Remembrance of a Graduation
By Gerald Hartman
This graduation season has led me to recall the graduation that I attended on May 21, 1984, at Wake Forest University located in North Carolina. It was the only graduation that I attended during my short time there as a law professor. It was truly a remarkable graduation. Bill Moyers was the commencement speaker. Eudora Welty and Robert Penn Warren, among several others, received honorary degrees. I remember hiding a volume of Welty’s short stories under my graduation robe and taking it out to get her to inscribe it to my former wife who was from Mississippi. I dared not approach Warren, 74 at the time and looking frail. His All the Kings Men was very familiar to me having been married on a naval air base in Plaquemines Parrish outside of New Orleans where the noted Louisiana politician, Leander Perez, held sway from 1924 to 1969 and where much civil rights activity occurred in the 1950’s and 1960’s. As an attorney, Perez represented Huey Long, the infamous governor of Louisiana, at his trial in 1929 that ended with him not being impeached. Long was the prototype for the character, Willie Stark, in Warren’s book.
Moyer’s address was majestic urging graduates “not to join the anxious age of agitated amnesiacs created by electronic journalism but to study history to maintain a link with the past.” That admonition caused me to remember that connection between Plaquemines Parrish and Warren that was reinforced by my time in New Orleans clerking in 1972 for a federal appellate judge.
All this that I observed while attending that 1984 graduation served as a backdrop for my focusing on events preceding it. Several months earlier, I had approached the Dean of the Law School about teaching a course concentrating on the legal history of the civil rights movement. Had that been approved, I contemplated asking Maya Angelou, then University Professor at Wake Forest, based on her involvement with many of those events about participating in the teaching of the course, but alas I never heard back from the Dean. I wanted to build on my experiences in the latter part of the civil rights movement in the late 1970’s from my time spent litigating cases while an attorney for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division where I was assigned to litigate cases over some four years in Mississippi and Alabama.
That failure of the Dean to get back to me was soon followed by an extraordinary encounter with a fellow law school professor. We were both serving on the school’s tenure committee. He asked me was “I going to vote for the scared little Jew from New York.” Startled by the question obviously, I had to hold back my laughter because my colleague was so incredibly stupid not to know that I was Jewish. I went to the Provost of the University to bring this event to his attention, but nothing was done about it and the candidate did not receive tenure.
Thereafter, I came to learn a month or so later that the law school administration was contemplating holding the celebration for that year’s law school graduates at a local country club that did not admit Jews or Blacks. I went to the Law School’s Dean to inform him that to do so would arguably violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I knew that argument would be quite a stretch but did not tell him. Title VI prevents the exclusion of persons based on their race from being excluded from participation in or denied the benefits under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. The Dean acquiesced and the event was held elsewhere.
These events I remembered as I watched the graduation proceed. For some reason, I recalled then the controversy written on occasion about Warren using the “N” word in his novel to convey the reality of the time, especially in that famous opening paragraph about traveling down Highway 58 towards the fictional Mason City. Both those three events and the history connected to them convinced me that I had to leave the Law School. I penned my resignation of my tenured professorship shortly thereafter.
Copyright © 2024 Gerald Hartman
*The author of this Perspective was married to Barbara McDowell in 2000. He founded the Barbara McDowell Foundation and the Barbara McDowell Public Interest Law Center.
**This essay is not intended to reflect the current practices and attitudes at Wake Forest University but rather presents a historical perspective.