September, 2020
Lincoln – The Omaha World Herald and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln are embarking on a joint effort to improve race relations within their institutions, according to OWH editor Randy Essex and UNL Chancellor Ronnie Green:
"In this joint effort, we will explore the history of race relations in Nebraska, give voice to community leaders and UNL scholars, and engage the public to map a path to understand the past and bring about a more equitable future."This is a worthy endeavor, if carried out properly. It will include a historical look at race relations at UNL itself. I was a student on the UNL campus from 1961-1966 (B.A. '65; M.A. '66) and have many recollections about race relations from the period.
During my freshman and sophomore years I was invited to a few fraternities on campus, which were seeking members. Before I gave them serious consideration, I asked about their charters, if they had whites-only clauses. Most did in those days, but recruiters emphasized that other races were free to form their own fraternities, so it wasn't as if they were discriminating, in the way they saw the situation. Indeed, at least one black fraternity was created and recognized by the University in the early 1960s, so as to provide an alternative to the white fraternities.
In other words, separate-but-equal was very much alive in Lincoln, even though the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned Plessy v. Ferguson almost a decade earlier. Plessy was the case that had enshrined the concept as enacted in the Second Morrill Act of 1890, which set up a two-tiered land-grant university system.
A close friend of mine in a fraternity informed me that national black organizations were trying to test and break the whites-only clauses at UNL by recruiting high-achieving black students with excellent social skills to participate in annual fraternity and sorority "rush" weeks. He said it was hard for his fraternity to turn down one applicant, because he was obviously so well qualified, but they did so in order to preserve what he called the overall good.
I declined fraternity invitations, saying I would not join any whites-only system, and expressed the hope things would someday change.
As an upperclassman and graduate student, I helped organize efforts to integrate Lincoln restaurants and taverns near the campus. This simply involved a mixed party of four or five students entering an establishment, expecting to be served. Most Lincoln establishments were not overtly whites-only, but some had other customers who would tell parties such as ours that we were not welcome, and ask us to leave. Sometimes sparks flew; we never left, anywhere. Places like The Happy Hour on 13th Street and Duffy's on O Street were soon integrated.
During the summer of 1965, I was employed by the University to welcome prospective students and their parents to the campus, give them group tours of the campus, and tell them what to expect from college life. The University showed them a film promoting fraternities and sororities, which I always sat through as well. One summer evening, while leading a tour group that had just watched the film, I said that not all of us bought into the idea of such organizations with their membership restrictions.
That quickly got back to my University employers, apparently from a parent. I was taken aside the next day by a University administrator and advised not to say such things. My response was that they could let me go if they wanted to, but I would speak about campus life as I was employed to do. Nothing further came of it, from my standpoint. I suspect University officials got back to the person offended with a message that they had spoken to the offender, but I have no direct knowledge of it.
As a graduate student I watched the University expand northward, building not only dormitories along 17th Street, but also three new houses on University property for sororities, at least one of which had a whites-only membership clause. This was in a neighborhood that a few years earlier, when I was a freshman, was populated by the black community of Lincoln. I pointed out to those in University administration with whom I still had contact (G. Robert Ross, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, if memory serves) that this was a problem that could be resolved by requiring the sororities to drop their whites-only requirements. To my knowledge, that did not happen, even after University officials noted the irony of displacing black residents with houses for whites-only, acting through the power of the state to issue revenue bonds for the buildings.
University dorms, however, were integrated throughout my years on campus. One year I lived in Selleck Quadrangle, where my neighbors downstairs were roommates Benny Nelson (later governor and senator) and Thunder Thornton (a notable athlete), white and black. They had requested the pairing as an expression of racial progress. There were several other examples.
Classrooms were always integrated and, as I recall, the general tenor on campus was that we students were of a generation that would put Jim Crow practices and racial discrimination behind us. I would not say we were woke, as the saying now goes. Many of us had simply been raised to believe that racial discrimination was wrong and we would not be a part of it, regardless of the University leadership's indulgence of it.
What now?
As noted above, this joint effort is a worthy endeavor if something comes of it beyond its public relations value. I'm not in favor of taking down the campus statue of former chancellor Clifford Hardin, who tolerated the separate-but-equal atmosphere of the time, or that of Clayton Yeutter, whose fraternity cooperated in enforcing that system. Nor do they and others of their era need asterisks by their records, although it would be good for UNL historians to explore in much greater depth the nature of race relations on campus in the period immediately before and after the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.* Perhaps more names of courageous individuals would emerge.
Rather than doubling down one more time on diversity officers, multicultural centers, sensitivity training, and other measures based on identity politics (to which exercises like these often lead), I'd like to see UNL take initiatives nationally in areas that might make longer lasting contributions in matters of racial equality.
One such place might be nutrition studies, where the University's Food for Health initiative holds great promise for addressing diseases that disproportionately affect the non-white population. We need to look no further than the coronavirus pandemic to see the effects of the nutrition variable. Another area that badly needs national leadership is the deteriorating condition of postsecondary student finance. It has become increasingly clear that the nation's student loan and enrollment management systems are creating ever-greater divisions by race. The situation cries out for leadership from major institutions like UNL, which is not doing a bad job itself in this area and would be in a position to rally others to national reforms.
I'll be interested in seeing the role the OWH carves out for itself in this project. May it succeed beyond expectations. Frank Partsch, former reporter and editorial page editor of the OWH, was a good friend of mine at UNL, where he was also editor of the Daily Nebraskan. John Gottschalk, former OWH publisher and I shared a class in freshman English. They should be able to make outstanding contributions to this effort.
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* One topic that should be of interest is the influence their years at UNL had on Hardin and Yeutter, after which each later became U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. During their respective tenures as Secretary, the civil rights of black farmers were routinely violated, resulting in great losses of black land ownership. See Pigford v. Glickman (1999). I suspect that the record under Hardin's successor, Earl Butz, was even worse, but nevertheless the subject must be explored. Eventually, billions of federal taxpayer dollars were paid out in settlements going back to 1981, covering the Yeutter but not the Hardin years.
