Dumas interview [Begin Tape 2, Side 1] 29 Warren: This is Mame Warren. Today is the twenty-fourth of May, 1997. I’m in Chicago with Willard Dumas. Do you want to say some more about the women? How about the friendships in your class? By the time you came along, women had been in for a while. It sounds like you still had a sense of those first women being pioneers. Were the women in your class perceived as being pioneers still? Dumas: No. I don’t think so anymore. No. I don’t think they were seen as pioneers. I mentioned Austin Parker because she was the first woman elected to the Executive Committee. So in a political and sociological fashion, Austin and I sometimes—and I don’t mean to be cliché, the one white woman and the one black guy, we ended up having a lot of similar views on stuff that we saw as students, members of the Executive Committee. I had a lot of respect for her and just the other people in our class. As for the women in my class, I think by then they had become accepted and integrated very much in the minds of students. Clearly they weren’t equal. There were problems with sports teams and what was available to them. Yes, they were still being elected to positions here and there, but there wasn’t the animosity that had existed with the other students. There were men who refused to date women from Washington and Lee. They thought that they were somehow holding on to a tradition and being honorable holding onto a cause and all of that. I can’t believe there would be men in my class who really felt that way. Probably one of my closest friends from Washington and Lee student is Pat Lopes, Patricia Lopes, and some of our experiences were fused together because we were non-traditional Washington and Lee students, but she had been editor of the newspaper the year I think I was president of the student body. She’s a very good reporter, and we just became friends. We saw things similarly and enjoyed each other’s company. There were lots of other people in my class who came from different backgrounds, different parts of the country, women students who I was good friends 30 with and older students—Mary Hanson [phonetic] and Mary Alice McMarrow [phonetic], Jenny Bray. Warren: I’ve interviewed Pat Lopes. I really enjoyed meeting her, and she told me a bit about the background of your election. Can we talk about that now? Dumas: Sure. Warren: What happened, from your point of view? Dumas: The gentleman who had been elected president before me withdrew from the school, and there was a question regarding his honor when he withdrew from school, and once things were looked at, it became apparent that there were a lot of factors involved in that. There may have been an attempt by some students to manufacture an accusation of dishonorable conduct against a student, I really can’t remember. I may be bound not to ever discuss this anymore. You should probably ask the current EC president what I can say. But I’d been elected vice president of the student body, much to the shock of not only myself but a lot of other students. Warren: Is that a student body-wide election? Dumas: Yeah. It includes the law school and all the academic classes. The individual who’d been elected president was also Jewish, and I think that there was a dichotomy. I think we were seen as the non-traditional candidates. I don’t know. There may have been someone Jewish who had been president of the student body before then. Clearly, there’d been no one black who was elected vice president, and it shocked the individuals who were my opponents, two individuals who I think are very decent individuals, one of which I became friends with and had to work very closely with that following year, Chris Giblin, and it was horrible, because this young man was a good friend of mine and I would say he still is, except I’ve kind of lost touch with him. He’s practicing law in Arkansas and has a wonderful family, and he’s had to put whatever mistakes he may have made or may have not made behind him and move on. For him, 31 he’d gone to Washington and Lee as an undergraduate and a law school student, and the university had been very important to him. I came to realize after being there, that there were lots of people who made mistakes at the university, and there were few people without blemishes on their honor as students there. I think I began to lose a lot of the idealized images I had of not only the Honor System but about people in general. So it was a very difficult experience for me because he was a good friend of mine. But to speed up to what exactly happened, I had been elected vice president, and I believe the law school had already left campus, their term had ended, when this whole situation developed, and there was a movement by the students who had lost the election and their backers, and it became one of—I was cast as the anti-fraternity candidate, and perhaps maybe that’s not unrealistic because of the things that I’ve said, although I don’t think I ever said anything against the fraternities publicly. I think my conversations were with John Wilson and other administrators and occasionally with other students, that I raised issues with them, but I also knew that fraternities provided the life blood of entertainment at the school. I had also been on the Student Activities Board and taken part in planning Fancy Dress and their activities for the year, and so we knew that we had to work around fraternity schedules because they provided entertainment for students. I was not a fool. I didn’t want to destroy fraternities at Washington and Lee. I still don’t. I think it’s a good way for them to raise money and do everything they do. I just don’t think they’re perfect. So that happened, and a decision had to be reached as to what would happen next year. Would I succeed and become president or would there be a new election? It was no secret that there was a question of honor, and actually, this probably shouldn’t be put into the tape. I think it would be inappropriate. Has anyone discussed the huge cheating scandal in ’54? Warren: Oh, yes. Oh, Lord, yes. It was a turning point in our history. 32 Dumas: Okay. Well then, since there was a question of honor involved with the student’s withdrawal from school, there were issues as to what would happen to the future of the Honor System. Would this be like the event in ’54? How could we repair the damage to student confidence? Warren: Was it taken to that level because he was the president-elect? Because there were people who were asked to leave on a regular basis. Dumas: Right. It was particularly because he was the president-elect. Warren: So at the time it was seen as a parallel to the scandal of ‘54? Dumas: I don’t think a lot of students knew about the history of the scandal of ‘54. Those of us on the EC did. I think that there were students who knew the school history, that they knew that there had been this major scandal. I think those people who were curious why we had gone from Division I to Division III, they knew. Clearly the reporters—I mean, this wasn’t a shock to Pat nor to faculty members, and I think that was probably disseminated to the student body. So there ended up being a meeting. It really broke down along political lines, political in the sense that conservative tradition. A lot of people came out—fraternity-house driven, fraternity males, a handful of fraternities that I would lump together as also being segregated, and they wanted a new election immediately. They wanted one without the law school. I had carried the law school along with the student because he had been a law school student. Dean—was it Kirgis or Henneman? I can’t remember—said that, okay, if they wanted to have student body elections without the law school, he would start classes next year without allowing the EC to conduct sort of honor instruction to the students and that he would not apply the Honor System to his law school students anymore if it came down to that. He was very disappointed that there would be a new election without the law school participating, without them having the influence of electing the president of the student body next year. 33 So there were a series of meetings that week that were ugly. We had to get EC members who were law school students who had left town already, who had gone on clerkships for the summer, to come back and help sort of deliberate and figure out what we were going to do. My opponent who had run against me for vice president, he had left the country. He was in England, I think, with Professor Hughes or Evans, whichever one of them used to go to London, and ironically, he had belonged to one of these conservative fraternities. He was a member of KA, which I ended up carrying a lot of members of the fraternity house because they weren’t particularly crazy about this individual anyway. And so out of those conservative fraternities, actually, I had a lot of support among the brothers of KA, although these same people two weeks later wanted reassurances from me that I wasn’t going to take the flags down in the chapel. It just seems so ridiculous to even think about any of this stuff anymore. So there were these three forums where the little EC room in the University Center—I don’t know if it’s there anymore, which can probably comfortably accommodate thirty people sitting and then eleven or twelve of the members of the Executive Committee in this little horseshoe, but it was probably filled that night with maybe forty or fifty fraternity members, and those were the only people that showed up, those individuals and Pat Lopes, and they pressured the EC into taking a vote that there maybe should be another election, and I abstained from voting. Those people who had been supporters of our opponents actually voted and individuals who would benefit if there was another election, and I felt that I had a conflict of interest and shouldn’t vote, and I think the motion passed by one vote. Pat had been a reporter in that audience, I recall, for the Phi, and I think what she shared with me is that she has never heard anything more racist before in her life. I don’t know if she said that that night, but she was sitting way in the back, and the references to me and the references to the recently withdrawn president-elect of the student body, they were anti-Semitic and very derogatory and abrasive, and I think 34 whatever fears or weaknesses she knew that members of the student body possessed, she had seen them manifest that night, and she, I think, was pretty sick. I don’t even remember if she said she got sick after that. I don’t know. She didn’t share that with me until, I think, maybe a week or two later. I was oblivious. This young man who withdrew had truly been a very good friend of mine and was so years after that. Word got out to the student body, and then this coalition of all sorts of students were just outraged, and law students actually came back to town, and there was another meeting, and another vote was taken. That decision was reversed, and everyone said, "Look, we elected Willard vice president, that in the event if anything happened he would be president. He had specific duties as vice president.” I was responsible for, I think, a lot of all the administrative stuff when it came to like actual honor hearings and dealing—and there were specific things. So they said that they had faith in me. So I "succeeded" and became president of the student body. It was quite a shock. It was nothing that I had expected to happen that way. I expected that I’d be vice president—well, I hoped that I’d be vice president and after I would run for president and be president my senior year. Actually, the young man who defeated me the following year when I ran for president, he had been in the group that had come out publicly in support of me becoming president, and he had belonged to one of these conservative fraternities and had expressed his outrage at the behavior of his fellow brothers. So there were lots of people who, I think, would have conceded that it was a disappointing reaction on the parts of students. The only other time that I saw worse than that was John Wilson, I think, expelled or suspended two fraternity students from, again, one of these conservative fraternities that had thrown, I think, bricks or bottles into the window of the housemother and could have injured her, I mean, could have seriously hurt her, but she wasn’t hurt. I think he did what I think he had never done before, was to have the students come to his office and called their parents and said, "You must leave.” I don’t think any 35 university president relishes doing that, and there was outrage and pandemonium among the students, and eventually the administration had to get a meeting together in Lee Chapel, and for all of these people who worshipped the ground that General Lee walked on, there was such disrespectful behavior. I think they refused to take off their baseball caps that night, and it was just awful. I think they shouted at Wilson. I would guess that if he recalls it, it would have to be one of the low points when he was president. I was so shocked. I had never seen such behavior. So I would say those two incidents are linked in my mind. I remember walking back from that meeting in Lee Chapel, and President Wilson, I think, was visibly upset, and I remember talking to him, trying to change the subject and talk about the trees. At first I think he thought that I was crazy, because Buildings and Grounds had been pruning the trees, and they just didn’t look healthy. So I started talking about the trees, and then he caught on to what I was talking about, because I was embarrassed for him. I mean, there was no other way. Students who were there later said that the conduct of the students who were assembled was wholly inappropriate, but that’s [unclear] John Wilson [unclear]. But yeah, I became president of the student body, and I worked my best to heal and repair the Honor System and the reason why I came to Washington and Lee, and I think that we were reasonably successful. Warren: How did you do that? Dumas: I think we tried to do it in our actions and our words and trying to show that we were committed to the ideals of the system and committed to an inclusive student body. I’m trying to think of something specific that we did. Eventually, when it came time to the whole patronage time and appointing people to run organizations, I think that we actually had open application procedures. No longer were certain organizations the purview of this fraternity or that fraternity. A lot of non-traditional people got into positions, and it caused all sorts of problems. Because when you got there one of the 36 things at fraternity Rush, they would sell the houses. "Oh, well, we have the editor of the newspaper, or this, or that, and we run Student Activities Board," and so I changed some of that, I mean, not me by myself. There were other people, I think, who had thought that. Warren: So how did you go about changing? This is very interesting to me because I know how it used to be and I know it changed, but I didn’t know when it changed. So this is very interesting. Dumas: I shouldn’t say that it was done on my own. The guy who’d been president before me, Christopher De Movellan, also an independent—I think that was the trend. It was Brad Root, I think Christopher De Movellan and myself, and I think we were sort of like those awful liberal years where we had been members of the Executive Committee, and we had seen sort of this old-boy network work, and we were like, "It’s going to be different when we’re there.” So Christopher had started it, and I think it was something that I committed myself to. I think it was one of the things that I campaigned on when I ran for vice president. With Hugh Finkelstein running for president and with him being a law school student, the whole idea was that there was going to be more equity. The whole allocation process for the law school was always viewed as, to use a Texas euphemism, "a redheaded stepchild.” I mean, they were always treated second-class. It was not uncommon that Fancy Dress could be scheduled while law school was in exams or something awful. I think it really irritated law school students because they paid the $140 in activities fees, and they’re there not to be like students with the rest of us, but they want to get their money’s worth and that’s what they’re paying this huge activity fee for, or what seemed like a large activity fee. So that was part of our program that we campaigned for. We were going to shake things up and change things from the way they used to be, and I think in part of that, I think that was an impression that could be also— 37 actually, I would say maybe almost for the Honor System, but I have to say even when I was a freshman or sophomore member of the EC, I think that honor investigations were conducted with honor and integrity, and I don’t think that someone was ever found guilty or had to leave school because he or she was not popular or anything like that. I do think that other people were given the benefit of the doubt, but in general, the administration of the Honor System was always topnotch. But that was one of the things we did. So we tried to make things a little more egalitarian. You can’t have visions that there are all of these brown and black and yellow people who are going to be running, because they’re not there. This was just opening up the process truly to other students who may have not been from these particular fraternities, and not that those other students were excluded. They weren’t. And hell, I mean, I can remember sitting in these EC meetings, and these fraternity brothers would say, "Look, that guy is a moron. He’s an idiot. He doesn’t do anything. We can’t put him in charge.” That would happen, but they walked in with this presumption that they could get these positions because they had done the walk under the person before them. And it had its repercussions. I think by my last trustees’ meeting, the wife of a trustee and the mother of a student said, "Well, we’re very happy to hear about this opening up of the student body and positions, but my daughter didn’t get on to this organization, and do you think that maybe you’re opening them up a little bit too much?” So I knew that I had done more than enough there and that my time was limited. Warren: What was it like for you that senior year? I presume when you lost the election to be president, you were no longer on the EC? Dumas: Well, actually my classmates returned me to the seat that I’d had since a freshman with, I think, the highest majority that they ever had. I think that there was a recognition, even on the part of "reactionary" students that I had been very dedicated to the Executive Committee. Even against our own candidates, I won without any 38 problem. It was something ridiculous like, I don’t know, 75 percent to 25 percent. So I was happy with that. It was difficult, because I have to say that I had enjoyed being president. I thought that I had good ideas. So I ended up focusing much needed time and energy on improving the chances for me getting into law school. I went to Costa Rica that year to present a paper that I had written. I appreciated more the friends that I had and less of the political struggle that had consumed so much of the time, got involved with the Outing Club a lot more and spent a lot of time with Kirk Follo [phonetic] and a few other classmates, hiking up House Mountain. Did a lot of canoeing that summer. I’m a terrible—well, I’m not a terrible—I’m not very coordinated, and most of my athletic prowess is spent running and playing ultimate frisbee. Late that term of my senior year or early that spring, I ended up tearing the ligaments, or spraining the ligaments in my right leg and my right ankle. So I ended up having to like use a cane for four months— not four months, like six weeks or something, and had been injured. So what did I do? I took up the canoeing, probably which wasn’t the brightest thing, but Kirk Follo and Dick Miller—I’d gone through the canoeing classes and I learned how to canoe and handle myself, and so whatever free time I had, my car ended up always having a canoe on top of it. I was one of the people that you could always count on for getting a canoe to go canoeing with them almost any day of the year. Kirk Follo was generous enough to let me have the canoe. I always had it on my car. I mean, I was always willing to take anyone canoeing. So I spent a lot of time canoeing and visited Bob and Gretta Youngblood who had a house on the Maury River, a second home, and I used to always go up there, and they’d just give me the keys and I could set out my canoe from there, hang out there. I think my friendships with not only my student friends, but my faculty friends really became much deeper. Warren: Tell me about that. 39 Dumas: Well, I can’t remember, it must not have been my junior year. It must have been my senior year. My advisor, David Parker, had what I think they—I think they just call it a stroke, but something more technical than a stroke, and he was paralyzed for a while, and they didn’t know what was wrong with Dave. His condition was so unknown, undiagnosable, that they thought maybe we’d actually picked up something up in Costa Rica when we were in the rain forest, but eventually they figured out at UVA, I guess, that he’d had something that appeared to be a stroke. So myself and about three or four other very loyal students of David and good friends of his and Phyllis took to helping out a lot at the house, whether it was supervising the kids to get their baths done, to helping cook meals, to going over homework, because Phyllis was down in Roanoke, and other faculty members and friends of theirs were doing their best to help out with them because they had three children who must have been—the oldest one, Anson, must have been maybe a freshman in high school if not that. Because Anson just started college last year. So they were very young, and their youngest daughter was maybe five, four or five. I remember sitting at the hospital with Phyllis some nights in Roanoke waiting for David’s condition to improve. So that was one way that my relationship with David and Phyllis Parker grew even more than what it had been over those three or four years when I think they had been very nurturing to me. And so had the Elrods. They had these dinner parties, and I had become a fixture, I think, at the dinner parties long before I was president of the student body, and my relationship with Mimi Elrod definitely began with the interview when I met her on campus, and they were just very nice and kind. I remember after the dinner parties, Kirk Follo and I would stay and help them wash dishes with the dean at the time, and we would drink scotch or bourbon. It was, I guess, somewhat in contradiction to the orders that had gone out that students no longer, even if they were of age, could be served alcohol anymore at members of the faculty’s home, and they were good conversations because it exposed me to things that 40 my academic course work hadn’t, other parts of philosophy. We discussed things. That, I think, was good for my intellectual development. So that was something that was regular, I mean usually once or twice a month, and that continued even after, when I was a senior, that I was a part of this dinner group. I mean, not always there, but I was there a lot, and I’ve gone back two or three times. The Elrods have put together a little dinner and for whoever is there and I could join them. The Youngbloods, Robert Youngblood, had been my German professor, German literature professor, while I was there, and I loved German, but I was a horrible German student and I’m hoping that I beat this Portuguese and my Spanish, but things have changed, and I’ll take a new approach, but I struggled to get through German. Ironically, two of my good friendships were with Kirk Follo and Robert Youngblood, two German professors, and I think they at least appreciated that I loved German literature. So I became really good friends with Robert Youngblood and his wife, Greta—no, not Greta. God, I can’t think of her name now. But they had us over to dinner a lot. It was always informal. Warren: I’m struck that we’ve talked a great deal about politics and about your social relationships, but we haven’t talked about your classroom experiences at all. Dumas: Well, you can probably figure out because I spent so much time, I was not a stellar student at Washington and Lee. I did very well in history, excellent in politics, but I wasn’t a great student. I became a better student during my junior year and my senior year. My grades shot up, and I think I made the Dean’s List every time after that, but freshman and sophomore years were not good years, and needless to say, my parents were not thrilled to hear that I’d become president of the student body. They wanted me to come home. I did pretty bad my freshman year. Clearly, I think it had been the freedom, and I hadn’t been disciplined enough, not like my parents had kept on me when I was living at home and I was in high school. 41 But David Parker turned me on to Latin American history. His parents had been Baptist missionaries in Chile, and it was his experience that just real really took me on the path of liking Latin American history. I had conversations that I wanted to be a professor of history, but I had been discouraged of that by my parents. They felt that being a black male, an African-American male in this society, I needed a career that would give me financial stability, position, power to buffer myself against racism in this society and that I could be more in control of my life if I was an attorney or a doctor like my father, as opposed to being a faculty member. I don’t think they really appreciated how lawyers who make money in this country, pretty much you have to work for a big firm or you become sort of a Melvin Belli or a—I can’t think of the guy from North Dakota. My parents had my best interests out for me, and they were not sure that Washington and Lee, that it was commensurate with those interests, and thought that I was misguided in my selection of Washington and Lee and my staying there. They came up for both Parents’ Weekends. The first one was a little traumatic for them. I remember that I was so happy that I was pledging Sigma Chi, and they were apprehensive about going there, and then they explained to me why. They said, "Well, these students, their parents, they belong to the class of people who were very anti-us, very pro-segregation. These are the people who may have not been out in the streets, but these are the people who represent the power structure. So it’s a little difficult for us to want to spend a few hours in a fraternity house, which has always been an elitist institution, a white fraternity house, and be chummy with these people.” And that opened my eyes again, which I think had gone into sort of this haze. I don’t know why I went back to that. So they wanted me to come home to New Orleans and finish school in New Orleans, but I stayed and thought that I could accept this challenge as president of the student body and that things would change, and actually things did change academically. I did well my junior and senior year. 42 Warren: Were there any particular teachers who made the difference for you in the classroom? Dumas: David Parker. Warren: Why? Dumas: His teaching style was much more different than the other professors. He, I think, really tried to convince us to question historiography and question materials, to really think about what a historian did and that it wasn’t so much of "this is the story" and they’re spoonfeeding us. I just had a course like that I took with undergraduates at the University of Iowa in my graduate program, although the professor was at pains to show them, "Well, the books that you were studying, these books, they’re all biased. They have a certain point of view.” So do the liberal ones. I think that a lot of times some of the other history courses I took hadn’t made that distinction. Barry Machado, I only took, I think, one course, maybe two courses, with him, but he was very challenging professor and very good. I think maybe some of these people revealed their liberal politics, but they liked me. They liked, I think, what I was doing on campus. For those whose classes I was in that I’m mentioning, I actually did very well. John Handelman in the Politics Department, in some ways he and his wife are two of my closest faculty friends and in general friends. I went to visit them down at their house in Florida last summer. The major decisions I’ve made in my life the last three or four years, those are some of the people that I talk with, John and Gwen Handelman. I guess they started to make me really critically think about things. She was a law professor, and so she was someone I talked to throughout law school and whose counsel and advice and friendship I value a lot. I’m trying to think who else. Warren: Let me turn the tape over.