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This chapter begins with Bill Friday's inauguration as University of North Carolina (UNC) president in the William Neal Reynolds Coliseum at State College. The event concluded with the pomp and ceremony that usually accompanies such occasions. The 7,000 people in attendance included Friday's family and old friends, as well as most of the state's power structure. Frank Porter Graham and Gordon Gray gave brief tributes, though Friday sensed surprise on their part that such a young man was taking on such a large job. Governor Luther H. Hodges presided, and a combined band from State College, Chapel Hill, and the Woman's College played “God of Our Fathers.” As Ida Friday bit back tears, Chief Justice J. Wallace Winborne of the North Carolina Supreme Court administered the oath of office.

This chapter outlines a brief history of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from its creation to the present. Over the years, the State of Massachusetts has meddled in the University's organizational structure and often been stingy in providing financial support. But the State has never interfered in the intellectual activity taking place within the University.

This chapter explores Kirk’s life from his birth through his earning of an M.A. from Duke and his brief time spent working at Ford. It also considers the influence that the great American humanists Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More had on the young Michiganian. Finally, it offers an in-depth look at Kirk’s time at Duke University and his thesis on John Randolph of Roanoke.

Chapter 1 situates Jackson State College in the racial history of Mississippi, emphasizing the struggle it faced against white supremacy and the balancing act its leadership performed. Determined to preserve the school, its presidents, both white and black, were forced to accept elements of racial containment. When protests emerged in Jackson in the 1960s, the Board of Trustees ensured that Jackson State’s president, Jacob Reddix, controlled student activism. When students joined Jacksonians to protest segregation in the city, he expelled them. When students voiced their political opinions, he dissolved the Student Government Association. During Freedom Summer, the Board of Trustees tightened restrictions on students. The smallest protest or rumor prompted white Jacksonians to condemn the campus as a breeding ground of criminals. In 1967 a new president, John A. Peoples, relaxed some restrictions on student life, even as the increasing influence of Black Power began to be felt on campus.

Although a decided majority of southern students were more conservative and less activist than students nationally, a distinct and embattled minority of antiwar dissidents on Dixie’s campuses mounted unprecedented protests. In so doing, they confronted the hostility of their peers, campus administrators, local officials, the southern media, and regional political leaders. Still, like antiwar students nationally, these protestors helped to keep the war’s agonies before the American people, to restrain the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and to convince local and national leaders that ending the war was essential to restoring domestic order and tranquility. This chapter examines the motives, actions, and influence of pro- and antiwar, white, black, and Chicano students in the South. Particular attention is given to student responses to the US invasion of Cambodia and the subsequent student deaths at Kent State University and Jackson State College in 1970.

This chapter describes how, despite his distaste for textile manufacturing at State College, Friday took a job with DuPont Corporation's Waynesboro, Virginia, manufacturing plant on graduation. Working with DuPont held considerable attraction. Even in 1941, with the defense mobilization, a graduating senior could not easily reject secure employment in one of the textile industry's premier jobs. DuPont was known to prefer students who were clean-cut, WASPs, and campus leaders; the company hired Paul Lehman, who shared these characteristics with Friday, as a chemical engineer. Meeting a DuPont recruiter at Raleigh's Sir Walter Hotel during an interview session sometime in the spring of 1941, Friday signed on with the company at $130 a month—the highest starting salary that the company offered.

Chapter 2 explores the convergence of forces that led to the 1970 shootings at Jackson State, beginning with the shooting of local activist Benjamin Brown in 1967 and then the tensions between conservatism and reform on campus from 1967 to 1970. Even as a new racial consciousness emerged on the campus after the ascension of John Peoples to the presidency, Jackson State remained largely isolated from the growing antiwar and student activism on campuses nationwide. Civil rights gains, student activism, the antiwar movement, urban rebellions, and the growing appeal of Black Power, though, had produced near-hysteria among white Mississippians and a broader backlash in white communities nationwide, a mood President Richard Nixon tapped into with his Southern Strategy and his deployment of racially veiled law and order rhetoric. In such a context, law enforcement in Jackson felt empowered to answer even limited unrest on the campus with force.

This chapter discusses the development of Asian American studies at San Francisco State College in relation to community control and academic autonomy. Emerging from the Third world Strike, the most radical aspect of the SF State program was an institutional structure predicated on the slogan of “community autonomy.” This phrase meant that Asian American communities should control the programs that were intended to serve the community's needs. However, community control is necessarily antithetical to the principle of the modern research university, which is faculty control. In order to establish itself in the university, therefore, the program had to eliminate community control in favor of academic autonomy. This question of autonomy was fundamental to the formation of black studies since that was the paradigmatic model on which the other ethnic studies programs were based.

This chapter tracks the most momentous years of Reddick’s life as he became a professor of history at Alabama State College in Montgomery and emerged as a major leader within the southern civil rights movement. He helped guide and document the Montgomery Improvement Association during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and he then did the same for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, serving as a founding member of its nine-member executive committee and as the organization’s official historian. Reddick also became a close mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. during these years, and he wrote the first biography of King, Crusader Without Violence (1959), helped King write a memoir on the boycott, Stride Toward Freedom (1958), and traveled with King and his wife Coretta Scott King to India. After supporting the local student sit-in movement in 1960, Alabama Governor John Patterson had him fired from Alabama State College, thus symbolizing his significant stature within the civil rights movement.

This chapter examines the ways in which Penn State University football “fans draw their sense of community from the shared belief that Happy Valley is not only a mythic place, but a singularly righteous one as well.” It puts legendary coach Joe Paterno at the center of the narrative and sees “Happy Valley as a fantastical American Brigadoon” that may vanish after him. The State College, Pennsylvania, area acquired the “Happy Valley” nickname because of its seeming immunity to the economic misery of the Great Depression. Paterno came to State College as an assistant coach in 1950. Four years later, Brigadoon debuted in American movie theaters. It was the tale of an enchanted village that appeared once every hundred years; by covenant, if anyone left, the village would disappear forever. This chapter discusses Paterno's success with Penn State's football team and argues that he has done far more good for the game and for Penn State than he can possibly undo in his fading years.

Clifford Brown sought new opportunities in Philadelphia. He had been playing at jam sessions for quite a while and had established himself strongly enough so that he thought about forming his own group. Dizzy Gillespie contacted Max Roach, who had established himself as the leading drummer of the new bebop school. Roach had played on Charlie Parker and Gillespie's classic bebop recordings and later with Miles Davis. In September 1949, Brown went back to school on a new campus and totally new environment. Maryland State College, again an all-black school, had an excellent music department, and there was an active jazz scene. On the evening of June 6, 1950, after a particularly successful outing, Brown and three of his cohorts were involved in a car accident. After a year of recuperation, Brown resumed playing the trumpet. Soon he found employment, and his fattest paychecks soon began rolling in, albeit from an unlikely source—a rhythm ‘n’ blues pop star named Chris Powell.

The practice of modern public relations during the early 20th century is reviewed alongside Woodson’s publicity activities. Details of Woodson’s public-education program and PR style are revealed through his correspondence with Luther P. Jackson, a Virginia State College history professor, collaborator, and fundraiser for Woodson’s cause. Woodson’s last known letter was mailed to Jackson and dated two days before he died in Washington. Woodson’s command of public relations methods also is demonstrated through examination of two of his most acclaimed legacies—The Journal of Negro History and Negro History Week—in public-relations contexts that sought and won press support.

The introduction offers an overview of the shootings of May 15, 1970, and the effort by students to protect the evidence and memory of what happened. An HBCU in the most racially repressive state, Jackson State College opened in the midst of the counterrevolution against Reconstruction and was determined to provide a first-rate education. The school struggled against white supremacy from the beginning. Activism following World War Two, the Brown decision, and the civil rights movement produced an epic backlash, including violence against activists, leading to the growing dominance of Black Power as an organizing philosophy. Activism on campus had long been repressed by the administration, acting on behalf of the all-white Board of Trustees, but by the end of the decade the campus was changing, influenced by Black Power and a new president, and opportunities to grow and express racial consciousness emerged. It was this campus law enforcement assaulted.

Born into a free black family in the early nineteenth century, Josephine Silone Yates was a pioneering woman faculty member at the historically black Lincoln Institute (now University) in Jefferson City, Missouri, where she headed the Department of Natural Sciences. Yates later rose to prominence in the black women’s club movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, serving as president of the famed National Association of Colored Women (NACW) from 1901 to 1905. Josephine was born in 1852 in Mattituck, New York, to Alexander and Parthenia Reeve Silone. She was their second daughter. Her maternal grandfather, Lymas Reeves, had been a slave in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, but was freed in 1813. Lymas owned a house in Mattituck, and Josephine’s parents lived with him. 1 Josephine’s mother was well educated for the time, and she taught her daughter to read and write at home. Josephine’s earliest and fondest memories were of being taught to read from the Bible while snuggled on her mother’s lap. Her mother made her call out the words as she pointed to them. Josephine began school at age six, where her teachers immediately recognized her preparedness and advanced her rapidly through the elementary grades. At the age of nine, she reportedly studied physiology and physics and possessed advanced mathematical ability. Silone also advanced her writing career at the age of nine, by submitting “a story for publication to a New York weekly magazine. Though the article was rejected for publication, she received a letter of encouragement, which increased her ambition to succeed.” Josephine’s uncle, Reverend John Bunyan Reeve, was the pastor of the Lombard Street Central Church in Philadelphia. Because of his interest in the education of his niece, he convinced his sister, Parthenia, to send Josephine at the age of eleven to live with him in Philadelphia so that she could attend the Institute for Colored Youth directed by Fanny Jackson-Coppin. It was probably felt that Josephine’s education would progress better under the mentorship of Jackson-Coppin.

This chapter explores Reddick’s pioneering work in the fledgling field of black history. During the 1930s, Reddick worked as a professor of history at Kentucky State College and Dillard University, and he took a leading role in the black fraternity Phi Beta Sigma. He also completed his PhD in history from the University of Chicago, where he studied under the Lost Cause scholar Avery O. Craven. While tracking Reddick’s activities across these institutions, special focus is on Reddick’s contributions to Carter Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Reddick gathered the testimonies of former slaves and influenced the larger effort by the Works Progress Administration, published a landmark historiographical article in the Journal of Negro History, completed an innovative dissertation on the role of white newspapers in New Orleans in sowing divisions and helping provoke the Civil War, and documented racial discrimination at libraries, archives, journals, and conferences.

This chapter describes Still’s image as a reclusive writer who wrote to make himself happy. In fact, he also wrote to publish but had little success in the 1950s. When “The Run for the Elbertas” appeared in 1959, Albert Stewart used its success to bring Still to Morehead State College and to establish the James Still Room. This move began his transition into a public figure, but he maintained his log house in Knott County and strengthened his relationship with the Perry family there.

The author discusses in this chapter how he, as a child of two white artists, ended up living in the inner city—in the projects of 1969, no less. He notes that his father worked part-time in an art supply store; and his mother was a graduate student at Empire State College. He also describes his bout with spinal meningitis, a rare infection that inflames the lining of the brain and spinal cord, at three weeks of age. It describes the living conditions in Masaryk Towers complex just south of Avenue D in Manhattan, where the family spent their first year as a white minority, a honky in a community of color.

Dr. Hopkins is one of the few American women to have held a doctorate in science and a license to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Her career included academia, industry, and government. Esther was born Esther Arvilla Harrison on September 16, 1926, in Stamford, Connecticut. She was the second of three children born to George Burgess Harrison and Esther Small Harrison. Her father was a chauffeur and sexton at a church, and her mother worked in domestic service. Neither of her parents had an advanced education. Her father had some high school education; her mother attended only primary school. However, both of her parents wanted to make sure their children had a good education. When Esther was three and a half years old, her mother took her along to register her older brother for school. Because Esther was taller than her brother, the teacher suggested that she take the test to start school. She passed the test and was able to start kindergarten at the age of three and a half! She and her brother went to school together all through elementary school. Boys and girls were separated in junior high school; in high school they remained separate but attended the same school. She decided in junior high school that she wanted to be a brain surgeon. This was because she met a woman doctor in Stamford who had an office in one of the buildings that her father cleaned. The woman was a physician and graduate of Boston University Medical School. Esther decided that she wanted to be just like her. Therefore, when Esther entered high school, she chose the college preparatory math and science track. She took as many science courses as possible in order to get into Boston University. She spent a lot of time at the local YWCA, becoming a volunteer youth leader. One speaker at a YWCA luncheon discouraged her from entering science and suggested that she become a hairdresser. Esther was hurt but not discouraged by this. She graduated from Stamford High School in 1943.

This chapter discusses four young men from North Carolina A&T State College, an all-black public school, who quietly seated themselves on lunch counter stools in Woolworth's five-and-dime. The demonstrators were met with icy stares, and the lunch counter closed for the day, but larger numbers of students came on subsequent days. Greensboro liked to think of itself as one of the most progressive cities in the South, a place with many colleges, a humanitarian streak brought on by its Quaker legacy, and bustling commerce and industry. It was also one of the region's first cities to implement small-scale integration in the public schools. Still, it remained a segregated city. The sitin movement that started in Greensboro galloped across North Carolina and the old Confederacy. A new day was dawning, but it was fraught with risk and a potential for violence.

From 1930 to 1970, a second folk music revival took hold in the United States and Europe, determined to capture and preserve for posterity US and European vernacular music. Critical to this collection of folklorists, academics, political activists, and entrepreneurs was the history and impact of African American music on folklore and culture. Big Bill, quite familiar with the types of country and Delta blues the folk music revival craved stood happy to oblige. Soon, one of the most sophisticated and urbane performers of the age began performing alone accompanied by his guitar for folk audiences from New York to Chicago. Within this community, Broonzy found a culture and environment willing and able to support his transitioning career from black pop star to folk music darling. Along the way, he would meet more individuals who could aid in his career reinvention and he both accepted and rejected their expectations of him and his music.