Separate but equal

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Students and faculty from then and now reflect on fifty years of integration at University of Louisiana.

Patricia Rickels Joined faculty in 1957, director of University of Louisiana honors program

When Patricia Rickels looks out the window from her perch in Judice-Rickels Hall, she can’t help but smile.

“When I look out my office window on St. Mary Street and see the beautiful multicolored kids crossing the street, I say, ‘Yes, yes, yes, this is what I love.’ ”

But the campus has not found utopia, Rickels said. Rickels joined the faculty in 1957, a year after the university saw its first black graduate, Christiana Smith. She and her late husband and fellow professor, Milton, fought for equality on campus during those early years.

“It’s not perfect yet,” she said. “Because we can always make things better. I’m a member of the board of directors on the (state) Council for Human Relations. We find across the state that white friends think racism is no longer a problem, and our black friends know that it is still a problem. People who worked for social justice in the ’60s think the job is done. It was not done.”

In the early ’60s, the first black student was employed on campus. He was assigned to Rickels. The dean of her college told Rickels, “ ‘You will know how to treat him.’ I said, ‘How about I treat him like any other student worker?’ ”

That student, James Shay, was discouraged from applying for the job, Rickels said.

She speaks of Shay with the pride of a mother. He is now earning a doctoral degree in public health.

“He’s like a son to me. Bless his dear heart,” she said. “His kids are the grandchildren I never had. We only had one child and he got killed in an accident,” Rickels said.

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Marsha Sills
msills@theadvertiser.com

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Recovering the Stories of SLI’s Desegregation

by Michael Wade

My interest in SLI’s desegregation began in 1984 when USL history professor Amos Simpson invited me to lunch with Leon Beasley in Charleston, S.C.

Beasley, a recently-retired USL professor, had begun delving into the oft-heard but little-substantiated story that SLI was the first southern college to desegregate.

Professor Beasley’s small folder of materials hinted at a story of enormous significance, and I found myself wishing that I had followed up on that story when I was a graduate student. Like so many others, I had heard it too. Unfortunately, Leon passed away before he could do more on SLI’s desegregation.

So it was that I began searching the documentary record. The 1954 federal court decision in Constantine v. SLI, newspapers, and records in the UL Lafayette Archives provided evidence that it was the first Deep South public college to admit black undergraduates, (Virginia Tech enrolled one black undergrad in 1953).

As is so often the case with historical documents, they raised more questions than they answered.

With segregationists firmly in control of state government, why was the decision not appealed? Why did the voluminous literature on civil rights contain almost no mention of this historic event?

Most importantly, where were the voices— the memories and feelings— of the participants in this process (which of course did not end with registration on that September day in 1954)? Who were those people who, with their parents, had the courage to challenge inequality?

What kind of fortitude had the next, and harder, step required — to be the pioneers in desegregating a Deep South state college? Was it, as many whites seemed to recall, really marked by generosity of spirit? How did those first students, two-thirds of them women, experience life on an overwhelmingly white campus?

Given that so many early black students were female, and that most of them had married and perhaps moved away, how did one locate them after four or five decades?

Given those trying times, would they be willing to re-examine their experiences for the record? Who, after all, would relish remembering such oppression, even if those memories were historically important?

These are vital questions, because documentary records naturally reflect the viewpoint, often impersonally, of administrators. They are necessarily incomplete, especially in a human story of such significance as this one.

To this point, I have documented a fairly complete and quite reliable history, in administrative terms. It has been enriched immeasurably by interviews of people both black and white whose names are too numerous to mention here. However, few of them were students.

A history which does justice to this great event of the civil rights movement must not just include, but feature, the voices of the people who made it possible.

This column then, is an unabashed and forthright appeal to former students, faculty and staff, and community persons to contribute to this history by sharing their memories with me, either in the form of an oral interview, or by letter, and/or by completing a survey form which you can get by contacting me at wademg@appstate.edu by phone at (828) 262-6003, or by mail (Michael Wade, Dept. of History, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC 28608.

Responses will be treated professionally and with respect. Submissions used in a yet-to-be book on SLI’s desegregation will be properly credited. Please don’t discount what you know or remember; you were a participant in a great event and your memories are important.

Michael Wade is a history professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. He earned a master’s degree in 1971, and a doctoral in 1978 from the University of Louisiana

The source of the story

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Helen Elizabeth Reaux, UL Student 1950's

Helen Reaux Gordon, UL Walk of Honor (2004)

In 1954, no one seemed to notice that history was being made on the University of Louisiana campus.

Helen Reaux Gordon’s last visit to University of Louisiana’s campus was 20 years ago.

It was a quick visit to the bookstore.

Her memories of this place were not the kind that she wished to recall.

But last week she returned one more time. This time to tell her story of how, 50 years earlier, she was one of the first black students to enroll at then-Southwestern Louisiana Institute.

She remembered walking together with a group of students toward the stadium for orientation. White students hung out dormitory windows and shouted, “Look at that bunch of blackbirds walking in a pile.”

Adults escorting her and a group of friends whispered, “Ignore it.” Fifty years later, the barb tossed out that dorm window isn’t forgotten.

“We’ve never been validated,” said Gordon, fidgeting with a black glove she held over the skirt of her white linen suit. “It’s like we were never here. I’m glad that someone is finally acknowledging our presence.”

The first black students who attended SLI in 1954 aren’t in classroom textbooks. No television network reported their struggles to attend a college near family instead of commuting across the state to attend a blacks-only school. Their front-page news was dwarfed in The Daily Advertiser by news from around the globe.

Some of that was done on purpose. Administrators knew that they faced a potentially volatile situation and didn’t want ugly scenes like the ones that followed years later. The history books tell those stories of the riots that ensued after James Meredith on the campus of Ole Miss in 1962 and a year later when Alabama’s Gov. George Wallace blocked a University of Alabama schoolhouse doorway in protest of the first two black students who enrolled there. Those stories are known.

But in 1954, no one seemed to care what was happening here, and little has been done since to record it for the history books — until now.

“Fifty Years Later: Commemorating the Desegregation of Southwestern Louisiana Institute” is a two-day symposium that starts at University of Louisiana on Friday.

It’s been difficult finding people,” said UL history professor Michael Martin, who organized the event. “It was purposely kept quiet.”

A lawsuit filed

It started on Sept. 15, 1953. Clara Dell Constantine, Martha Jane Conway, Charles Vincent Singleton and Shirley Taylor attempted to register at Southwestern Louisiana Institute. But they were turned way. Attempts by The Daily Advertiser to contact these students were not successful.

The students sued the following January. By April, the federal court had ruled that the state was in violation of the 14th Amendment.

There are few newspaper accounts and even fewer historical references to the event. Were it not for court records, there would be virtually no written account of what transpired.

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Tribute is finally paid to students who broke racial barriers at University of Louisiana

Today, Fifty years after the fact, the courageous African American students who opened the doors of UL Lafayette to members of their race are finally being recognized at a symposium on the integration of the school. Those students who broke the racial barrier at what was then SLI set forces in motion that have positively affected the quality of life of our African American population, and made all of us more tolerant and more appreciative of the advantages of diversity — in education and all other walks of life.

Yet the story of their courage and perseverance has remained untold for 50 years. At the urging of the university officials of that era, the media basically suppressed the story. Both school officials and media management acted, we believe, out of a fear of violence and bloodshed. It was a time of raging racial tension. There were elements of the community that gave decision makers cause for their fear that publicity could unleash turmoil.

Whatever the motivation, those students who pioneered college integration in Louisiana received no recognition — no well-deserved praise for pushing aside racial barriers. We and the other area media kept our distance. We did not ask and so did not know of the tension, the slights, the racial slurs that they endured. They came, performed a service to their race and the community, and left with few people knowing their names or faces.

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LOUISIANA La. — The volume of black students registering at Southwestern Louisiana Institute 50 years ago is what set it apart from its Southern peers, according to university researchers.

The size of that first class of students was unlike other Southern state-supported schools that saw one or two black students integrating at a time, seminar panelists said.

“You see here (at UL) a different kind of presidential leadership,” said panelist Clarence Mohr, a history professor at the University of South Alabama. “We saw on (an) administrative level the willingness to act on good faith.”

The symposium is an effort to give those first black students like Helen Reaux Gordon, “what they wanted,” said Gordon Harvey of UL Monroe, “a little validation.” Harvey moderated the morning seminar on how integration affected higher education.

And Gordon got a little of what she waited 50 years for Friday afternoon.

“We have been validated,” Gordon said after a seminar that focused on University of Louisiana’s integration. Gordon had felt that the university had done little to remember those first students who had integrated the campus.

“Without our presence, nothing that followed would have come about.”

After the seminar, Gordon rose from her chair and shared her story with about 100 people in the audience of those early years as a black student on campus.

“As I look around, it is so different. I see a young woman sitting next to an African American man,” Gordon said.

“I’m so happy to see so many different faces of color. It was worth it,” she said.

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Marsha Sills
msills@theadvertiser.com

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HAMMOND — Nearly 50 years ago, Clara Constantine Broussard’s mother didn’t think it made much sense that her daughter had to attend Southern University when her taxes were paid in Lafayette.

“She couldn’t really afford it and thought that it didn’t make sense with her money coming here,” Broussard said.

So, Broussard and three other students — Martha Jane Conway, Charles Singleton and Shirley Taylor — sued the University of Louisiana when they were refused admission because of their skin color and won. The four and about 70 more students were the first to integrate then-SLI.

Fifty years after integrating UL, Broussard and the others will be recognized by the university for their stand. The university will award honorary humanities degrees to the students during its fall commencement. The university received approval during the University of Louisiana System’s meeting on Friday.

That first class to integrate “played such a significant role in the university and the country,” said University President Ray Authement on Friday. “We were the first in the (Deep) South to integrate.”

The students faced prejudice in and out of the classroom for their presence on the previous all-white campus. The administration tried to keep the media at bay during the integration. Because little documentation had been made of the history, the university held a symposium last month to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the desegregation. Scholars from across the country attended, but it was the stories from the students who lived the history that impacted the audience the most, according to those who attended and even the students who lived it.

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Marsha Sills
msills@theadvertiser.com

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LOUISIANA La. - Cue "Pomp and Circumstance No. 1."

Saturday, the University of Louisiana will confer degrees at its graduation ceremonies throughout the day at the Cajundome and Cajundome Convention Center.

Each semester, the university awards an honorary degree to a notable person in the community. This semester, the university will confer four honorary degrees to the students who paved the way for integration on campus in the 1950s. The four students - then Clara Broussard, Martha Jane Conway, Shirley Taylor and Charles Singleton - filed a lawsuit against Southwestern Louisiana Institute when they were denied admission because of the color of their skin. In 1954, the students and nearly 70 others were admitted in the fall, becoming the first class to integrate the college.

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Marsha Sills
msills@theadvertiser.com

[Boomer]

We were Black before Black was cool ---remember walking to the president's home --before the one on Campus and letting our People----men's bball team geaux!!!

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Clara Constantine Broussard

Shirley Taylor Gresham

Charles Vincent Singleton

Martha Jane Conway Bossett

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Clara Constantine Broussard
Her mother started it all.

Fifty years ago, Helma Constantine didn't think it made much sense that her daughter, Clara, had to leave home for a college education just because she was black.

Broussard was 21 years old when she started at Southwestern Louisiana Institute.

"It wasn't something that was easy," Broussard said. "It's nice to be recognized for what we did."

She stayed in school one year before she decided that she really wanted to go to beauty school.

She looks to her mother as the driving force behind the lawsuit and changing the course of the lives of the students that followed her. It is a strength she wants her grandchildren not to forget.

"I want them to know what their grandmother and great-grandmother did," Broussard said, turning to look at her mother. "She was so determined."

Shirley Taylor Gresham
Shirley Taylor was 19 when she first set foot on SLI's campus. She didn't think twice about the prejudice she would face.

"I wasn't thinking," Gresham said. "I just wanted an education and to register. That was it."

She attended the university for one year before she left to join the Army.

"I always wanted to be in law enforcement," she laughed, "but there was a height and weight requirement and I didn't have either."

While in the service, she was in the signal corps.

"I left as a sergeant," she said. She went on into the banking business where she retired after 40 years.

Friday was her first time back on UL's campus since she was a student. Today, she'll receive an honorary degree in humanities for her courage that first semester.

"It hasn't hit me yet," she said. "I am just so honored and pleased. They always say good things come at last. It's good to know that our fight was not in vain."

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Shawn Wilson/UL Lafayette Alumni President:

"That was a very monumental occasion. But, in actuality, the fact that we had 72 students enroll that following September made it the largest desegregation in the deep south. After us, other universities slowly began to desegregate..."

The KLFY story

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University of Louisiana honors desegregation students

More than 50 years ago, Clara Constantine, Shirley Taylor Gresham, Martha Jane Conway and Charles Singleton set foot on the campus of Southwestern Louisiana Institute wanting to attend college there.

They were told no based on the color of their skin, but didn't take that for an answer. They filed a lawsuit against the university and won the right to enroll.

On Saturday, that same university, now known as the University of Louisiana, awarded the four students honorary degrees during graduation ceremonies for their fight to integrate the school.

"It made us feel so proud," said Gresham, who now lives in California. "I never thought I would get speechless, but I am."

Gresham and Clara Constantine Broussard stood dressed in their caps and gowns glowing with the same excitement as the twentysomethings buzzing about them.

"It feels so great," Broussard said.

For different reasons, each of the three women left college to pursue different careers or to start families. Singleton never attended classes because he could not afford the tuition.

UL President Ray Authement told students of stories he heard from Norman Francis, now president of Xavier University, about what it was like growing up in Lafayette more than 50 years ago.

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Marsha Sills
msills@theadvertiser.com

[RaginEsquire06]

Class act Baby! Class act!