Hill interview

[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]
Warren: How about the town of Lexington? Was it welcoming to you?
Hill: Oh, yeah. I got to tell you, it was. When we were here as freshmen, the black
ladies who worked at the Cockpit and who worked in the co-op, they took good care of
us. They looked out for us. On the weekends, we’d get invited to dinner. We’d always
try to take something. But they kind of adopted us and raised us. They really did.
Mrs. Poindexter used to work over in the financial aid office. She worked for Dean
Sholt [phonetic] who was the dean of financial aid when I first got here. I think she may
have worked for a few years for Dean Van Pate when he was financial aid director. But
Marjorie Poindexter, she kept us sane, and the university needed to pay her for that,
because she served a counseling service for us.

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         Addie Payne [phonetic] worked over in the information center in the Student
Union Building. She kept us sane. Famie Smothers, who was Linwood’s mother, he
and Walter were here, they were the two guys from town, Famie Smothers worked in
the co-op, and I think Miss Famie may have retired last year. She may still be working
there. She took good care of us.

         Let’s see. Who else? There were a couple of people in town, and her name will
come to me in just a minute, but she fed me and [unclear] many a night.
Warren: How about going into shops and restaurants? Were you welcome there?
Hill: Yeah, I didn’t experience any problems with that.
Warren: I want to talk about Walter Blake and Linwood Smothers.
Hill: That was Miss Famie’s son.
Warren: All right. And she worked in the co-op?
Hill: Right.
Warren: All right. And they’re both local people?
Hill: Yeah, from Lexington.
Warren: Do you know the story behind their coming here?
Hill: No, I don’t. When I worked in the admissions office of W&L, W&L has categories
of preference: sons and daughters of alumni, minority students, and residents of
Rockbridge County. And I think as resident of Rockbridge County, they got a
substantial financial advantage of coming to W&L and they both were really bright
guys. Blake, who’s working out of Texas now, he owns, I think, a construction firm.
He’s actually on the alumni board of directors. I was on a search committee and they
were looking for new members for the board of directors of the Alumni Association,
and I suggested Walter Blake.
Warren: Is he here this weekend?
Hill: No, he’s not here this weekend. He was here last time I was here, but he’s not
here this weekend. So Blake is on the board of directors now. Now, Linwood, last I

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heard, Linwood was working for the Department of Defense, and he was doing a lot of
technology work on nuclear submarines. I don’t know where he is now.
Warren: But his mother’s still around?
Hill: Yeah, Miss Famie still lives here.
Warren: I’m interested in finding out their stories, too. So they were a guidance to
you?
Hill: Well Blake really was. Linwood stayed to himself.
Warren: Did they live on campus?
Hill: No. They just walked back into town. They went home. Blake spent a lot of time
with us. I mean, he really was a mentor to us, Linwood was not. Linwood didn’t
spend a lot of time with us.
Warren: As you know, the reason I was so thrilled to meet you yesterday is because I
know you were a mentor to the next class behind you.
Hill: Yeah. That was an obligation we owed. We were supposed to do that.
Warren: Tell me about that.
Hill: Well, when the class came in behind us, it was smaller than our class, and then I
think maybe the second class or the third class got a little bit bigger. These guys were a
little different from us. They had gone to integrated high schools. So things were
changing a little bit. Some of these guys were really bright, but experiencing the
problems I experienced, and I tried to do for them what Walter did for me, which was
help them see around the corner. See, my problem was—I mean if getting through
W&L was a series of turns, I could only see straight ahead to the wall, I couldn’t see
around the corner, and Walter was standing at the corner constantly telling me, "You
can get here, and once you turn the corner it’s going to be all right. Trust me. I’m
telling you what’s around the corner."

         And for these guys I was trying to do the same thing. I was trying to say, “Look,
I’m telling you, you can get there. Trust me. I’m standing right here on the corner.

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Once you turn it, you’ll be okay.” And unless you got somebody telling you what’s
around that corner, you lose your motivation. You think you ought to be somewhere
else.

         And consider this, too. Here we are at W&L, W&L is all male. Our buddies have
gone to Howard or they’re going to Morehouse, and they’re telling us they’re having a
great time. They’re telling us all the things they’re doing in the frats. They’re talking
about going to football games. They’re talking about how great the bands are, all these
nice women they meet, and they’re just having a ball, and we’re living in the goddamn
library.

         So I mean, you’re here as a freshman or as a sophomore and you've got all these
pressures here on campus. You've got the academic pressures. You don’t want to come
up here and disappoint your family, you don’t want to let the other guys down that
you’re in class with because everybody’s looking to each other for support. You've got
your buddies at home telling you how great it is. And you know, some of these guys
are no brighter than you are, but they’re making hellacious grades. I mean, here you
are, you’re pulling a 2.1 or a 2.2, and unless you've got somebody that when you’re
down they pump you up, and then when they’re down you pump them up, unless you
all support each other, you don’t make it.

         I felt that we owed that to students coming in behind us, so I would always come
back for alumni functions. I’d talked to the guys over the telephone. See, it was really
great, because when I graduated from undergrad, I was still here for three more years,
so I’d come over. We’d sit in the dining hall and eat or we’d go out and get a
hamburger or something like that or they'd walk over to the law school. So it was easy
to do it while I was still on campus for those three years.
Warren: You mentioned that you worked in admissions.
Hill: Yeah. I worked in the admissions office, doing recruiting, student recruiting.
Warren: Tell me about that.

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Hill: I would recruit at high schools for the undergrad, and I would recruit a lot in my
old high school in Atlanta whenever I was home for a break. I’d call the principal and
say, “Could I come in and talk to some of the seniors about going to W&L?” Or if it was
too late in the year, talk to some of the juniors about going to W&L. And I talked to
them about my experience here. I’d tell them, I’d say, “Look, let me tell you something.
If you want to go to W&L and if you do go to W&L, you’re not going to get there and
I’ll run into you on campus and you cuss me out for not telling you what it was really
like, because I’m going to tell you what it was really like.” I’d tell them, “If you want a
good education, if you want to be challenged, if you want to graduate knowing that
you can do whatever task is placed in front of you, this is where you want to go. If you
want a great social life, if you want to have stories to tell your children about what you
did in college and where you went and what music group you saw and what girls you
dated, don’t come up here.”
Warren: Do you hear what you’re saying, though? Because that’s what the white kids
are telling their kids. The white students you went with, went to school with, that is
their memory of Washington and Lee, that it's a great party school.
Hill: Yeah, it is. We had one guy named Brad Martin, we were in law school. Brad
went to undergrad with me and Morrison, we were all in the same class. Brad got
married while we were in undergrad, and when he decided he wanted to stay here and
go to law school, he and his wife started having problems, and I think she left him for a
while. She moved down to North Carolina, maybe Greenville, and he stayed here in
law school.

         I remember one night Shot and I were in the law school, Shot was over at my
carrel, and we were talking about some class we were going to have the next morning,
and Brad came through, just bemoaning the situation. And Shot goes, “What’s wrong
with you, man?” And he’s going—I mean, he’s all heartbroken because his wife has left
him and all this kind of good stuff, and Shot says, “Boy, if I was a white guy, I’d be in

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heaven. Here you are at W&L with all these goddamn surrounding girl schools, and
you sit up here crying over one women. You crazy.” And he was absolutely right. I
mean, if I was a white guy at W&L, this would be heaven. I mean it would be heaven.
It’s real different if you’re a black guy at W&L. It’s damn sure different if you’re a black
woman at W&L.
Warren: Tell me about that.
Hill: Which is what I told my daughter before she came up here. I told her it was going
to be different. It is very, very different. I mean, if you’re a black woman at W&L,
where is your pool of available men?
Warren: It’s not there?
Hill: No, it’s not there. And if there is a pool, it is a substantially reduced pool. I mean,
think about it. Have you ever been down to the Atlanta University Center? Clark,
Morehouse, Spellman, Morris Brown. All black. And all those colleges and
universities, they have common campuses, they abut each other. Suppose we take you
over there and drop you off as one of eight white women at Spellman, and suppose
over at Morehouse they’ve got ten white men, and at Morris Brown they got eight
white men. That’s generally your pool. So how great a time do you think you’re going
to have? I mean, that’s the way it is, just the situation is reversed.
Warren: So what was it like for you? What did you do for Fancy Dress?
Hill: We invited girls from the surrounding girl schools. See, the thing about it you
may not have a romantic relationship with somebody, but you make friends. So you
end up inviting friends. The probabilities of finding somebody you’re going to marry
are probably not substantially high. Although I ended up marrying a woman from
Hollins. Shot ended up marrying a woman from Hollins. Matthew ended marrying a
woman from Mary Baldwin.
Warren: So it’s worked in your favor.

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Hill: Yeah, I was just lucky. I was lucky. But I told my daughter that when she came
up here, I said, “Look, the reason you’re going is to get a good education. You get as
much as you can as quick as you can, and you take it with you when you leave.”
Warren: So when you were doing recruiting for admissions, were you recruiting
students or were you recruiting black students?
Hill: I was primarily recruiting black students. I was going to minority high schools,
all-black high schools, recruiting black students. When I was recruiting over in the AU
Center for law school, I was recruiting black students for the law school, minority
students. And it’s difficult to talk minority students into coming to W&L out of
undergrad or law school because the minority students that W&L wanted are the same
ones that the Ivy Leagues wanted. And the minority students that the law school wants
are the same ones that the Ivy League law schools want.

         So you’re asking these minority students when they’re being confronted by
schools that are not any better than W&L, but they’ve got more name recognition and
just the prestige of going to an Ivy League school, when you’re trying to talk to them
about coming to W&L and then in addition to coming here you tell them, unlike the Ivy
League schools, you’re going to be in a substantial minority position, not just a minority
position, but a substantial minority position, unless they are of a frame of mind where
they’re willing to make a sacrifice, a social sacrifice for four years or three years, they’re
not going to come. So you may walk into a high school and get one person, or make it
two people who are truly interested in W&L and you may get one person to come, after
you talk to thirty or twenty-five.

         I can’t bemoan it, because it is a difficult situation. W&L is steeped in tradition
and the tradition is not going to change. It is a small, upper middle-class/upper-class,
private, white, conservative institution and that is what it will always be, it will be that.
It offers to a minority student some advantages, however, that you won’t get if you go
to some other school. For one thing, you not only get a good academic education, you

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get a good social education. I graduated from W&L. I have never been in a social
situation where I was uncomfortable. Never. There were many a times I’d be
someplace and I’d say, "Melba (that’s my wife), do you realize that we are the only ones
of us in here?” And she’d say, “I know that.” But she got the same education at
Hollins. She’s not uncomfortable.

         If anything, the all-white environment in which we’re in, they’re uncomfortable
because they think I’m uncomfortable, until I make them understand I’m not or unless I
find myself in a group of people who know me, and they realize I’m not uncomfortable.
But you get a good education here. There is no place you can’t drop me that I’m not
going to be okay.
Warren: I would agree with that, from what I’ve learned in the last twenty-four hours,
less than twenty-four hours.

         Well, I feel like I’ve taken enough of your time, and I’ve got pure gold here. Is
there anything more you’d like to say?
Hill: Well, some people ask me what I think about W&L. I come up in the summer.
Mimi wants me to come up and do another series of lectures for the Summer Scholars
and the Futures Program. And a lot of the kids will ask me, "Would you send your kids
to W&L?" This was before my daughter was old enough, and I said, “Yes, not only
would I send my children to W&L, but I’ll tell you something, if given the opportunity
to do it again, knowing what I know now, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I’d come right back.
Absolutely, no hesitation." I mean, that’s how much I think if the university. It is a
good school, populated with good people in the faculty, good teachers, they really care
about the students.
Warren: Well, I’m happy to be here.
Hill: I know. It’s a good experience. I’ve been lucky more than anything else. A lot of
times I made the right decisions, not always for the right reasons, but then only in
retrospect you look back on it and realize how precarious you were and how fortuitous

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you were to have made the right decision, and you go, "Whew, I’m glad I was lucky on
that one." [Laughter]
Warren: I’m glad you were, too. Thank you, Bill.
Hill: Oh, my pleasure.
[End of interview]

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