By Andy Rieger
The Norman Transcript
NORMAN — Like many seasoned academics, Dr. George Henderson has a vita full of publications, research papers and books. His more than four decades at the University of Oklahoma are rich with scholarly work and civic accomplishments.
But it’s his latest project that has the 78-year-old professor showing a little extra pride of authorship and spring in his step. “Race and the University,” a memoir, traces the longtime OU dean and professor’s arrival at and journey through an oftentimes hostile city and campus with its covert and overt racism and intolerance for African Americans like him. OU Press expects copies in mid-August.
“I did not want this part of our history to be lost. It is our story, not just my story,” said Henderson, the Sylvan N. Goldman Professor Emeritus, David Ross Boyd Professor Emeritus and Regents Professor Emeritus of Human Relations, Education and Sociology. “This is so personal. I think this book is my most authentic work.”
The 272-page memoir will no doubt turn a few heads and raise some eyebrows in Norman, a place his mentor at Wayne State warned him about. “It’s a redneck school in a backward state,” Henderson was told in 1967. He pulls few punches in the book and hopes it will inspire those pioneers at other institutions to write their stories.
The first test came when real estate agents tried to prevent him from buying a home in Norman which was known as a “sundown town.” He and his wife, Barbara, their seven children — George Jr., Michele Alicia, Lea Ann, Faith Elaine, Joy Lynne, Lisa Gaye and Dawn Noel — and his mother-in-law, Ora Beard, came anyway, excited about his first faculty appointment after earning his doctorate. He was OU’s third African American professor. Preceding him were Melvin Tolson, Jr. and Lennie Marie Muse-Tolliver. Marie Mink, assistant professor of nursing at the OU Health Sciences Center, was the first African American full-time professor.
All were trailblazers but the expectations on Henderson were immense. His reputation as as agent of change preceded him.
But he didn’t come here to dissolve the university’s racial divides. The issues and obstacles faced by African American students at OU were immense in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There were fewer than 100 African American students, many recruited as athletes and graduate students. He spares few words for the athletic department and singles out coaches and administrators who mistreated African American athletes.
“I was just going to fulfill my fantasy and be a typical college professor,” said Henderson, the son of Alabama sharecroppers who moved north to escape racism in the South. “I was going to be the Mr. Chips of Oklahoma.”
But national civil rights issues quickly manifested themselves on a campus he found to be a place of “white privilege, black separatism and campus-wide indifference to bigotry.” Minority students looked to him and the two other African American professors for encouragement, organizational skills and mentorship. Oklahoma City African Americans had great expectations of the “rabble rouser from Detroit.”
The book describes in graphic detail the abuses suffered by the family and the acts of courage and kindness that kept them from packing up and heading back north to more welcoming campuses. Sallie’s Real Estate, headed by Sally and Sam Matthews and Edward “Mokey” Webb, bravely pushed through a home sale to the African American Hendersons, believed to be a first for Norman. Architecture professor Fred Shellabarger voluntarily redesigned and secured a contractor to enlarge the family’s home. Dr. Mary Abbott volunteered to be the children’s pediatrician.
“During the darkest, most contentious times of our residency, strangers reached across the community’s enormous racial divide to make us feel wanted,” Henderson writes. “Without those people we would have been able to survive the bitterness surrounding our arrival. Even so, none of their friendly acts could wash away completely the horror of receiving obscene and threatening telephone calls, garbage and a makeshift cross thrown on our front yard, raw eggs splattered on our cars, and epithets yelled at us by strangers in cars speeding past our house.”
The Hendersons didn’t have to bother looking for the city’s black community. “To bigots, we became the black community of Norman,” Henderson wrote.
They were invited to numerous dinner parties by faculty colleagues and civic leaders. It was an awkward dance playing out in a university community that had admitted its first black student less than 20 years earlier.
“Someone had to break those barriers. If it was just about the Hendersons, then we’ve really been wasting our time,” he said.
After two years, he thought he was ineffective in uniting the students and making a dent in the university’s racial record. He later changed his mind and accepted an endowed professorship charged with creating a graduate-level program to train students to combat racial discrimination. “After I got to know the students, I couldn’t abandon them. They were my power base,” he said.
Fellow faculty member David Levy wrote the book’s foreword. Henderson invited three OU African American students to share their campus and city experiences in the book. Sandra “Sandy” Rouce, of Tulsa, Beth Wilson of Muskogee and Sterlin Adams, a graduate student from Nashville, penned their memories for Henderson.
The three, like Henderson, describe the creation of the Afro-American Student Union, a first for OU. Henderson, who eschewed violence, at times found himself at odds with the group’s declarations and methods.
“They knew they were pushing me and I was that close,” he said, his gesturing fingers nearly touching. “But I always said to myself if I can’t model non-violence then what good is it to say to my students non-violence.”
Henderson includes a summary and postscript in the book. He says that “we won more battles than we lost,” and in so doing he came to understand the deeper meanings of friendship that have no racial boundaries. The city, he says, is must more desegregated now than it was in 1967 but complete racial integration is a more distant goal.
“I just feel better about the book than any other book I’ve done,” he said. “For me, it’s therapeutic.”
