Confronting civil rights, and wrongs
Vanderbilt symbolized the struggle in the South
When Robert F. Kennedy’s plane touched down at Nashville’s Municipal Airport, a 30-foot banner stretched across the lobby entrance. It read, “Suddenly there’s hope for America.”
It was March 21, 1968, and Kennedy — who five days earlier had announced his candidacy for president — was on his way to speak at Vanderbilt University’s Impact symposium.
The event, established in 1964 to give students a voice in an unsettling age, was focused that year on the “Destiny of Dissent.”
Dissent had become part of Nashville’s disposition. From the success of
the sit-ins in 1960 to the pursuit of John Lewis’ “good trouble” protests, studentled movements in the city fueled civil disobedience and fostered change.
Nashville, at the buckle of the Bible Belt, was considered a place of morality and keen enlightenment.
It was home to myriad colleges and universities, including Fisk, Vanderbilt, American Baptist, Meharry and Tennessee State (then Tennessee A&I).
And Nashville made history by becoming the first city in the South to integrate its lunch counters.
“History really has a continuum,” says Reavis Mitchell, a Nashville native and professor of history at Fisk. “And we kept believing that optimism was going to roll over and multiply itself.”
But 2 miles across town at the almost entirely white Vanderbilt, the landscape looked different. There, civil rights were still taking shape.
‘I just had this feeling’
Eileen Carpenter remembers that when her parents dropped her off at an ivy-covered entrance gate at Vanderbilt, the theme from The Twilight Zone played in her head.
“I just had this feeling it wasn’t going to be good,” the 70-year-old Baltimore real estate attorney recalls.
She saw only one other black woman. It was 1965, and Vanderbilt had admitted its first black undergraduate students only the year before. Carpenter could count the number of black students on campus on her fingers.
“Nashville was just ...” She pauses. “It was so conservative and very Southern and very segregated.”
Carpenter grew up in Nashville; her neighborhood on the east side of the Cumberland River boasted nice homes for black professionals, doctors, lawyers and professors.
She didn’t know she wasn’t allowed to go to certain swimming pools or to sit anywhere but the balconies of the city’s movies theaters. Her parents simply said they didn’t have enough time for those activities or couldn’t afford them.
She watched as the black kids in her neighborhood were bused past the nearby white school while she attended the only integrated Catholic high school in town.
When the sit-ins at Woolworth’s dime store downtown made the news, her parents’ half-truths started to come undone.
As progress persisted, more opportunities presented themselves. Desegregation moved past lunch counters into affluent white universities.
For Carpenter, a lover of astronomy, Vanderbilt offered Dyer Observatory and an astrophysics degree, which Tennessee A&I did not. The chance to enroll was a great opportunity.
Vanderbilt, however, also had a contemptible history with race.
In the late 1950s, James Lawson enrolled in Vanderbilt Divinity, in part so he could begin a push for social justice that Martin Luther King Jr. wanted him to start in Nashville.
Lawson conducted morning classes in non-violent resistance at a nearby church, where students role-played as demonstrators and attackers to prepare for the hatred they would encounter. Despite the peaceful efforts, Vanderbilt officials were incensed about Lawson’s protest activities and expelled him.
By 1964, educational institutions in the South were forced to confront segregationist underpinnings.
To address potential unrest, Chancellor Alexander Heard approved an initiative called Impact. The program brought controversial figures selected by the students to campus and gave students an active role in addressing what they deemed unjust. The first Impact Symposium was held in 1964.
By 1967, Impact had tackled divisive topics such as sex, war and race. Speakers included Allen Ginsberg, Strom Thurmond, Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael.
The appearance of two high-profile black men in the recently desegregated Southern city emboldened some and enraged many others.
Carmichael, in particular, was a polarizing figure. Tough-minded and militant, he served as head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the leading spokesman of the Black Power movement.
The day before Carmichael was to arrive at Vanderbilt, his advance team — four black men with bandoliers of bullets crisscrossing their chests and Roman sandals on their feet — strode into the office of the campus chaplain. There to greet them was Frye Gaillard, a tall, skinny white boy from Mobile, Ala., who was the student chairman of Impact.
Gaillard grew up in a place where white people implicitly believed they were better than black people. Joining Impact was his way of refuting the racism of his roots.
“It fell to me,” Gaillard recalls, “to tell (Carmichael’s team) we had death threats against Stokely, and to ensure his safety, we arranged to have police protection.”
“We think of police as the occupying army,” one of Carmichael’s men responded brusquely.
“In this set of circumstances,” Gaillard said, “we need to think we’re all in this together.”
As Carmichael started his speech, a white student in the balcony unfurled a Confederate flag over the rail.
“Just as long as you don’t burn down any of my churches,” Carmichael said.
Then he began a sophisticated lecture on black power to a predominantly white audience.
In the crowd, Carpenter — late into her sophomore year at Vanderbilt — listened with special interest.
Carmichael’s words enlightened her: She attended Vanderbilt, but she wasn’t a part of Vanderbilt.
“He opened my eyes to the fact (that) discrimination doesn’t just have to be lynchings and throwing rocks at you,” she says. “It’s an assault on your humanity, and that’s real.”
A better place
For many Impact attendees, King and Kennedy “were the embodiment of hope,” Gaillard says. “They were the champions of the idealism that had begun to take root for that whole decade.”
Recovering from their loss has been a generations-long struggle.
Mitchell says that, just as he saw in 1968, there is a spark of optimism.
“They say every movement needs a martyr,” Mitchell says. “In that case, it seems like it was necessary at the time.
“I think King’s death, for a while, made America a better place. It reached those who weren’t easily reached. Lessons were learned. I think, in Nashville, much progress was made.”
The students of the 1960s are the parents and the grandparents of today. The kids they raise walk out of schools and hold rallies for their own causes: gay rights, women’s equality, gun control.
“We’ve been waiting for the young people to get fired up,” Carpenter says, a satisfaction in her voice. “We’ve got to pass this baton.”
It is a different fight, driven by the same spirit.
Dissent.