Can We Be Saved from School Savers?

By Paul Gaston

Vol. 5, No. 4, 1983, pp. 10-11

Before I had a university professorship, wrote a book, received a Ph.D., won a Fulbright to study abroad, and graduated from the college of my choice, I spent fifteen years (three of them as a kindergartener) working in wood, clay, leather, and silver; singing; acting; folk dancing; playing sports and games of all sorts; and, yes, basket weaving (using Alabama long-leaf pineneedles)–all in a school where these things were thought to be as educational–as basic–as reading and mathematics.

In fact, we didn’t categorize things that way, which is one reason why I react badly every time someone talks about going back to the basics. What are the basics basic to, I always wonder. In our school, folk dancing was as important as American History; Arts and Crafts as essential as Chemistry. When we were very young, before we were eight, nature walks were part of our daily routine and learning to read was something we didn’t do–there would be plenty of time when we were ready for it. Everything we did was basic and some of what others now call “the basics” we left out until it was time for them.

I don’t believe the members of the National Commission on Excellence in Education would share the enthusiasm I have for my school. But, then, I feel the same way about their ” imperative for educational reform.” AII of those litanies to “excellence,” “quality,” “standards,” and “tough demands”–not to mention the jingoism–frighten me with the vision of joyless students obediently churning out higher test scores.

Every time I am confronted with such blatant examples of competition, coercion and mindlessness as the American way of learning, I think back to the School of Organic Education, in Fairhope, Alabama, where I went, and wish that its values and assumptions could be our inspiration.

The founder of our school–a remarkable woman named Marietta Johnson–always said “education is growth.” By this she meant that education should not be training or preparation for future demands but the proper nurturing of immediate needs of the whole organism. She called her idea “organic education” and she strongly believed that no part of a child’s development should be isolated from another without the danger of warping the child. The spiritual, mental, and physical must always be kept in balance; stressing one to the detriment of another would damage the whole child.

Because this philosophy pervaded the school–not just the faculty but also the pupils–we never thought about which courses were academic or more basic than others, which would assure you of the college of your choice and which would condemn you to a trade school. There was no “tracking system” and had anyone ever proposed a “college preparatory” class the idea would have perplexed us. The best preparation for the future, we believe, was unselfconscious absorption in the things that naturally and properly interested us at any given stage of growth. We quite literally prepared for the future by not preparing for it.

I don’t remember if there were SATs in my day. I’m certain that if they existed as a requirement for college admission we would never have set them up as goals to work toward. Tests were as alien to our idea of education as were honors courses, acceleration, specialization, and preparing for a career. We had no tests or marks in pottery or drama–everyone understood we did those things because we liked them–and it worked the same way for Spanish and Shakespeare: we studied because we wanted to, without being ranked, compared, and classified. One of our major articles of faith was that learning is its own reward.

And we found that learning is intensely satisfying. Because our teachers helped us to care about what we studied, treated our opinions with respect, and encouraged us to share, defend, and refine them, we learned to read and write and reason because those things were important to us, not to meet someone else’s expectations of what we ought to be.

Tests, examinations, grades, promotions, honors, rewards and other invidious distinctions masquerading as incentives to learning were all perversions of the educational system, we believed. If you worked to get a good grade or to beat out somebody else, you were warping your own growth, undermining your own education. Why would anyone do that?

No one failed at our school; and, with no failure, the roots of fear were cut off. That released power in many persons who might otherwise have been crushed early in life. With no honor rolls–no awards for any achievements–there was less chance for false pride to develop and more support for the idea of achievement as its own and sufficient reward. With no grades there was no cheating. Cheating was one of those absurdities we

---

Page 11

jokingly called “un-organic.” Later, when we went to college, we looked on those who boasted of their anti-cheating “honor codes” as being curiously perverted.

We varied greatly in our talents and backgrounds–we were a good cross section of the community–but the school helped each of us to grow to our potential. There was no mechanical formula for this, no system that could be designed and mandated by some educational authority. Far more important than method or technique were the values and assumptions of our teachers. They believed in the school’s philosophy, in organic education. They had faith that if you valued each pupil as a unique individual, took them where they were and worked from there, everything would turn out fine in the long run.

There were certainly standards–we all knew we were expected to do our best–but we never had what the National Commission would call “objective” standards that would show whether an individual student was measuring up to the norm or not. There simply were no fixed reference points by which we could be placed in a continuum in relationship to our peers. We were ourselves in an environment deeply mistrustful of measuring and comparing.

There was discipline, too. We were not a “do as you please” school. But the discipline we had was not imposed by rules and regulations, fear of punishment or lust for reward. It was self-discipline that emerged quite naturally from our confidence in the school and in ourselves and our keen sense of what was right and what was wrong.

Along with confidence we had great pride in the school. Our school spirit–intense and pervasive–was rooted in a belief that we were part of an important experiment in social democracy. John Dewey visited the school in 1913, just six years after it opened, and he made a famous report, stating that the school was showing “how the ideal of equal opportunity is to be transmuted into reality.” Our founder said many times that equal opportunity exists only when all children are provided the conditions for the full development of their capacity. We believed those conditions existed at our school. I suppose we were naive, but we held proudly to the idea that our school pointed the way to a sounder, more just and humane democratic society.

Thirty-seven years after graduation I am still naive enough to believe that we had the right idea. I know the National Commission doesn’t have it.

Paul M. Gaston teaches history at the University of Virginia and its the author of The New South Creed (Knopf) and the forthcominq Women of Fair Hope. He is a member of the executive committee of the Southern Regional Council.

The Civil Rights Act After Twenty Years Later. [Response]

By Paul Gaston

Vol. 7, No. 1, 1985, pp. 14-15

Prompted by Harold and Harry’s discussion of the new mythology–and particularly by Julius’ recollection of his student days at Chapel Hill and his recent return visit–I would like to tell a brief anecdote about my own teaching at the University of Virginia.

It seems to me that I see among white students in my Southern history class greater evidence of this conservative wave of recent years, and it’s been extremely troubling.

About the time I started to teach Southern history I read an article that James Baldwin published in Harpers’–this was in 1958. He said that for white people in the South to watch segregation taken apart and dismantled was going to be to watch an entire way of life of being discredited and that was going to be an enormously painful experience for them.

It was about that time that some of my students started dubbing my course in Southern history “Pain Infliction 102.”

Well, this pain infliction course was a great joy to teach because increasingly larger numbers of Southern students would shift from a belligerent attitude of open hostility to one of more open inquiry. Then, during the 1960s, a large number became converts and they wanted to join the movement and see that Southern history was made whole.

This year, the course in pain infliction continues to be taught. The students are required to read–among other books–Dan Carter’s book about Scottsboro, and we spent a long time on Richard Kluger’s monumental study, Simple Justice, which is an absolutely brillant and moving account of how the Brown decision came to be written.

There’s a significant group of white students in this class who, it seems to me, typify what’s happened. They don’t deny that all of the achievements that we’ve made are good, but these students are unreachable. A group of eight of them led a discussion of sixty students last week. Their subject was Kluger’s book and the origins of the Brown decision.

They were logical. They didn’t say anything offensive. They were coherent in their analysis. They discussed the move from Gaines to Sweat vs. Painter to Brown vs. Board of Education, and they weren’t touched by one bit of it.

After awhile I couldn’t stand it anymore. About fifteen minutes before the end of the class I got up and said, “You know you’re reading one of the most . . . you’re reading a magisterial work. You’re not likely to read many books like this in your lifetime. And it’s a book about one of the great movements for human liberation that you’ve never experienced. Where is the feeling? Where are the guts? Where are . . .”

Well, there was great silence.

---

Page 15

I’m not sure that they were touched. They know that I have these periodic outbursts. But I present them as evidence of this growing sense of conservatism-the teflon-coated group that can’t be reached, but they’re going to say the right thing.

The happy part of the story is that there are still some white students in the class who are on my side, but more importantly there are some black students in the class now and they, more than 1, make it uncomfortable for those students simply to pass this off as another work of history that you have to memorize and pass a test on. I came out of this a born-again historian.

During the fortieth anniversary meeting of the Southern Regional Council, held in Atlanta this past November, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Harry Ashmore, Julius L. Chambers-director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and former SRG executive director Harold Fleming reflected upon the status of civil rights twenty years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. An additional comment was offered by Paul Gaston, professor of history at the University of Virginia and current president of the Southern Regional Council. In the following pages, we present the perspectives of these long-time observers of, and participants in, Southern changes.

Paul Gaston, professor of history at the University of Virginia, is president of the Southern Regional Council.

My University Under Attack:
The Anti-Affirmative Action Brigade Comes to Virginia
By Paul Gaston

Vol. 21, No. 2, 1999, pp. 10-11

You never quite know how strongly you will feel about a great public issue until it shows up in your yard. I felt the force of that truism when Linda Chavez came to town in March to talk about a study her Center for Equal Opportunity had released. What it said was that the University of Virginia was guilty of racial discrimination. Our affirmative action program, according to her study, violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause just as the segregation laws once had.

Before she arrived for her talk, the Center for Individual Rights announced that it was likely to file a lawsuit against us, based on the findings of Chavez’s study. It had already won a case against the University of Texas and was hot in pursuit of the University of Michigan. After all the years of struggle here to overcome our racist heritage-a struggle we have every right to be proud of-it now appeared that our new enemy was to be not from within but from without, an enemy boasting, without irony or embarrassment, to stand for equal opportunity and individual rights.

The large auditorium was packed, with many students standing. They heard Ms. Chavez tell them that you don’t “end discrimination by discriminating against new groups of people.” Our admissions policy, she claimed, “smacks of the kind of racism that has long plagued this nation.” We must not “continue to judge people based on the color of their skin.” Then she told us that Martin King’s legacy was on her side, not ours, because he believed in a color-blind society and wanted to judge people only on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

Her attempt to claim Dr. King for her side didn’t surprise me. Most “color-blind conservatives” I know distort his words to make them say the opposite of what he meant. It is true that he said that his dream was deeply rooted in the American Dream. But he also said that his nightmare was deeply rooted in the reality of American racism. I recalled that he had said, in his “dream” speech, something about the dream being a promissory note that had come back from the bank of justice marked “insufficient funds.”

In the aftermath of Chavez’s speech one of our student columnists wrote that our policy was to make it easier for blacks, because they are black, to get into the university than it is for whites. “The admissions office should not admit minority students under a different standard than white students,” he wrote. He then added his coup de grace: “This is racial discrimination, plain and simple.”

Of course it is not “racial discrimination,” plain or simple. I suppose the student meant no offense, but his statement seemed grotesque to me, claiming a moral equivalency between two diametrically opposed realities. It strains credulity to believe anyone can really believe that affirmative action and white supremacy are occupants of a common bed of evil. The same is true for the use of such popular terms as “reverse discrimination,” suggesting a turning of the tables by blacks on whites. Such assertions need to be swept away so they may not be used as justifications for the end of affirmative action.

Gearing up for the struggles ahead of us, I sat down to see if I could fashion a metaphorical broom. This is what I came up with.

Racial discrimination, in its historic sense, meant that black people, not individually but as a race, could not:

• attend schools attended by white people;
• attend schools equal to those of white people;
• drink from the same water fountains, relieve themselves in the same toilets, or wash their hands in the same basins used by white people;
• eat in the same restaurants as white people;
• sleep in the same motels and hotels; swim at the same pools and beaches as white people;
• sit next to white people in lecture halls, concerts, or other public auditoriums;
• sit next to white people on buses or streetcars or other means of public transportation;
• be born or treated in the same hospitals or buried in the same graveyards as white people;
• vote or hold public office;
• expect to live in the same neighborhoods, hold the same jobs, or attain the same standards of living as white people.

These are particular forms of historic racial discrimination. They are well-known for their place in law and as the manifestations of white supremacy the Civil Rights Movement sought to end. But we need also to recall the values and beliefs of the white supremacy culture that gave rise to and justified this racial discrimination, its ultimate reason for being. These included the belief that black people, not individually but as a race, were genetically inferior to white people and that this genetic deficiency was responsible for the fact that black people were: less intelligent than white people; more prone to crime than white people; diseased;

---

Page 11

unclean; untruthful; unreliable; immoral; violent; sexually promiscuous; and sexually threatening, through their men, to white women.

The list could go on. These beliefs also led whites to condone lynch mobs, poverty, malnutrition, and sickness; and invent means beyond counting of handing out insult and injury.

Affirmative action means none of these things. It bears no generic, historic, analogous, or constitutional relationship to racial discrimination and the white supremacy myths that created it. What affirmative action in education does mean is: a broad effort to identify potential black applicants and to encourage them to apply for admission, often in the face of institutional and emotional barriers; judging each applicant holistically as an individual, not as a member of a race; offering admission to black students whose application materials are predictive of their success in the university; offering admission to some black students whose SAT scores and grades are lower than those of some white or Asian or Hispanic applicants who are not offered admission; a systematic program of encouraging successful black applicants to accept their offers of admission; an objective measure of the success of these actions in achieving their goals.

These are the particular forms of today’s affirmative action. They are the manifestations of a philosophy rooted in the American Dream. The values and beliefs that gave rise to and justify affirmative action, its ultimate reason for being, need to be recalled. These include the belief that: black people, not individually but as a race, are not genetically inferior to white people; universities share a national obligation to acknowledge and use their resources to help overcome the effects of historic racial discrimination; Virginia’s obligation is peculiarly enhanced by its long history of slavery, segregation, and the denial of education to Afro-Virginians; the effects of historic racial discrimination are far from having been eliminated in social institutions and individual assumptions; abolition of affirmative action would be a major setback for the university’s effort to overcome the effects of historic racial discrimination; affirmative action neither excludes nor favors any individual solely on the basis of race; affirmative action is a positive, not a negative, action. It harmonizes with and is essential to the university’s overall mission to produce the best educated, most creative, responsible, and public-spirited citizenry possible.

Our admissions dean and his associates try to take a holistic approach, judging each applicant as a whole person, taking into account, in addition to academic ability, the peculiar interests, needs, talents, skills, sex, race, nationality, and place of residence-all these and probably more. The result is that some students from every applying category are rejected: white, black, Hispanic, Asian-as well as male and female, brilliant and not brilliant, rich and poor, athlete and non-athlete, the musician and the tone deaf, leaders and followers, Virginians and non-Virginians. To say that one of these whose application for admission is not successful is a victim of “discrimination” is to empty the word totally of its derogatory meaning-making choices on the basis of class or race or category without regard for individual merit; to show prejudice-and return it to its literal meaning-to make clear distinctions; to make sensible decisions; to judge wisely; to show careful judgment. Understanding the word this way would be a good thing, but it is not likely that an opponent of affirmative action would agree, nor would concede that we have to make choices and that our discriminating judgment should be trusted. And yet that is precisely what a moral and fair university must do to meet its obligations to the citizenry, the national interest, and the students. There is no magic formula, no fixed scale for assigning points for each human characteristic. There is discrimination, good faith, a sense of history, and the vision of a future made better by our colleges and universities.

So Ms. Chavez was wrong when she told her audience here that we are “discriminating against new groups of people.” She was wrong when she said that our admissions policy “smacks of the kind of racism that has long plagued this nation.” She was wrong when she implied that we “continue to judge people based on the color of their skin.” And she was wrong when she told us that Martin Luther King’s legacy was on her side, not ours. We need to hold on to these truths as we prepare for the struggles ahead.

Paul Gaston is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He is a Life Fellow and former president of the SRC.This essay is excerpted from his booklet (June, 1999) “Reflections on Affirmative Action:Its Origins, Virtues, Enemies, Champions, and Prospects,” available from the University of Virginia News Service, Booker House, Charlottesville, VA 22903 or on the Southern Regional Council’s website at www.southerncouncil.org.

Remembering C. Vann Woodward (1908-1999)

By Paul Gaston

Vol. 12, No. 4, Winter 1999 pp. 19-20

C. Vann Woodward died on December 17, 1999, just a month after his ninety-first birthday. I heard the news from Sheldon Hackney, his friend and former student. “Vann died peacefully at his house in Hamden [Connecticut] late this afternoon,” Sheldon’s e-mail message said. “His daughter-in-law, Susan Woodward, had moved him out of the Whitney Center just yesterday. Workmen were still completing the construction of a ramp that would provide wheel-chair access to the sun room, where his bed had been set up, amidst his books. Lucy and I had stopped to see him just an hour after he had arrived home, where he desperately wanted to be, but he was mostly asleep and did not really recognize us. Susan tells us that he asked to be gotten out of bed so he could sit in his desk chair that had been brought up from the study. That is where he died.”

I last saw Vann in a New Haven hospital in July, shortly after the heart operation from which he never recovered. He was a strong man, physically as well as morally and intellectually. As we talked about the operation (“they took the organ out and put it on a table,” he said, shaking his head in wry disbelief) I thought back to the time two summers previous, when he arrived at the little Danish island of Aero for a meeting of Europeans and Americans who write and teach about the South. After a grueling twenty-four hour non-stop air, rail, and ferry trip from New Haven through New York, London, and Copenhagen airports and then to our remote island, he walked up the cobblestone street to the hotel, bag in hand, commanding hard-breathing stragglers to keep up. I thought he must be immortal.

He foiled that belief, but he lives permanently in our consciousness, which is a pretty good form of immortality.

In the New Haven hospital room we talked about why we became historians, and especially historians of the South. He chose history, he told me, because it would give him the opportunity to write, which is what he craved. The South he grew up in was a stirring place to be. I recalled a passage he once wrote about how he was aware, in the early 1930s, of “new voices in the land and new forces astir.” Deepening poverty brought on by the Great Depression threw in broad relief the South’s historic burdens of racism, inequality, and broken spirits, at the same time quickening the conscience of its youth. Too shy and temperamentally unsuited for the world of politics and agitation, he chose to be a writer, soon to become one of the new voices in the land. Admiring the brilliance of the novelists and poets, he did not become one of them but turned his burgeoning literary talent to making the past speak to the present.

By the time he arrived in Chapel Hill for doctoral studies, he had a book already under way. With a few added chapters it became his dissertation and, in 1938, one of the seminal works in American history: Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel . That book set him off on a life-long career of writing about the ways in which class and racial loyalties and fears shaped the destinies of Southern whites and blacks. Watson, the hero of Populism, turned out to be a symbol of hope in the first part of the book, as he penetrated the shibboleths that had divided the downtrodden and, in the last half, an example of the tragedy of Southern history as disillusionment turned him into a fierce demagogue. Woodward the writer, one of the new voices in the land, was well on the way to becoming one of the “new forces astir” as well.

After war duties as a Naval officer (and a book on a naval battle), he returned to academia, teaching first at Johns Hopkins University and then at Yale. More importantly, he returned to the themes of the Watson book. In Reunion and Reaction (1951) he showed how the materialistic ambitions of Southern and Northern conservatives merged to end Reconstruction, abandon the defense of the

---

Page 20

freedmen’s rights, and lay the basis for the rise of Southern conservatives at the expense of the Southern masses, white and black alike. In Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951), his masterpiece, he traced the rise of a new ruling class, the heavy toll it exacted from the Southern people, and the emergence and crushing defeat of a popular and humane protest movement. His Alabama friend Virginia Durr wrote to say it was a great book, telling truths long hidden or denied. In reply, he said, “my sympathies were obviously not with the people who ran things, and about whom I wrote most, but with the people who were run, who were managed and maneuvered and pushed around.” His sympathies never altered.

As our hospital-room conversation moved on, I told him that, in ways he might not have known, he and I were comrades in the South’s civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s. At my post at the University of Virginia, where mostly self-satisfied young men believed that segregation and the privileged social order they came from were ordained by higher powers and would certainly never be spoken badly of by General Lee, the teaching of Southern and Virginian history was an exhilarating challenge. I can’t imagine how it could have been met without Vann, and I told him so. His books on the promise and betrayal of Populism, the retreat from Reconstruction, and the triumph of the oppressive New South created a new way of looking at the whole of the southern experience; as they did, they fortified and guided my own passion.

After Origins came The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), which Martin King called the “historical Bible of the civil rights movement.” It washed away the defense that segregation was an immutable folkway that could not be changed by mere law and soon became recognized as the most influential work ever written about American race relations. It was followed by The Burden of Southern History (1960), a collection of essays that provided for southern history the kind of reach and resonance Faulkner’s novels gave to southern fiction.

With these five books I felt I had an invincible army behind me. And, as time passed, that army captured many of my students. The campus movements they organized to end segregation, combat racism, and build a different kind of New South out of the region’s virtues and promises were anchored in the Woodwardian reconstruction of southern history, now energized by the moral example of the black freedom movement. I wanted to tell him all of these things, and more, but he needed rest before the next visitor of the day should arrive. “Keep in touch,” were the last words he spoke to me.

Vann was a hero and example to my students as he was to thousands of other young and old people of good will; and my debt to him as an activist-teacher was incurred by many other young southern scholars in those days. He was also a hero to us for the kind of committed life he led. When Thurgood Marshall called on him to help prepare arguments in the Brown case, he responded; when historians were asked to join the last phase of the march from Selma to Montgomery, he marched; when expert testimony was needed to persuade Congress to renew the Voting Rights Act, he testified.

One might have thought that his scholarly integrity and moral courage would have been called into question because of such “activism,” or “presentism”; in fact they almost never were. Partly this was because of his craftsmanship–no one wrote better, had a more thorough command of the sources, or a keener sense of irony and the complexity of history. No one who cared about the course of events in the past was more scrupulous in writing history addressed to the present. Later, of course, he would be showered with all the honors his profession could bestow and he would read with modesty and a good measure of amusement the regular declarations of his status as the nation’s pre-eminent historian. Partly, too, I think, his authority derived from the kindness and consideration he showed for others. He wrote often that criticism was the lifeblood of good scholarship, but he never made it personal or conveyed it with malice. The mean-spiritedness, careerism, and petty rivalries that mar so much of our intellectual discourse found no home in his makeup. In this, as in so much else, he was a rare model.

He kept working right up to the time of last July’s surgery. He once told me that he wrote more in his retirement years than when he was teaching, promising me I would find the emeritus years even more satisfying than what had come before. Sheldon reports that “he lived the end of his life as well as the rest of it. Up until last July, he was working every day, taking a walk every day, having an evening martini every day, and was surrounded by people who loved him. In this, also, he was a model for us.” His parting words to me, “keep in touch,” put me in mind of one of the old Movement songs:

There’s someone by my side walkin’.

There’s a voice inside me talkin’.

There’s some questions need some answers.

Carry it on. Carry it on.

Paul Gaston, Life Fellow and former President of the Southern Regional Council, is Emeritus Professor of History in the University of Virginia and a contributing editor to Southern Changes.