Perry interview [Begin Tape 1, Side 2] Warren: I’ve been looking forward to talking with you. Perry: There’s so much going on. When you ask me about day to day, I mean, every day it was something. We’d come back to the table and somebody had a story to tell about something that happened to them. Warren: You were like having group therapy every day, weren’t you? 21 Perry: Oh, yeah, that’s what it was, and that’s why we had to sit there and talk this out. We’d talk guys out of wanting to fight someone, guys out of wanting to go home. You know what I mean? Guys would come there—when you’re living in that situation, the slightest thing can really upset you. Your girlfriend. Something could go wrong in any little aspect of your life and it can affect you. We weren’t really students, if you know what I mean. We weren’t allowed to be just students. We were still those pioneers. We had to deal with a lot of things. When they first came to this country, they had to survive. There was no vacation. Every day you were trying to survive. So we were in a survival test. We couldn’t think about homecoming, for instance. Homecoming came, I didn’t know about it. Homecoming had no meaning to me at Washington and Lee. It was bigger for me when I was in high school. I remember guys asking me, "What are you going to do for homecoming?" I wasn’t going to do anything. It didn’t have any meaning to me. I was struggling to make sure I could stay there with my grades. I didn’t feel a part of the school to go to homecoming. Guys didn’t even go to the games. We didn’t even go to the football games. Warren: You didn’t? Perry: Most of the guys. I did because I was into sports. I would go, I mean, the team stunk, so there was no real reason to stay there. My dad and I, my second visit there, when I was in high school, my dad, we went to talk to the football coach. I had played on a championship team. I had played quarterback. We went to talk to Buck Leslie. He started telling me about the quarterback that they had there, he was ranked sixth in the nation and all this kind of stuff. And I said, “Well, that’s all well and good, Coach, but you don’t win any games. So what are you telling me? Are you telling me I can’t compete with him, that he’s going to be the quarterback? What are you telling me?” 22 He said, “Well, you know, he’s going to be here. He’s ranked sixth in the nation.” I kept saying, "But you don’t win, so what are you telling me?" My dad was getting annoyed because I wasn’t supposed to be speaking up to this man like this. But I just wanted to get everything out on the table. So I walked out of the office. I left my dad in there with him. I left. I went in and talked to Coach Canfield. Because I knew he wasn’t going to let me quarterback and I wasn’t going to play any other position. I’d never played on a losing team, anyway. So I wasn’t going to play there anyway. I decided they couldn’t win, they weren’t going to win with those attitudes. So that was my experience with him. Some of the other guys had had a problem with him the year before, as I found out the next fall, that they had a problem with him. But there were some good people. I want to mention some good people. Bill McKinley [phonetic], the athletic director, made sure I was taken care of when I had my knee operation, good man. I switched faculty advisors my freshman year, I think, or sophomore year, to Barry Machado. He liked basketball, so we could go play basketball and I could talk to him. He was more than my advisor, he was my friend. He was an advisor, but it had nothing to do with him being on the faculty. I could talk to him. We could talk very frank. He would be frank with me. When I had an attitude that wasn’t quite right, he'd say, "Gene, why don’t you think about this." Instead of saying, "Gene, you’re wrong," he would say, "Gene, why don’t you think about that." Because he was an educator, you know what I mean. He knew what he was there for. That’s the role of an educator. I’m there, I’m young, a little impetuous, and wanting to strike back at some things, and he said, "Why don’t you think about this." He would make me think. He helped me to grow as a young man and as a student, because I had him in class. He would tell me, "This is what you do to write a paper. This is what I’m looking for when I ask you a question on a test." To me, that’s what he was there for, to make me improve. 23 I started to improve, as a student, my sophomore year. My freshman year, it was a struggle and I was just struggling. But I knew that Washington and Lee would make me a better student, I knew that and I was prepared for that. I didn’t want to deal with a professor who was prejudiced or racist. But I knew that I had some work to do, and some of the other black students, who were really good students, really were inspirational. They inspired me because I could see that they were a little bit sharper then I was. Guys like Bill Hill, who’s a judge in Atlanta, Johnny Morrison, who’s in Portsmouth, these guys were sharp and they, even though they were only a year older than me, they inspired me. They were my role models. I wanted to be as good a student as they were. Even though I knew they weren’t getting the grades that they should’ve gotten, but I knew they were bright guys. The professors knew they were bright guys. Warren: So were you able to pretty quickly figure out which professors were sympathetic, and take courses from those people? Perry: We weren’t looking for that, for sympathetic, we were looking for fair. Warren: Well, that’s what I mean. I mean, maybe sympathetic was maybe not the right term. Perry: The guys ahead of me, when it was time for me to pick my classes, I would go to them before I would go to my faculty advisor. I’d say, "These are the classes I need to take because I’m in history." They would say, "Don’t take him and don’t take him and don’t take him, because he’s not fair. And avoid him and avoid him." They would say, "take this guy because he’s fair, he’s interesting, and you will get something out of the class." Warren: Were there enough of those people? Perry: Well, we all graduated, so obviously there were. Warren: But were there enough that you felt that you weren’t cheated out of some courses you’d like to have taken? 24 Perry: Yeah. I mean, there were more Washington and Lee gentlemen there than there were not. I don’t want to give the impression that these professors—most of the professors were good men, good people. There were just very few that I thought had a problem. Most of them were fair. It’s a good school. It’s a great school. Most of them were fair. It was new to everybody, this integration thing. Warren: Sure. Perry: But there were people that you just avoided, and I avoided them to the extent that I could. If they were in the history department, then I had to deal with them. Like they said, "Don’t take Jefferson Davis Futch III," who I was told didn’t like women, blacks, nothing. He believed in the monarchy. Have you met him? Warren: Yes. Perry: Okay. You know what I’m talking about. They said, "Don’t take him. He’s never taught a black, doesn’t want blacks. Don’t take him." So I didn’t have to take him, because I was really into American history and he was teaching the European stuff. But I said, "I want to take him. He’s going to teach me." Because all the white guys said he was great, that he was funny, he was interesting. I’m saying, "If they think he’s good, then he’s going to have to tell me I can’t take his class." Because you had to go and ask him. So I marched up in his office during his office hours, I think they call it, I walked in there and he looked up. [Laughter] He was a little surprised. I introduced myself and I said, “I’m a history major and I would like to take—" Whatever that course was. And he said, “What are your grades in history?” And I told him. He said, “Okay.” He says, “You have to wear a tie to my class, every day.” I said, “I own a tie.” He said, “I expect you to be here every day.” I said, “I expect to be here every day.” He said, “Who’s your advisor?” And I told him Machado. He said, "Okay." 25 I said, “Thank you very much, I’ll be here.” And I enjoyed his classes. I loved his classes. I mean, I knew where he was politically. I don’t know if he knew me, where I was, because he never asked me. But I understood that. And I enjoyed his class. When I sat down in that class, he looked at me, the guys in there were shocked that I was in there. I sat in the back and I enjoyed his classes. And I took every class I could with him. Warren: Really. Not just one? Perry: No. Warren: Not just one? Perry: No, no. I enjoyed it. I felt that whatever grade I got from him, I would earn. On the first test I got back, I felt I was—I mean, I was ready for him because I had heard all this stuff that he was what he was. And he was all right with me and to me that’s what it’s all about. He was fair. He had his ideals. He was very opinionated. He was funny. I enjoyed him. Warren: So did everybody have to wear a tie to his class? Perry: Oh, yeah, oh, everybody wore a tie to his class. It was a requirement. The guys were in there with jeans and ties. I had a tie on. Warren: When had conventional dress code fallen by the wayside? Not very far ahead of you. Perry: The year before, I think, they had gotten rid of that. But guys were still wearing ties. Warren: The upper classmen were probably still in that— Perry: Some of them. I was there during the age of revolution, now, you know, the Vietnam thing. They had had the big sit-in, I think, in ‘70 or ‘69. Warren: That was ‘70. Perry: They had the big—and there were hippies walking around and they were our friends, the blacks and the hippies, we got along fine. There were revolutionaries there. 26 There were guys bucking the system, more white than black. We were conservative compared to some of these other guys, because we couldn’t afford to be too radical. We were radical just by our color. We formed the Student Association for Black Unity there. I think that was formed in ‘71. We used to wear these jean jackets with the red, green, and black patch on the back, it had "SABU" and "Washington and Lee University." There were a lot of students that hated that organization. They didn’t understand why the organization was there, why the administration would allow us to have this black separatist organization on campus. Occasionally there was a white student who wondered why he couldn’t join SABU. There was a lot of animosity because we formed that organization. I think we had the first Black History Week my freshman year, I know we did, because my uncle died during that week. People were resistant to that, students, maybe some professors. They didn’t know why we had to have that. They didn’t know why we had to do anything. We had to fight for that week. I don’t know where we found all the money. Well, there were always people in administration that would give us money to do what had to be done. Warren: There’s always money at Washington and Lee. Perry: There’s money. They saw that we got what we needed to do what we had to do. Our functions weren’t that well attended by the white students. My friends that used to hang with me, the white guys, they would come. A couple of guys I played basketball with would come. Warren: What kind of functions did you have? Perry: We just had speakers to come in. We had two or three speakers come in. I think we had a choir to come in a sing some spirituals, Negro spirituals, and we had the Black Ball at the end of the week, which was really a very nice formal affair, a very nice affair. That turned a lot of people off. You're walking on Washington and Lee's campus, and 27 you see on campus a sign that said "The Black Ball." I missed the very first one because I had to go home for the funeral. I was really disappointed, because I really had a good date all lined up and I missed that one. Warren: So you had a Black Ball. Did you all go to Fancy Dress? Perry: No. Warren: In your whole four years, you never went to Fancy Dress? Perry: Yes, I went. I went as I got older, yeah. I was not going to go to Washington and Lee and not experience the Mock Convention, Fancy—I mean, I wasn’t going to leave there and have isolated myself. You have to understand, I grew up with white kids, you know what I mean, so I played with them. When I went to Washington and Lee, that was really an experience for me. Like I said, I grew up with white kids. So I was not used to white kids like the ones I met at Washington and Lee. But I wasn’t going to let them keep me from Fancy Dress or anything. I was going to do what a normal student did. Warren: And did most of the black students go? Perry: No. No. I believe the first Fancy Dress I went to, I may have been a junior. And I think just me and Elf went, the guy that was in my class, that I'd hang out with, and two or three others. The other guys didn’t go. They never bought into it. Most of the guys in that first group of us didn’t buy into the Fancy Dress, homecoming, or anything. We didn’t stand for The Swing. There was a lot resentment, there was a lot of protest going on in the first couple of years. I remember one time we weren’t going to sing for the national anthem, stand for it, but I always had a problem with that, because my uncle was all for it and the war, and I had a cousin who was fighting in Vietnam at that time. So I had a problem with that. Warren: You didn’t have any problem with standing up for the national anthem? Is that what you’re saying? 28 Perry: Well, there were guys that didn’t want to stand for the national anthem or The Swing. The national anthem I could stand for, because in my family they're all for that flag, so I would never disrespect them or the flag, really. But The Swing, I pick and choose when I stand for the Swing. It didn’t do much for me when I first got there. By the time I graduated, though, I had bought into The Swing. Warren: You bought into the whole program. You stayed and went to law school, right? Perry: Yeah. I think Washington and Lee’s a great school. I had a great time there, in spite of all of that. There was some bad times there, but there were more good than bad. I made a lot of road trips. I made a lot of friends. I had to grow, I had to mature into it, too. I was young when I got there. I made a lot of friends there that are still my friends today. My brother was inducted into the Hall of Fame back in October, the first black to go into the Hall of Fame. And John Clough, a white man, was here, and he and I went there, met in Lexington, to attend the ceremony. John Clough lives in Alaska. He was there. He and I, we’ve always been there for each other. Warren: And you were his best man? Perry: I was the best man at his wedding. Warren: How do you spell his name? Perry: C-L-O-U-G-H. A very courageous young man, because he caught hell freshman and sophomore year because he was my friend. He had white friends who said, “John, we like you, but why do you have to hang around with Gene or E? Why do you do that?” He probably lost dates because we were together. He would’ve had a better time there, he may have graduated from Washington and Lee had he not been my friend, because it cost him a lot, I think. But he was always there for me, I’m always there for him. We will always be there for each other, no matter what. Warren: He probably got the better end of the deal. 29 Perry: And Mark left after freshman year. I think they ran him away. He couldn’t take it. Warren: The Jewish kid? Perry: The Jewish kid. He was very unhappy there. But Mark had a car. He and I could drive. So Mark gave me the keys to his car. I’m sure that kept me in Lexington because I had a car, I had access to the car. My parents hated that. But Mark didn’t like to drive. Mark would go home with me—okay?—to this southern town, go home with me and eat food that he shouldn’t have been eating. My parents loved him. They loved John. And he just became part of our family. I was in Mark’s wedding. I was in a Jewish wedding, years after we had graduated. I was in law school. I was going into law school, I think, when he got married, after I graduated in the summer. He called me, and I was in law school. He called and said, “Gene, I want you to be in the wedding.” I said, “Mark, I love you, but you don’t have to do this. I will come. I’ll be there and we’ll have a great time, but I don’t have to be in the wedding. I appreciate your asking me, but you don’t have to do that, because I know your parents will go for this, I don’t think your bride is going to go for this, her parents.” And he said, “She’s fine with it.” Well, she was. Her parents almost fainted when I walked in there. They got married in Flint, Michigan. Whew! I drove up there in my car, my dad’s car. Johnny White was with me, he’s another guy went to Washington and Lee. We drove up there and I was in this wedding. It was an interesting week we spent up there. Those are the friends I met there and we’ve been friends forever. Warren: It is a place that makes friendships. Perry: Yeah, because most people there are good people. But the first couple of years, it was not a happy place. We made the best of it. We had so many stories to tell about things that happened to us. I remember Parents Weekend, and I was walking across 30 campus, and this elderly alumnus came up to me and said, "Boy, can you tell me where such and such is?" And he had the little alumni thing on. I said, "Yes, sir, I can tell you where it is. In fact, I’ll show you, if you like." He said, "Fine." I took him to wherever it was he wanted to go. He had graduated, I think in the forties. He was an elderly man. We were talking and he said, “Well, how do you like working here?” I said, “I don’t work here.” He said, “You don’t? Do you live in town?” I said, “Well I go to school here.” He says, “You do?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “You know, I didn’t know they had colored boys here.” I said, “Yeah, we’ve been here for a couple years now.” He said, “Really?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “How do you like it?” I said, “I’m getting along pretty good. Good and bad times.” He said, "Wow." No, actually he said, “Damn, I didn’t know that.” He said, “This is interesting.” He says, “Come and walk with me.” So we talked. He just couldn’t believe it. I wish I knew his name. He said, “I shouldn’t have called you boy, should I?” I said, “Probably not.” I said, “You probably shouldn’t have said that.” I said, “But, you know, we got past that, didn’t we?” He said, “Yeah, we did.” And we shook hands and he went—I think I took him to the library. I don’t really know where I took him. But it was interesting, because we were from two different worlds, but we had something in common. 31 Warren: That’s a beautiful story. Perry: That we were on that campus. I was going to have that little button in a couple of years. And halfway through the walk he realized that I was going to have that. He was annoyed at first, and by the time we got to where we were going, I don’t know if we liked each other, but we understood that we were going to have something in common. He realized he shouldn’t have said "boy." But he appreciated the fact—and I had grown, I think I was probably a sophomore or junior, and I took him, instead of saying, "I don’t know where that is," which I would’ve done when I was freshman, I said, "Fine. I’ll take you." Because I bought into what a Washington and Lee gentleman is. I teach my son. I was raised to be a gentleman, not at Washington and Lee, but I was raised that way, so I respected my elders, so I took him. And he caught me on a good day. On a bad day I may have said something else then. But it was always interesting when the alumni would come and see the guys who were not there when it was integrated and probably didn’t want it to change, to see their reactions when they saw us. And we always watched. We had the advantage of knowing our situation and just watching people, to see how they would react. Sometimes we’d probably do things, be a little mischievous to make them or make people react to us. That was part of the fun that we had. There was an occasion when one of our black guys was accused of an honor violation in the biology department. He was doing an experiment, I think, with a white girl, who was probably an exchange student from Sweet Briar or somebody, they could come there their junior year, I think. They were doing the experiment. He was doing the work, she was taking the notes. Okay? So at the end of the day, she says, "Well, here are the results of the experiment we're doing." So he writes the notes down. I’m sure that’s what everybody did that were in these groups. People did the work, they all had the same results of whatever it was they were doing. He was accused, I don’t know 32 who accused him, if it was the professor—I think it was. I don’t think it was another student. But he was accused of an honor violation. I was a junior. He was in my brother’s class, freshman class. He was very upset. He was crying. He really wanted to go to Washington and Lee, and they were going to kick him out for cheating. So we had a SABU meeting and we discussed this and we listened to him. We knew this kid would never cheat. Willy Harrison was his name. He would never cheat. It was obvious what had happened and what was happening. So we decided that we were not going to take that; we would all leave school. If they kicked him out, we would leave. And I think almost all of us, maybe two or three guys said they weren’t going to do that. But we said if they kicked him out for nothing, we had to go. We communicated that to the powers-that-be, Huntley on down, that we believed in the Honor Code and if you lie, you cheat, you steal, you have to go. But this was not that, and we were going to take a stand. If that was going to happen, if anybody arbitrarily can do this and get rid of a black student, then we were not safe and we had to go. There were guys that were sitting outside that—we were sitting outside the courtroom that night. There were guys sitting there who were seniors. I was a junior. But I had decided that I was going to Virginia Tech, that I was going to leave. I told my brother, I said, "You just got here." He was a football star. I think he was All- American his freshman year. I said, "You’ve got to make a decision." He said, "Well, I’m going, too." So we decided that was it. Now, when he came out of there, he was innocent. I’m sure there was some special dispensation, because those students were going to get rid of him, I believe. Maybe they saw the light, maybe they did, I don’t think so. But when they came out of there, he was innocent. There was another case where a guy was accused of cheating. Two black kids were accused of cheating because they had similar homework or something. Now, they 33 studied together, they would talk about it. I don’t know what kind of class this was, it had to be a science or math class. They had the same tutor. The tutor was showing them how to do this work. So guess what? They did it the way the tutor showed them to do it and they did it the same way. I was in law school by this time. The professor says they cheated. Now, who would cheat? These guys had been there. Who would hand in the same work if they thought they were cheating? You know what I mean? So, anyway, they went to the trial, and a lot of nonsense. Again, we were up in arms because we knew this was—we were really mad because the professor did this. He should’ve known better. And what happened was, one of the kids took the blame so the other could stay there. Warren: Wow. Perry: That’s right. They were all in a room, and this kid says, "I will go," because he was a freshman, I think, he just got there, I think. He said, "I'll go. I’m not that happy here anyway, so he can stay." Maybe he was a junior. But we made those kind of sacrifices for each of us all the time, whether it was you were giving somebody your last dollar, you letting the guy have the car because you think he needs it more than you do, because he’s been under some pressures that you’re not under. In that little group we made sacrifices for each other all the time, daily. You know what I mean? This didn’t happen like once a month. Daily, somebody was making a sacrifice just to keep him there. Whatever happens. We saw a lot of tragedy. I met a guy whose daughter died, his mother died, had a tremendous effect on us because we were all so close. But that was a very interesting thing. I was there. I caught myself counseling them, and this kid said, "Look. I’ll go." So we’re there and still there are not a lot of black men there. There are not a lot of black professors there, and we were making these adult decisions. You’ve got nineteen- year-olds counseling eighteen-year-olds, or twenty-one-year-olds counseling eighteen- year-olds, because we had no one that could step in there and help us make these 34 decisions. At the same time you have to be a student, too. You’re being a brother and a father and all this, and you have to go to class. There were days where emotionally I just couldn’t even go to class because something happened to me or my brother or somebody else. We would get all wrapped up, sometimes too much, we'd get too wrapped up in that, and you’re just tired. But again, when you fight for something like that, then, at least in my case, it made my attachment to Washington and Lee stronger. There are other guys who will not come back there. Warren: Do you go back for alumni weekends? Perry: Oh, yeah, I was on the alumni board. I’m in the Washington Society. I haven’t been able to get back recently because of scheduling, but I like going back to Lexington. I could retire there. I don’t have a problem with Lexington or Washington and Lee. Washington and Lee was a very good experience for me. I took the bad with the good. Warren: Tell me about law school. Perry: I don’t know. I consider that different than my undergrad years. Warren: Yes, but we’re doing the law school, too. Tell me about being a student at the law school. First of all, I’m intrigued that a history major goes to law school. Perry: I didn’t want to teach history. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, to be quite honest, so I figured I’d go to law school. My dad said I had to work. I didn’t want to work. I was having too much fun. By the time I got out of Washington and Lee undergrad, I was having too much fun. I was having a ball. It had become Washington and Lee Country Club for me, too, so I was having a good time. Warren: Oh, now, wait a minute. That’s interesting. You had gotten into the country club way of thinking. When my husband and I went to Fancy Dress last month, when we walked out of that place, Henry said, “I swear, every one of those kids was born in a country club.” He said, “They’re so comfortable with the whole thing.” Perry: Yeah, I had become comfortable with my lifestyle. I had found my niche. I knew I could graduate. Once you realize you can graduate, you can make it. That’s 35 one thing. I realized I could live there, I could deal with all the other stuff going on around me. I had my friends. I enjoyed going out on the road, I liked the girls. I had friends in Lexington. I had a surrogate mother, Margaret Carter, who fed me, who nurtured me, who got mad at me when I was sick and would then care of me. She was there for me. She was there. I talked about her in that article. So I had everything I needed, and my parents were only forty-five minutes away. So I could call the troops to me or I could go to the troops. So I was comfortable there and I was having a good time. I had found a way of rising above this other stuff. Warren: So, with law school, did they offer scholarships to law school, too? Perry: I received some money to go to law school. My brother was there, and he wanted me to stay there while he played football. I should’ve left, really. I should’ve gone to another law school, but I stayed. My brother and sister were in school, we were all in college at the same time. Washington and Lee offered me some money, and that was the difference. I should’ve left, really. Warren: So what year did you graduate? Perry: ‘75 and ‘78. Warren: So you were there when the law school moved into the new building. Perry: Yes. My first year we were in the old law school. Warren: In Tucker Hall. Perry: Which I found stifling. I couldn’t deal with that. I didn’t like going to the library. And then we went down to Lewis Hall, which was nicer. My law school years, I don’t really know what happened. You’re working and you’re studying. I don’t know if people had time to be racist or whatever. I don’t know. That’s kind of a blur. I had my fun as an undergrad. There were only four of us in my class, again, in the law school. We weren’t invited into any study groups. I lived in a law dorm. Warren: What's a study group? 36 Perry: You know, guys who get together and study. I think if you’re going to learn law, you’ve got to be in a group. You have to study it, you have to talk about it. Warren: So did you form your own group? Perry: No, because two of the guys were married, the black guys, and one guy was a loner. And I was the youngest of the bunch. I was the only one that came right out of undergrad. So they were a little older than me, a little bit more mature than me, and I was kind of out there on my own. But, again, there were some good guys in my dorm. We had some fun. One of my best friends was a guy named Mike McDonald. He was a big football nut. He got me to play football on a team my second year there, the law school league, and we won. It was funny. We used to have a draft. He drew the number-one pick in the draft our second year. I had never participated in football there. I used to tell him that I could quarterback in high school. I would brag to him, tell him little tales, and he believed me. I didn’t go to the meeting, but he stands up and he got the first pick and everybody figured he would pick one of the older upper-classmen who had established himself as a player, and he chose me. Everybody looked at him. "Why did you do that? Are you crazy? Who is he?" This type of thing. And he came back and told me, in my room, he said, "E, I drafted you first." I said, "When it came around to you, you drafted me first?" He says, "No, you were the first person picked. Period." I wanted to jump out the window. I said, "Why would you do that? Why would you put me under that kind of pressure? Why would you do that? You could’ve drafted these other guys who had played." But anyway, he drafted me. So we formed this bond, and we won the title. We had a crazy team, misfits basically but we won the title. Warren: I didn’t even know there was a law school league. 37 Perry: It’s a touch league, and they keep weekly standings. There would be a write-up of the games and they would write the teams. It was really very nice. It was very competitive, too. I was on our team. I think we had a girl on that team. Did we have a girl on our team? I don’t know if she played, but she was around. I was very close to the guys on that team, though. Warren: Were there many people in your undergraduate class who went on to the law school? Perry: There were a number of us. I don’t know. We weren’t friends in the undergrad and we weren’t friends in law school. We just knew each other, but we weren’t friends. Law school’s competitive and you’re into your own thing. Warren: When you make that trek into the law school, do you then say goodbye to what’s going on at the undergraduate? Perry: I guess you should have. I didn’t. Warren: Did you continue to go to Fancy Dress and things like that? Perry: I don’t know that I went to a Fancy Dress. I participated in homecoming. I was an alumnus. I went to homecoming. I may have gone to Fancy Dress at the time. My friends were in the undergrad. William Hill and Johnny Morrison were in the law school. I thought I had to act like a law student. I couldn’t act like I was acting when I was undergrad. I didn’t hang out too much. My friends were basically the undergrads, and my brother was still there, and those are the guys that I partied with. If I went down the road, I would normally go down the road with one of the guys from my undergrad years. Warren: Where did you go when you went down the road? Perry: We had expanded going down the road. When I went there, I guess guys went to Mary Baldwin, Sweet Briar, and Hollins and Southern Seminary and Randolph- Macon Women’s College. We soon found out that there were not enough black women at those schools, so we had to go into the new world. We had to go to Madison, James 38 Madison, Radford, which was ninety miles away, but there was a whole lot of black women at Radford. The woman that I eventually married was at Radford. I met her when she was a student there. So we went to Radford or James Madison or University of Virginia. We had to have some numbers. If we would go to Hollins, it was the same amount of girls at Hollins as guys at Washington and Lee. So it didn’t work too well for us. But we were fine. Guys would go to Virginia Tech. We found them or they found us. That was rough. That dating game was rough because we didn’t have the money. We got lucky my freshman year because Mark was there with that car. That was just a gift from God, I think. I don’t know what would’ve happened had he not been there. Sophomore year, I think some of the guys were juniors then, and they had cars. They had gone home to work and brought back some piece of junk that we could make it in. Going down the road was therapy. You had to do that. Otherwise you’d go crazy. Warren: It still is, from what I can see. Perry: I'm sure it is. I’m glad to see some things still last. Law school was different. Obviously there were some problems there, because we didn’t have the numbers. You were getting people who are coming to Lexington from other schools, who were older, so you had people who were not tolerant of what went on. There were a lot of people in the law school that resented that preppy—that stuff that they saw in undergrad. They thought it was childish, because they had gone to bigger schools or different schools. So they kind of were people you could talk to as a black student. Then there were people who came to Washington and Lee because they wanted that experience, so they were kind of rigid in their thinking. It was a professional school. There were things that went on there that I didn’t like, that I didn’t have time to fight them. I didn’t have the numbers to fight them and I didn’t have the time to fight them. Again, I probably should’ve gone to another law school. But law school, I just went. I don’t have the emotional attachment that I have to the undergrad. 39 Warren: We’re getting close to the end of the tape. I want you to say whatever you want to say. Perry: What do I want to say? Warren: To end this up. You’ve given me pure gold. Perry: Well, I’m really proud that I went to school there, Washington and Lee. I try to support it any way I can. Warren: Do you help recruit? Perry: No. I think they recruit the type of students that they want. They don’t recruit the type of students I would recruit there. If you had more tape, I could go on and on about that. I don’t recruit for Washington and Lee. I recruited one, two people for Washington and Lee. My brother—and I had mixed emotions. He used to come visit me and so he wanted to go there. I had mixed emotions about him coming. I didn’t want to be responsible for him coming in, but he made the decision, and I’m glad he did. My cousin, I tried to recruit. They rejected my cousin, because some biology professor, probably I think the same one that tried to get the kid kicked out of school— you had to write an essay in those days on the application. He thought that my cousin’s essay was weak, and so he rejected him. I remember Barry Machado really fought for him. He was a basketball player, so if he would’ve come there, he would’ve played basketball. As fate would have it, he went to Roanoke College and so did some other guys. Because he went to Roanoke, they went to Roanoke, and Roanoke had been losing, year after year. This group of six guys goes to Roanoke, not only did they turn the program around, in terms of they were ranked nationally when they left there, but they all are successful. My cousin’s a vice president at Allstate. He was a Dean’s List student. He’s probably to Roanoke what I am to Washington and Lee, if you get my drift. The fact that you’re here. Well, if they were to write a story about Roanoke 40 College, they would go to Kenny Velt [phonetic]. He’s a great man. I’m very proud of him and the man he’s become. He was what Washington and Lee needed, but they couldn’t look past whatever it is their little stand's worth, to see his family. The same reasons they let me in there, they should’ve let him in there. We were similar. We were brought up the exact same way. We did the same thing in high school. We were leaders. There wasn’t that much difference in our grades, but they rejected him. Once they did that, I stopped recruiting. I’m not that enthusiastic about the way they recruit kids. I mean, they want a certain black student there. They don’t want Eugene Perry, William Hill, Johnny Morrison, Johnny Whitesop, Ford, Ernest Freeman. They don’t want those guys back there. They’re proud that we went there and that we’ve done okay. They don’t want us back there now. I don’t like that. I don’t like the fact that they don’t want black kids with some character and with some social conscience. When I went back there in November, the first black was inducted into the Hall of Fame. If that had happened while we were there, we would’ve put something together for him, with the monies and resources that we had, for him and his family. We would’ve been there at the ceremony. How many blacks do you think were there or even knew that that was going on? None. Not one black student spoke to my brother the whole weekend. He brought his family up there from Tampa. I was there. John Clough was there from Alaska. All of Waynesboro was there, a lot of people from home were there. No one black student said anything to him. And it’s embarrassing, actually, as alumnus, when my friends are there—