘lynch him!’”
Barnaby Draper ’88, who roomed with Jonathan Beane ’88, witnessed widespread racism “that showed its face, for example, when Jonathan left the room sometimes. And then I was in a room of White guys, and they thought all of a sudden that I was just another White guy. And that’s when racism shows it’s face…those feelings and straight-up cowardice, in my opinion, only exist in darkness. None of them would have had the guts to share those feelings in front of him.”
REMNANTS OF A PAINFUL PAST
Jump to a memory from 1997, shared this fall by Assistant Director of Admissions Jonathan Lee ’01 in a chapel talk in which he described a racist encounter from his student days that he has carried with him ever since. One of his dormmates had been showering with a confederate flag towel all year, so when Lee opened the dryer to retrieve his laundry and saw that very towel mixed in with his shirts, he knew who to approach. When Lee asked the fellow freshman whether the towel was his, he answered, “yes, n-word,” each of the three times that Lee posed the question.
“I asked three times, because I just couldn’t believe this was happening. Then, I lost it. By this point, the anger was full within me and I picked him up and was in a full rage. Before anything could happen, the dorm head was in the bathroom, breaking apart the fight,” Lee told this year’s student body. “Many of you will experience bumps in the road along your journeys. You just can’t plan for the moment that will stretch you to the brink of your normal character. This bump in my road was huge. As I reflect on my time here at EHS, I return to this moment in the bathroom on the third floor of Dal, and it still weighs heavy on my heart.”
In a separate conversation, Lee recounts a memory from 2000, in which a classmate told him he “was the first Black person who wasn’t cleaning his car or cutting his grass.”
Hatcher, who graduated from Episcopal 17 years before Lee, tells a similar story. “I remember making friends with a guy and really being his first Black friend. The other people they were used to dealing with were maids and staff who worked in their homes. For me, being able to have that kind of impact on people was worth whatever sort of issues or challenges I was going to go through.”