Ted De Laney July 31, 1996 Mame Warren, interviewer Warren: This is Mame Warren. Today is the thirty-first of July 1996. I'm in Lexington, Virginia, with Ted De Laney, who probably has worn as many hats at Washington and Lee as pretty much anybody. Did you grow up in Lexington? De Laney: Yes. Warren: So asking you what your earliest memory of Washington and Lee is probably goes back pretty far. De Laney: Yes, it goes back to when I was a small boy. I can remember Sunday afternoons when we were children. One of the real high times was going to Lee Chapel to look at Traveller's skeleton, which was on display in the basement of the chapel. So, yeah, it's a long time ago. Warren: Was it really carved up and had initials in it? De Laney: No, not that I recall. In fact, the skeleton was in a glass case. I'm sure there are confusions, because there used to be a fully assembled camel skeleton in the biology department that did have initials on it and, in spite of the hump, there used to be people who thought it was Traveller, but it wasn't. In fact, the biology department used to have quite a collection of mammalian skeletons that were fully articulated or, that is, assembled. Now and then, there were people who didn't realize that horses couldn't possibly be shaped like that. They would think this camel was a horse. [Laughter] Warren: What do you mean they "used to have"? What happened to all of them? 1 De Laney: I don't know what happened to the camel. I know it was still there when I worked in the biology department, but things like that became a storage problem. But Traveller, of course, was after the chapel was renovated, I guess it was President Huntley at the time, perhaps it was President Cole, I can't recall, but whichever, didn't think that the renovated chapel was the appropriate place for a horse skeleton, and I agree. For a while, Traveller was stored under a dormitory, and the Richmond Times Dispatch got hold of that and there was some controversy about Traveller being in a place of dishonor. The university asked the biology department to take Traveller, and the head of the department at the time, an older man named Kenneth Porter Stevens, decided that he didn't want Traveller in the biology department, because every little old lady from the Confederacy would be traipsing around the biology department complaining that Traveller didn't have a place of honor there. So the university ultimately buried Traveller on the campus. I think the grave is somewhere near the chapel, although I'm not sure. But in any case, that's what happened to that skeleton. But the other large skeletons that were at the campus, I guess at one time they were on display somewhere that the public used to see. I don't recall. But I don't know what the biology department did to dispose of them, but certainly they were occupying space that the department needed for other things. Warren: I've seen pictures of them and I was curious about what happened to all of them. It will remain a mystery. All right. You're this little boy going to see Traveller. What else do you remember? Was it a playground? Was the campus a playground for you? De Laney: No. The campus was not a playground and, in fact, I don't know, I think the campus was—well, I'm not sure what I think of the campus from that part of my life. My family was pretty restrictive on us as far as our whereabouts were concerned when we were children. Maybe on Sunday afternoon we might do something like that. But 2 generally, we would not have been permitted to be across town on the W&L campus. But I grew up not far from the campus. In fact, I was born and most of my childhood was spent just around the corner from where the Visitors Center is now. In fact, our family house, which looks pretty bad at this point, which was rented, I guess, to students, the address was 7 Tucker Street. It's right behind presently where Dr. Crew's office is. So the other memory of Washington and Lee are the fraternities that were there, that were close by our house, the Pi Phi House, the SAE House. Of course, growing up close to fraternities was a little fun, because where our parents might have been unhappy with the music keeping them awake, I can remember, as teenagers, we weren't unhappy at all. It was great fun to lay in bed at night and listen to rock bands. But nonetheless, there was also the reality that Washington and Lee was a segregated campus, and even though it was close by, and even though the fraternities were our neighbors, there was that invisible line there that was not crossed in the fifties when I was growing up, or even in the early sixties. I finished high school in 1961, and the idea of getting a degree from Washington and Lee in 1961 is an impossibility for a black kid in Lexington. There also was the reality that as close as the vestiges of Washington and Lee were, Washington and Lee was many, many, many miles away in a different sense. Warren: So did your family have any economic ties with Washington and Lee? De Laney: Not exactly. At one point in my mother's life, in a very, very short period in my mother's life, she had been a maid at a fraternity house. I'm not so sure that she did that more than a year, and I'm not really so sure why. My mother's family was sort of unusual. My mother was one of six girls, and even though my grandmother was college-educated, she didn't work, and my grandfather was a barber. He taught all of his daughters how to be barbers, so my mother, most of her life, worked as a barber cutting men's hair. My father worked in Natural Bridge, and later in Roanoke. There 3 were no direct economic links to Washington and Lee, except that brief period that my mother worked in a fraternity. Warren: Were you aware of what was going on in that period when Washington and Lee was first trying to get black students to attend? De Laney: Well, I started working here in 1963, and the first black student doesn't arrive until 1967. So I worked here for four years on a segregated college campus. Warren: Let's start there, then. Let's talk about that. De Laney: Okay. I came to work here in August 1963. There were a lot of things that had happened in my own life that sort of pushed me into working here. One is that my parents had not been able to afford to send me to college, and I had been unable to, even though I had been out of high school a year, I had not been able to obtain work. I finished high school when I was seventeen, in 1961. I had a United Negro Fund Scholarship to Morehouse College, and my mother didn't want me to go there because of the sit-in strikes, and this fear that she would worry about me for four years sitting at lunch counters. Nonetheless, my family didn't have money to send me to college. At seventeen years old, in Lexington, a black kid, seventeen years old, finding a job was virtually impossible. It was probably one of the worst years of my life, 1961-62, not having anything to do. At the end of that year, my parents permitted me to do something that they had vetoed before, and that was at one point I had been interested in the priesthood, and I was permitted, at that point, to try this, since there was this frustration about me not doing anything. So in the summer of 1962, I went to Garrison, New York, and entered the monastery of Graymoor Friars. I was there, I guess about seven months, long enough to discover that that was not what God was calling me to do. I came home, and then, once again, there was the same situation, no job. At some point during the year, 1963, I got a waiting job. I was waiting tables and not making a great deal of money. Then I sort of reluctantly did what seemed to be the 4 history of black people in Lexington, ended up going to Buildings and Grounds here at Washington and Lee, looking for a job. So at nineteen years old, I came here to work. In August 1963, I came here to work as a janitor in the biology department. To some extent, it was sort of a lucky situation to be in, because the biology department was having growing pains, and Dr. Stevens was in his last years as the department head. They brought in this new man from North Carolina, a man whose name was Henry S. Roberts, more popularly called Pat Roberts. He wanted to hire a laboratory technician for the department. Certainly, I'm sure his preference would have been one who had a degree, but there was not that kind of money budgeted for something like that. So he decided that the next best thing was a bright high school graduate. So I was in the right place at the right time. The idea was the department will teach me everything they needed me to know. So I went from pushing a broom to doing something very different. I can remember, at the time, the salary raise was very impressive to me, but certainly, in retrospect, it's not impressive at all over a year's time, because my job description changed. I got a $1,000 raise, but I think when I started working here, I started for something like $3,600 a year or something. So there was a completely different dimension to my job after that. I was there in the biology department until 1983, at which time I quit my job and became a full-time student. I had, beginning in 1979, taken courses part time. There's a little-known benefit that the university has, where a full-time employee can take a course a semester free, as long as you can arrange it with your job supervisor, for credit. I had racked up, I guess, about thirty-eight credits. Bill Watt said to me one day—he was the dean—"You know, if you ever get serious about a degree, you have to be full time two years." So in 1983 I quit my job and became a full-time student. But, in essence, I was in the biology department from 1963 to 1983, so that's twenty years of my life there. 5 Warren: Did you develop an interest in biology? De Laney: Yes and no. I certainly enjoyed what I was doing in the biology department. Most of the stuff that I was doing—well, I shouldn't say most of the stuff—it probably was the craziest job description in the world, and if you talk to John Hufnagel, he could probably verify this, because one of the things that I found in the biology department was that I had to work for about six different bosses. Even though I've the greatest affection for those people, one of the things that certainly is a part of being in a situation like that is everybody's needs are the most important needs in the world. So oftentimes it was a matter of juggling things with regard to who you're helping at any given moment. That's not to say there weren't a lot of times that were dull, a lot of times that were down, and certainly it was not a job in which I was doing frantic-paced work, because I was not. But my responsibilities covered a multitude of things, many of which were interesting, some less interesting. One of the things that I did was I did laboratory preparations. With regard to the introductory labs, that was probably primary responsibility. General biology, for instance, I spent a great deal of time preparing solutions, and either assembling equipment or setting equipment up for laboratories that were of a biochemical nature, that taught me the principles of biology. With courses like general zoology, that ended up being probably a more interesting development than even doing the things with general biology. Certainly, it intensified my interest, because I was working with a guy named Jim Starling, who was in the department for many years. He was a premedical advisor. He was in his declining years, declining years inasmuch as he'd had heart surgery a few times, his health wasn't the greatest, and as a part of heart surgery, oftentimes his memory wasn't particularly great. I would find very tiny parasitic organisms under the microscope to have on display for students to see in a given lab. I would also help him set up the laboratory examinations. So I ended up being probably somebody that he 6 came to depend upon more and more within. That probably is the one lab that I probably was most needed in, mostly because of his health and the level of dependence he went through. The younger people in the department didn't need me quite as much, and some of the stuff that they were doing was so sophisticated, that they had to work hand in hand with me, and my mathematical abilities have always been very slight. So when you come to mixing up some of these really sophisticated things, where you're going to have to do some real mathematics with the formula to make sure that you're doing it right, then they had to be with me. Other responsibilities included the greenhouse, the care of the animal run. I did the photographic stuff for the department, and that tended mostly to be making slides to illustrate people's lectures. I supervised five work-study students, usually, a year, for the department. We had a departmental library which the secretary and I together essentially ran. I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot, but there were a lot of things that I did, and developed some incredibly, incredibly good friendships with students during those years. Warren: I wanted to ask you about that. What was your relationship with students, and did it change through the years as people's understanding of blacks at Washington and Lee changed? De Laney: Well, one of the things that's really interesting about the relationships that I had with students over the years is really a part of understanding the South, and what the South was like. It seems to me that elite Southerners always had a polite relationship with people of color. The hostilities between the races were oftentimes hostilities that were between people of lower income brackets, and so you have situation where Washington and Lee was essentially a rich white boys' college, and most of the students in those days were Southerners. 7 My relationship with the Southern students was very good from day one. In fact, one of the things that I've never forgotten, there was a Northern student one time who got to be very friendly with me in the lab. I don't remember his name, but he proceeded to tell me one day, much to my surprise, and I was really annoyed by this, that should I see him on campus and he didn't speak, it was because he was with his white Southern friends, and that when in Rome you do as Romans do, etc., etc. I pretty much didn't respond to that, but one of the things that was very interesting is that very quickly thereafter, he learned an incredibly important lesson and learned just how polite Southerners were. He saw me on the campus and he was with two Southern students, and both of those Southern students greeted me immediately, and I greeted them. I deliberately did not greet him, but I looked at him. I think the point was gotten across that his assessment of the South is entirely incorrect. It might have been correct if the students had belonged to a different social class. But one of the things that I think that C. van Woodward and other scholars of the New South have certainly argued is that white and black Southerners have lived together and have known each other, and there has been a certain gentility with regard to the way they treated each other, in spite of segregation. My experience always was that the very worst of the relationships that were experienced with white Southerners were with those who were low income and not those who could afford to go to a college like Washington and Lee. That is certainly not to say that students in the sixties were clamoring for this place to be desegregated, because certainly there was also the reality that white Southerners of all social classes wanted to preserve the status quo. And certainly the students here wanted to preserve the status quo just as much as any other segment of Southern society. Maybe I've rambled and veered away from what you were asking. Warren: Oh, no, you're exactly where I want you to be. So what did you see happen and how did the transition happen? 8 De Laney: Well, there was a lot of stuff that happened here that I didn't like. The students that I was friendliest with, and the students who were friendliest with me, were the Jewish students, and certainly that is because there was their own little struggle in a society like this as well. I've give you an example. During the 1960s, still, and I'm not sure when this changed, but the charters of national fraternities read, "white Christians." So those national fraternities not only were racially segregated, they were religiously segregated. There were two fraternity houses on the campus to which the Jewish students could belong, and those were the Zeta Beta Tau and the Phi Epsilon Pi houses, which were across from the entrance to the hospital. Those boys faced certainly some levels of anti- Semitism on the campus, and I can remember some of those guys that I was friends with used to be almost paranoid about the anti-Semitism that existed on campus. Very, very strong friendships developed with Jewish students. It was no unusual to hear students put down students who were Jewish in my presence, which also said a lot to me about where they were with regard to people outside of their own ethnic or racial groups. Washington and Lee was very slow to change in that regard. In fact, I can recall that in the late sixties and early seventies, when these barriers disappeared with the fraternities, some of the Jewish students were very unhappy when very attractive Jewish freshmen pledged other houses. It essentially killed the two Jewish houses on campus, which functioned as car pools to temple in Lynchburg, and the Passover Seder every year at the ZBT house, etc. But the changes don't happen at Washington and Lee until the late sixties, when Washington and Lee is desegregated. I can remember the discussions about desegregation among the students, and in spite of their gentility that I mentioned earlier, I can remember hearing some of the same arguments being voiced against desegregation that VMI has used to keep women out. I heard some of those same arguments here again ten years ago, when W&L was getting ready to coeducate. 9 One of the big questions that I used to hear all the time was, "Well, where will they go to the bathroom?" Well, of course, there was the reality of Southern society that restaurants were segregated. I mean, there was a Leggett's Department Store, for instance, downtown, that had two sets of bathrooms, and on one set there was the word "colored." So students who were living in a society where these signs still existed many places in the 1960s, had a great deal of difficulty understanding that even though these students who would come to Washington and Lee in the late sixties were their same gender, they couldn't possibly go to the bathroom with them, or couldn't possibly use the same bathrooms. All of the same sorts of hangups. I met a guy on Saturday. It was really interesting. There was a band club on Saturday in the dining hall, where the kids who were here in the Futures Program, and the Futures Program, I guess, is ninety percent black, and serves as something of a recruiting tool for the college. But one of the fathers that I met on Saturday had come here in the sixties. There was some weekend sort of seminar kinds of things that happened with Hampton Institute, which is the historically black college on the other side of the state. So they brought these students and faculty members up from Hampton in the sixties to talk about desegregation. This guy told me—it was really funny to run into—because I remember the program happening, but I never attended any of those meetings or anything, but this guy told me that one of the things that he can remember so vividly is the student making the argument that black students could not possibly be educated to the level for the Washington and Lee education. So there are these arguments about silly things like bathroom, but also more fundamental and deep-seated things like intellectual abilities and the inability of a black student to aspire to the level of excellence that Washington and Lee demanded. Warren: Where was that coming from, from faculty or from students? De Laney: From students. From students. In fact, the one faculty member that he remembered that was involved in these talks, who certainly would never let something 10 like that go unchallenged, was Lou Hodges. Lou Hodges is one of the most decent people I've ever met in my life. Of course, Lou was on the scene and was very much a vocal part of the community during those years, as Washington and Lee moved toward desegregation. The one thing that I guess is a part of [unclear], is that by the late sixties, when Washington and Lee was moving in this direction, I had no aspirations at all at that point about a college education myself. I was just sort of locked into my job, and enjoyed the contacts that I had with students, enjoyed my job, and was just sort of floating by. But I think the student body was probably very, very slow to change, and I'm not so sure they're completely changed today. I also have a sense of chronological order, and we can talk about where students are today later on in the interview, but I'll let you ask another question. Warren: You mentioned when the first black students arrived, and my understanding is that Washington and Lee had to really go out and find people, because no one was applying here. De Laney: Well, they still do. I may be wrong with my date, but it's either '66 or '67. I think it's '67. The first black student was a local kid named Dennis Haston , and there was a disastrous situation, so this part of it you certainly have to be careful with with regard to your writing. Dennis was like a kid in a fishbowl. He was right out of Lexington High School. He was the only black student on the campus, and certainly not a desirable situation to be in. Dennis lived at home with his family, and was one of six brothers. He has brothers who work on this campus, I think, at least one brother who works on this campus as a janitor right now. But Dennis did not survive a year academically, and he ended up transferring to a historically black college where he was completely successful, and went on with his life, and is a fine guy, and a very successful person today. 11 The next two black students were, once again, local students, but their experiences were very different from Dennis. I'm not sure why. Perhaps Dennis had made people more comfortable with the idea of a black student being here. Dennis was a pretty low-key, very nice kid. The next two kids were kids named Linwood Smothers, and Linwood's mother worked in the snack bar for many, many years. Her name is Famie, and his Aunt Marie still works over there. The other kid was a kid named Walter Blake. Those two boys were very, very different from Dennis in many ways. Linwood Smothers is a very quiet, determined kind of kid. As I recall, he was a physics engineering major, and we had some sort of program at the time where—I guess it was a six-year program. You did four years here and two years at Columbia, and you got a master's degree in engineering. He was entirely successful. He was a good student. He did well here. Walter Blake was a politics major, and Walter also did well here, but Walter had an experience that was very different from Linwood's, and that is that Walter pledged a fraternity, there again one of the Jewish houses. He was a member of the ZBT fraternity. This past year I had a student who did an honors thesis on the desegregation of Washington and Lee, which has some problems—the thesis does. But he did send out questionnaires to black alumni that he didn't follow up on, and one of the two who responded was Walter Blake. So that honors thesis is in Special Collections. So Walter Blake still has, I think, important ideas to share about his experiences during the period. But those two guys were successful. They went through Washington and Lee, there was no major problem the whole time they were here. They sort of continued what Dennis had started. They were nice kids who showed that the school wasn't going to crumble because they were here. Then they recruited another bunch who, I guess, the first class that had any significant number of black students in it, I think, was the class of '74. I'm not really 12 sure. But it certainly was the class that Bill Hill was in, and I don't know whether you got a chance to meet him last week. But one of the things that's very, very interesting, is that Holt Merchant had a student, a black student, who studied desegregation of Washington and Lee a few years ago, in an independent study, and he talked to these guys, and they had nothing but good recollections of their four years at W&L. The thing that just blew Holt's mind and it blew mine as well, is that we remembered when they were here and how unhappy they were. So I think the years have sort of tempered their recollection of what the experience was really like. Warren: What do you remember? De Laney: Well, I remember students who—and to some extent this still happens—I remember students who came in who were eager, who were absolutely willing to do their best, who found that doors were closed to them socially, and that at least the academic door was open there, but the social doors that were closed made it very difficult to be a student here. One of the things that you have to think about is that, first of all, it was an all- male environment. One of the things is that human nature being what human nature is, in an all-male environment, there was a need for a female element, and there were even fewer black female students at the neighboring colleges, but the black students did not have the access to the female colleges that the other students had. The other students had automobiles, the other students had the fraternities as a vehicle for bringing, for attracting women to the campus for social events. So the black students didn't have that. They weren't in the fraternities. They couldn't get in the fraternities. So there was some frustration because the social outlets weren't there. One of the things that I was very slow to learn about the black experience at Washington and Lee, and I was slow to learn because I wasn't in the quagmire that these students were in, was what their day-to-day experiences oftentimes were like with white students. I understand that a lot better today. I understand it from completely 13 different experiences, and with some of the experiences that I've had with black students more recently. But one of the things that, in spite of the gentility that was always there, in spite of the civility that I always experienced, there was also an element that these students experienced that was not civil. I was very slow to come to understand that, and very slow to come to believe that that non-civil element was there. So the experiences that I had with students were very different from the experiences that some of these guys were having as students. I suspect, however, one of the reasons that their recollections are more moderate today than the experiences, I think, actually were, is because of the doors that a Washington and Lee degree opens. When I finally got mine, I was really surprised to discover how receptive potential employers were to you when you said the college you went to, or how receptive potential graduate schools were when they found out where you had gone to school. So I think that those guys, at least as I understand it today, had some really horrendous experiences that were mostly experiences between them and other students. Some of them got to the attention of the student body as a whole, others didn't. One of the things that I can remember from those years is there was a white student who was dating a local black girl, and there was some controversy on the campus because of this. Certainly people were more expressive of their feelings about crossing this boundary that was a taboo in the South than anything. Even as late as the 1980s, when I was a student myself, I can remember Holt Merchant saying—he had a seminar—well, it wasn't a seminar, it was a directed independent study, and I guess there were about four or five guys in it, and the topic was civil rights. They said that they really wanted the experience of talking to someone who had experienced 14 segregation, who had gone to a black high school, etc., because they didn't understand what segregation was. Holt came and asked me if I would mind coming to his class to speak to these guys, and I said, "Sure, I'll do it." I went in and I sort of turned tables on them. I said, "You know, I don't believe you don't know what segregation is." And they sort of looked at me a little strange. I said, "How many black students are in your fraternities?" Then they began to explain to me why there were no black students in the fraternities, and they blamed it on the alumni and their parents. My response was, "The alumni and your parents are not here. You are here." "But our parents will give us hell if we do this." "Well, your parents are back home, and you know full well what segregation is, because you are perpetrating it." At that particular point, there were two of them who were sitting there, and I knew what fraternity house that they had come from. An interracial incident had happened in their fraternity house just a couple of weeks before I was talking to these guys, and some guy in their fraternity had showed up at a fraternity party with a black date, and the fraternity squared off against each other because of this. I said, "Yeah, I went to a segregated high school, and I grew up in a segregated system, but you guys know full well what segregation is, too, because look at what goes on in your midst." So the only other thing that I can only say with regard to that is, I look at the students that I see who have come in, fairly conservative black students who've been radicalized by the system. One of them is a young black kid, he just finished, John Branham, who I'm not sure had really identified himself as black until he came here. His mother is white, his father is black, John is very fair-complected. John grew up in the Mormon Church, a fairly conservative Western kid, and John's argument to me was that the college completely radicalized him, that he had never thought about race as an 15 issue before he became a student here. So his senior year, he was president of the Minority Student Association. He went to the Million Man March. He was a kid who, by himself, brought Cornell West to the campus. So I'm not really so sure that the campus has changed very much since the 1960s with regard to students. Warren: I need to turn the tape over.