‘The reckoning will go on without him’
Ted DeLaney, the conscience of a roiled university, dies at 77
Ted DeLaney, who began his nearly 60-year career at Washington and Lee University as a custodian, accumulated enough credits to graduate at 41, returned a decade later as a history professor, became the school’s first Black department head, and later helped lead its reckoning with the Confederate general its very name honored, Robert E. Lee, died Dec. 18 at his home in Lexington. He was 77.
His son, Damien DeLaney, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
DeLaney’s fondness for his alma mater was both wholehearted and complicated. He took pride in his decades of hard work — overcoming obstacles, he often pointed out, that a white academic would never have had to face — and he bristled at suggestions that he was a poster child for the university’s racial liberalization.
In fact, he was a prime mover in driving what was still a very conservative institution forward. As a member of countless faculty committees, he urged the university to recognize its own difficult past — it once owned scores of slaves — and to increase students’ exposure to Black history and culture. “He was always willing to call out the institution on its failure to live up to its promise,” said Molly Michelmore, chairwoman of the Washington and Lee history department.
But DeLaney’s primary target was Lee himself, and Lee’s defining role in the university’s identity.
Lee, a slave owner, resigned from the U.S. Army at the start of the Civil War to fight for the Confederacy. In 1865, just months after surrendering to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, he accepted the job as president of what was then Washington College. When he died, in 1870, the school changed its name to Washington and Lee and had him buried in a crypt on campus; his horse, Traveller, is buried nearby. Generations of freshmen have had to file into Lee Chapel to sign the “honor book” near a recumbent statue of the general.
DeLaney attacked Lee’s legacy with the tools of his profession. A common story about Lee has him kneeling to pray alongside a Black congregant — proof, his defenders say, of his colorblind heart. But DeLaney’s research showed that the incident had almost certainly never happened.
“If it had been written into a history essay, we would have given it an F,” he said in a 2019 conversation with the Rev. Robert W. Lee IV, a descendant of the general.
In 2017, in the wake of the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville Washington and Lee created a commission to address the university’s troubled history. DeLaney was one of three faculty members appointed to it, and by many accounts its motive force.
The commission’s report, delivered in May 2018, made a number of recommendations, among them that Lee Chapel be turned into a museum and that the university “discontinue programming at the chapel that celebrates the mythic Lee, particularly events with characters in period costumes and horses that resemble Traveller.”
According to one account, the university rejected 75% of the commission’s recommendations, including anything having to do with Lee Chapel. But a Washington and Lee spokeswoman said the university had accepted at least 50% of the recommendations and that additional steps were underway. Respectful of the institution he called home for so many decades, DeLaney muted his criticism — perhaps, his son speculated, because his training as a historian had taught him to take the long view.
“Knowing my dad and the arc of his career, I don’t believe he thought it was over,” Damien DeLaney said.
Theodore Carter DeLaney Jr. was born in Lexington on Oct. 18, 1943. His mother, Theodora (Franklin) DeLaney, was a barber in Lexington. His father was a door attendant at a local hotel. His parents divorced when Ted was 11.
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Patricia (Scott) DeLaney; three sisters, Carla Cooks, Janet Jones and Theresa Morgan; and two grandchildren. His brother, Charles DeLaney, died in 1992.
DeLaney graduated from high school in 1961 and planned to attend Morehouse College, in Atlanta, on a scholarship. But his mother refused to let him go, fearing that the direct-action tactics of the city’s civil rights movement could spur a violent backlash, with her son caught in the middle.
Instead, he worked a series of jobs around town, including as a butler for a Washington and Lee fraternity. Having converted to Catholicism in high school, he spent seven months as a postulant at a Franciscan monastery in upstate New York, but left after he grew frustrated with the rules.
Returning to Lexington, he got a job as a custodian in the biology department at Washington and Lee in 1963.
Within a year he was working as a lab assistant and, once the school allowed Black students, taking night classes. (Today the university has an undergraduate student body of about 2,000.)
By 1981 he had accumulated enough credits to become a fulltime student. He and his wife sold their house to pay for his studies. Patricia DeLaney was the city treasurer for Lexington, and Ted DeLaney often brought his infant son to class when day care wasn’t available. After graduating cum laude in 1985, he taught at a private school for two years before pursuing a doctorate at William & Mary in Williamsburg.
DeLaney retired in 2019, and although he taught a class that fall, he was increasingly occupied with his fight against cancer, and could only watch from the sidelines as the racial tumult over the summer of 2020 brought renewed calls to remove Lee’s name.
In early July, the student government, which plays a large role in the university’s governance, voted overwhelmingly in favor of changing the university’s name; days later the faculty did the same. The board of trustees has formed a committee to consider the idea.
DeLaney, his son said, was pleased. “The reckoning,” he said, “will go on without him.”