The Making of a Liberal, Part Three for the Grands

In the fall of 1962 I moved from a school of 600 to a school of close to 25,000—the University of Texas at Austin.  My roommate that first year was from a small town just an hour or so from my own.  In fact I just visited her and her husband a week ago. 

We lived in Andrews Dormitory.  This was to be the last year of the infamous…and silly…panty raids where young men stood en masse before the dorms demanding that panties be thrown to them from windows.  Today men and women share that same dorm.  In 1962 women had to wear a coat or skirt over gym shorts while walking to gym class. It was the last gasp of the façade of primness that characterized the ‘50’s.  Soon the whole country would be embroiled in revolts—against the Vietnam War, against the behavioral straight jacket of the previous decade.  Women were demanding equal rights in the classroom, the office, the bedroom and everywhere in between.  Texas was late to the party but eventually it showed up or rather the party came to it.

Part of being a liberal is being inclusive.  In the early ‘60’s there were less than two dozen black students among 25,000 on the 40 acres comprising the UT campus. But one of those students changed me.

In 1963, my sophomore year, I had an ‘Aha’ moment in the elevator of Batts Hall the foreign language building where I took classes in French, one of my two majors, the other being English.

That morning as I rushed to class, I hesitated for a second as the elevator doors opened.  A young, black man was standing alone in the elevator.  I took a quick breath, made a decision and entered.  I was going to be late if I waited for him to go up to his floor.  To this day, 53 years later  I remember looking straight forward at the doors, thinking  ‘Oh My God I’m alone in an elevator with a Negro man’, since’ black’ was not in vogue at that time.  The elevator rattled upward always sounding as if it were on its last gasp.  I cut my eyes over and up and up for he was quite tall and took a quick look.   He was looking straight ahead as well, perhaps feeling as uncomfortable as I was.  He said nothing; I said nothing.  His presence did not feel threatening.  I grabbed another quick glance.  

Understand that I had never been this close and alone with a black man.  All the stories that one gathers by a kind of cultural osmosis that feeds the fear of a white woman in the presence of a black man were a part of my psyche.  Yet I felt no fear.  I remember thinking, ‘So what is the big deal’?  And the light came on.  There was no big deal.  Here was a student going to class just as I was.  I didn’t feel fear.  I just felt acute awareness.  And finally I thought.  ‘This is OK.  I’m OK.’  And from that day forward I have endeavored to identify knee jerk reactions based on biases fed to me in countless ways in my youth.

There is a piece on the Internet describing those first black students, the Precursors they called themselves.  I look at the photo below and wonder, ‘Is one of the guys  shown my elevator stranger?' 

Oh how I would love to speak with him and share all that went through my head in those few moments when we rode to the third floor of Batts Hall.  Our paths never crossed again.  Indeed I have no memory of any black students in my classes.  There were only a few in those first years.

So often we cross paths with others and something happens that shapes us, shifts us.  Sometimes years pass before we understand the significance of these encounters.  But the rub is that we almost never get a chance to tell that person how they played a role in our lives.  Sigh…

To be continue...Lessons from Saudi Arabia