A Tale of Two Campuses

Now that autumn has arrived and schools are in session, I can tell you about my own back to school experience.  This one was not at all what I had expected even though I had been given some advance notice.  I found myself on unfamiliar ground which made me think about education in ways I had not entertained for a long time.

On Saturday, 15 September, I visited Tuscaloosa which is some 55 miles/88 km southwest of Birmingham.  I had not been in the city since 1981 so I knew there had been some changes.  I had once lived there when I was studying metallurgy at the University of Alabama and so knew that campus as well as much of Tuscaloosa itself.  My business in the city took me to Stillman College, but before taking care of that I had my brother John drive me to the UA campus.  An old high school and University of Alabama classmate had told me I wouldn’t recognize the place again and to prepare to be surprised.  I had no idea what his words could mean, but the reality went well beyond my expectations.

We found the campus without too much difficulty thanks to the numerous signs pointing the way.  From the moment we arrived, however, I found my head spinning.  I saw some of the familiar landmarks that I knew from my salad days:  the brick tower which housed Denny Chimes, the unofficial campus timepiece; the main library; and the President’s Mansion were all still standing tall.  The oak tree-girt Quadrangle was still in place as well, but more crowded with outbuildings than it had been in my student days.  And as we cruised down one side street, we passed the university’s Natural History Museum, a building that also contained classrooms and had been rumored to be haunted.  It still stood tall and grim, shaded by the omnipresent oak trees that cover so much of Tuscaloosa and which have given the city its “Druid City” nickname.

But it didn’t take me long to get completely turned around.  New buildings were everywhere, claiming much that had been open space before.  They lined narrow lanes and streets, elbowing each other it seemed as they rose cheek-to-jowl into the Alabama sky.  The campus I had known was gone.  In its place was a conurbation that looked more like a city planner’s nightmare than a university.  John and I drove around aimlessly until I was on the verge of asking him to leave when I spotted a familiar building, the Ferguson Center which had been the student center in my time.  I now knew where I was and even though the layout of the surrounding streets had been altered I successfully navigated us to the two dormitories I lived in back in the 1970s.  Paty and Palmer Halls were still there.

Paty Hall:

Palmer Hall:

Somehow both dorms had survived the campus renewal and rebuilding but the quiet no-thoroughfare street they occupied was no more.  Instead, more buildings loomed in the distance and the old oak groves and football field I had known and played on were gone.  The duck pond behind Palmer Hall had evidently been filled in as well and where once there was nothing but trees and grass was now covered with yet more buildings.

The dorms are security-locked now, but a friendly student let me into Paty and I strolled around the ground floor.  My old room was on the third floor but since I had not gained authorized access, I decided not to tempt fate and go looking for it.  Instead, I called my old classmate, who now lives in New Hampshire, and told him where I was.  He laughed uproariously when I told him I no longer recognized the UA campus.

“That’s no surprise, Raymond,” he said.  “Remember, thirty-five years ago, when we were students, there were 12,000 students at Alabama.  Now there are 31,000 and all the new buildings you see are a reflection of that growth.”

Indeed they are although I can’t say that it has all been good.  The collegial atmosphere is gone and what has replaced it isn’t something I liked.  After talking to my friend, John and I drove away from the campus but there was one last sight that made me realize that some things were bigger than ever.  That was Bryant-Denny Stadium, the home field of the University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide football team.  A stadium that held less than 60,000 thirty-five years ago now has more than 101,000 seats.  It towers over every other structure on the campus like some concrete version of Godzilla over Tokyo.  As I’ve noted before, college football is king in this state, and here was its mightiest temple, an edifice that on certain autumn Saturdays is the fifth-largest population center in all of Alabama.

We drove away and went in search of Stillman College.  After a long and frustrating hunt we found the campus.  It is on the opposite end of town from mammoth UA and is a school with a completely different history and culture than its more celebrated counterpart.  We parked, I entered the building where I conducted my business and then took a little time to learn more.

Stillman is a HBCU, a “Historic Black College and University.”  There are some 105 of these institutions in the United States and Stillman is one of the oldest.  Most of the HBCUs were founded to educate the freed black slaves after the Civil War.  Stillman’s founder, a white Presbyterian minister, intended the college to be a school that would train and prepare black men to be ministers in the Presbyterian Church.  It was founded in 1876 and has had a most distinguished history.

In the year Stillman was founded, the defeated Confederacy was in the last year of what the victorious Union called “Reconstruction.”  The aim was to rebuild a South that had been wrecked by the carnage of the American Civil War of 1861-1865.  One of the social programs undertaken at the time was to give the freed slaves a basic education, to teach them how to read, write, and do basic arithmetic.  After mastering those skills, it was soon discerned that a college education should be the next step.  At that time, despite emancipation, many freedmen found themselves barred from attending the country’s elite colleges and universities.  Thus the HBCUs came into existence with the purpose of closing that gap.

I got some satisfaction from realizing that both Stillman College and my alma mater, the University of Colorado, were founded in the same year.  And as far as education in the state of Alabama, Stillman carries another distinction.  It was founded and was conducting classes when the University of Alabama was a pile of charred ruins.  That is because on 9 April 1865, the day that Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia and ended the Civil War, a Union army marched into Tuscaloosa and attacked the University of Alabama.  The university was defended by teenage students who were easily routed.  The Yankees then proceeded to burn the university to the ground with only four of its buildings escaping the torch.  That devastation lay like an open wound in Tuscaloosa until 1881 when the university was at last rebuilt.

So while Alabama’s flagship university was still a memory, former slaves were getting a college education.  That fact is a source of great pride at Stillman, and its campus reflects that.  After the stifling urbanscape of the UA campus, the atmosphere of Stillman was a direct and most soothing opposite.  This was my first ever visit here because even as a UA student, I never made the time to see the college.  I thought that UA was light-years ahead of poor cousin Stillman and believed the school had nothing of worth for me.  How wrong I was!

For it was only after talking to a long-time Stillman employee and walking out onto its Quadrangle that I could see that Stillman had retained its original vision and purpose.  Yes, many of the buildings I saw were undoubtedly new and yes, Stillman pursues grants, endowments and gifts as other colleges and universities must and should.  But it was only when I walked outside, under the spreading oak trees and next to the stately buildings that I could feel the history.  It seeped out of the ground and up my legs before finally embracing my heart and mind.

Stillman Quadrangle:

Stillman College:

The employee I spoke to smiled broadly when I told him my Tuscaloosa history.

“Back in your day,” he said, “many black UA students came to Stillman for their social life.  There wasn’t much of one for black students at Alabama in those days as you probably remember.  They came here for dancing, movies, parties and dating.

“Matters are otherwise now.  We don’t get those kinds of visitors anymore.  But Stillman is still here and we’re still educating our people.”

I told him I would like to come back, look around, and maybe talk to staff and faculty to learn more.  He told me that I would be more than welcome and that he hoped I would return soon.

Indeed, I plan to return to both campuses and take a good look.  I want to visit the President’s Mansion and the Gorgas Home on the UA campus because they were two of the buildings that survived the university’s destruction and so have great historical value.  I want to visit the Mineral Industries Building, a foundry built by a rich UA alumnus and where I learned metallurgy and how to cast aluminum, brass and cast iron.  I want to go back to Foster Gym where, in 1963, Governor George Wallace “stood in the schoolhouse door” to prevent the registration of two black students at the university.

Stillman College, with its 2,000 students, is now one of the foremost colleges for the study of computer science in America—quite a feather in the cap for a HBCU.  I want to learn how the college intends to move forward while still honoring its history and traditions.  Stillman is not the only HBCU in Alabama, either.  The most famous is Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington.  There are also Alabama State and Alabama A&M which have their own stories to tell.

These visits and the activities associated with them will enrich my life in Alabama.  Here is something that Colorado does not have:  a link to this nation’s past that speaks directly to the life of my ancestors and my family.  I had a cousin who attended Tuskegee Institute.  Another was one of the founding members of the Afro-American Students Association at UA and labored tirelessly to make the years which immediately followed the university’s integration more benevolent than they might otherwise have been.  In Tuscaloosa there exist side-by-side two institutes of higher learning which continue to thrive, albeit in strikingly different ways, and advance human knowledge and understanding.  I am most eager to gain a greater appreciation of both of them.

What It Is, Is Football

September has arrived and that is a very special month in the South.  For decades, the month has been the start of a frenzied period that must be witnessed to be understood and I am getting reacquainted with it this year.  No, I’m not talking about celebrating the end of summer, the scramble to readjust to the start of the school year, or anything that trivial but something far, far more serious.  September means the start of the college football season, a season which hangs on the words of the late Michigan State football coach Duffy Daugherty when he said, “A big game is not simply a matter of life or death…it is more important than that.”

Now before I go on let me clarify something.  I love college football and have since I was thirteen years old.  I was born in Pennsylvania, and the first college football team I learned anything about was Notre Dame.  Then I got acquainted with Penn State football, but the first college to really claim my allegiance was the University of Alabama and its Crimson Tide squad.

My parents were born in Alabama and when my father retired from the Army he moved our family back to his and my mother’s hometown of Birmingham.  My father never attended college and my mother had only a year or so of it before getting married.  When my parents were of college age, blacks were barred from attending both the University of Alabama and Auburn University, the top two educational establishments in the state.  Those were the days when the Jim Crow segregation laws were in full force, and the only reason black people had for setting foot on either campus was to work as janitors and maids.

My cousin Percy Jones was the first member of my family to attend Alabama.  He got his degree in History upon graduation in 1971 and was a tireless worker for civil rights on the campus.  Thanks to his efforts as well as other early black pioneer students, the atmosphere of unrelieved hostility toward us had largely dissipated when I arrived on the campus in 1974 as the second member of my family to go to school there.  I did not graduate but left in 1977.  My cousin Janice was the third family member to attend Alabama and graduated with a nursing degree in 1983.

Despite the Jim Crow laws and racial barriers against us, most of my relatives were Crimson Tide fans.  The big exception was my brother Joe who attended Auburn in the 1980s.  While I was as student at Alabama, I avidly attended football and basketball games.  Alabama’s football history has indeed been a storied and magnificent one.  Appearances in college football’s premiere game, the Rose Bowl, burnished its image in the 1930s; the reign of Paul “Bear” Bryant as head football coach and the six national championships he won were another source of pride.  Other colleges have won more football games than Alabama, but none has won more national championships.  And while Auburn’s football heritage is nothing to sneeze at, its football program has always been overshadowed by Alabama’s.

This history has given rise to a culture that has football as its lifeblood.  When I returned in April, the talk was all about the approaching spring scrimmage at Alabama that would mark the end of spring practice for the Crimson Tide.  I couldn’t help but compare attendance figures for the spring games at Alabama and the University of Colorado whose own scrimmage was held on the same day.  About 15,000 people may have showed up at Colorado’s spring game in 53,000-seat Folsom Field in Boulder, whereas only 95,000 bothered to attend at 101,000-seat Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa.  More than 80,000 made the pilgrimage to Auburn’s Jordan-Hare Stadium for the spring game.

Not a week went by during the spring and on into the summer that some mention wasn’t made of football at Alabama and/or Auburn.  The Olympic Games in London took a back seat to trivial stories about Alabama head coach Nick Saban’s golf game or Auburn coach Gene Chizik’s lamenting the youth and inexperience of his squad.  As the college football season openers for Alabama and Auburn approached, excitement grew with every passing day.  Listening to all the talk, you would have thought that the first Saturday in September would surely see the Second Coming rather than a college football game.

All the other colleges in the state take part in this as well.  The University of Alabama has a sprawling campus right here on Birmingham’s south side and now UAB has a football team.  Compared to Alabama and Auburn, UAB is indeed the poor cousin, but that doesn’t stop tens of thousands from going to games at the mammoth 80,000-seat Legion Field football stadium which is a thirty-minute walk from my house.  Then there are the smaller schools which don’t have football factories on their campuses but which have their legions of devoted fans that flock to their games.

People deck themselves in team paraphernalia which boldly declare their collegiate loyalties.  Alabama and Auburn jerseys, jackets, caps, banners and other insignia are everywhere you look.  You’ll hear people shout, “ROLL TIDE!!!” or “WAR EAGLE!!” (Auburn’s battle cry), with a more than religious fervor.  So when you see people wearing crimson-and-white, you know they are an Alabama supporter.  Orange and blue are Auburn’s colors while UAB’s are green and gold.

This phenomenon is not limited to the state of Alabama but is rife throughout the South from Kentucky, the Virginias and Maryland to Florida and westward into Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas.  The professional football teams in the region, of which there are ten, don’t come close to commanding this kind of devotion.  When I moved to Alabama back in 1972, I couldn’t believe the intensity of the feelings college football would incite.  I saw grown men break down in tears over a team’s loss; fistfights erupt among high school students over game results; scores of Alabama-Auburn games spray-painted on the sides of public buildings; and coaches worshiped as if they were God Almighty.

In the more than thirty years of my absence, this fanaticism has grown even greater.  Maybe that is because the population has increased and so there are more fans than ever.  Football season is now here, and Saturday is the preferred day of worship and sacred service.  Alabama opened its season with a surprisingly easy victory over a highly regarded Michigan squad in Dallas while Auburn was getting its comeuppance at the hands of Clemson in Atlanta.  Alabama is currently the top-ranked college team in the country, and don’t think for one second that its fans don’t revel in that.  The Crimson Tide is also the defending national champion and its faithful are expecting a repeat performance this season.

Where does all this come from?  What are the roots of this devotion and loyalty?  I think the answer lies back in the first quarter of the twentieth century.  The South back then was still mired in depression and defeat.  There were many who could still remember the Civil War and how it ended with the South in ruins.  The North and West went on to greater prosperity while the South wallowed in poverty.  There was little to recommend the region to others with the possible exception of its climate and even that didn’t attract the new blood that could possibly have led to a genuine revival.  The South’s greatest heroes had not given it the independence it craved, but instead had led it to ignominy and disgrace.  There was nothing to look toward with any pride.

Football changed all that.  The big state-supported colleges and universities fielded football teams that were made up of tough, wily players who asked and gave no quarter on the gridiron.  They played each other to sort out a pecking order of sorts, and when that had been determined, they were ready to take on other foes.  As the twentieth century moved into its second quarter, there arose a beacon of glory to which Southern teams could aspire:  the Rose Bowl game in Pasadena, California.  Southern teams like Alabama and Georgia Tech went west and emerged victorious, bringing home coveted trophies to Tuscaloosa and Atlanta while the rest of the nation was forced to admit that Southern teams were a force to be reckoned with.

The Rose Bowl spawned other bowl games:  the Orange in Miami; the Sugar in New Orleans; and the Cotton in Dallas.  These games showcased Southern venues and featured Southern teams paired against the best from the North and the West.  Winter-weary radio listeners and later television viewers would hear and see games in which their teams would be cut down by the despised Southern schools.  Leading the way in racking up victories in the bowl games were teams like Alabama, LSU and Texas.  The host cities reaped a financial windfall as well because outsiders flocked to them during the holiday season, enjoying themselves mightily and spending tons of money.

All of this fueled pride for a region that had little else to be proud of.  The Jim Crow laws were cruelly enforced.  Economic opportunities for people of color were severely limited.  Material progress seemed to skip over the South and put down roots elsewhere.  Men like George Wallace, Lester Maddox and Strom Thurmond became the face of the white South, men who were despised and loathed in other parts of the country.  Meanwhile people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks and Julian Bond were hailed as pioneers and freedom fighters.

Compared to such contrasting and negative images, the college football teams of the South emerged as some of the few positive assets the region had, and they built a fan base that has spanned generations and transcended sociology and politics.  Today, with Southern teams featuring so many black players instead of the all-white ones of bygone days—and thereby hangs a tale I’ll share in another entry—that now rainbow fan base is as strident as its predecessors of seventy and eighty years ago were.  It has been a remarkable transformation, but certainly not a unique one.  South Africa has seen much the same thing happen in its national sports scene since the end of the apartheid era.

Where does all of this leave Yours Truly?  Well, I am a University of Colorado Golden Buffalo.  I wear my CU cap when I go out and it has drawn a few curious looks but no challenges.  While a part of me bleeds crimson-and-white from my days at the University of Alabama, I am a dyed-in-the-wool CU Buff and I let everyone know it.  I tell them I won’t take sides in their intrastate rivalries because my loyalties lay elsewhere.  Besides, while I certainly still love college football and have spent these first Saturdays of the season in front of the TV watching games, football is still a game, a diversion to relieve the stress of everyday living—or at least that is how I want to view it.  That has given me a peace of mind that many are finding elusive this time of year, and I plan to keep it that way.

Raymond Van Winkle

We’re all familiar with Washington Irving’s classic tale of Rip van Winkle, the man who slept for twenty years and awoke to a different world from the one he knew.  When I first read the story as a boy, I thought that some of Irving’s observations were far-fetched.  Now, more than forty years after that reading, I am discovering that he didn’t cover the half of it.  For like his befuddled protagonist, I have also seemingly emerged from an even longer sleep—more than thirty years—to re-engage with a land and family that have undergone significant changes.

When I lived in Colorado, I had contact with my family, but it wasn’t as frequent and regular as it could and should have been.  Oh, there were no quarrels or disagreements that created a hateful silence or unbridgeable schism.  I kept up with my parents and siblings and had a broad understanding of what was going on in their lives.  At the same time, I filled them in on some details of my Colorado life.  Furthermore, I would travel back to Alabama from time to time to see everyone and reconnect.  Then my father died suddenly in 1991 and his death had a profound impact on my extended family.  He was the glue who held things together.  He constantly checked up on kinfolk and not just the ones who lived in Birmingham.  He was a father, uncle, great-uncle and mentor to so many and his death opened a void that nobody filled.

So family members began to drift apart.  My own visits were spaced over wider gaps in time.  My siblings, who had been children when I left, graduated from high school, went to college, got married and became parents themselves.  My mother also returned to work and helped support her grandchildren.  I became the mysterious uncle who lived far away in the West and lived a life beyond the comprehension of most of my extended family.  The years lengthened and changes came; some of them were quite sudden while others were of the slow and gradual kind that overtake one before he is even aware they have transpired.

My arrival last spring has been much like Rip Van Winkle’s awakening and return to his home village.  Before his sleep, he was a colonist and subject of King George III.  He was shocked to learn that now he was a citizen of a new nation and that his loyalty to his former king and country were badly misplaced.  For me, it was the discovery that Alabama had changed somewhat and that my family had new members, young people born during the decades of my absence.  These cousins, nephews and nieces knew little of our family’s history and had their focus on other matters now.  Meeting them and getting to know them has been almost surreal.  I see them and remember when their parents were children.  Or I see them and realize the cousin I knew as a child is now this young boy’s grandfather.

My niece heard me talking about one of her great-grandfathers not too long ago and she wanted to know his name.  This man was my paternal grandfather, but my niece knew nothing about him.  That isn’t too strange because her father, my brother John, had never known either of his grandfathers.  Besides that, our father died years before my niece was even born, so she has little idea of who he was either.

For me, there is still the strangeness of being “Uncle Raymond”.  My brother John was only eleven years old when I moved away.  Now I see his children.  Years ago, the only Uncle Raymond in our family was my father.  Now I have assumed that title and role without the advantage of gradually getting to know these young people.  They have appeared cut out of whole cloth as if by magic.  I know very little about their infancy but am presented with this fully realized child.  I look from the child to the brother or sister who is the parent and I wonder where the years have gone.

Siblings relate their college days and experiences to me.  They talk about getting married and where they spent their honeymoons.  I missed all of that.  I met a young boy not too long ago and upon introducing myself marveled at saying to him, “I’m Raymond and I’m your first cousin twice-removed.  That’s because your great-grandmother and my father were sister and brother, making your grandfather my first cousin.”  Or there is the young girl who came to our house a few weeks ago who is my second cousin twice-removed.  There are also some third cousins of mine lurking around town whom I haven’t run into yet but knew from my previous life here.

Then there are the changes that have occurred in Alabama.  In some ways, the state is as backward and retrograde as it was when I moved here forty years ago.  Southerners are notoriously resistant to change and many are very unhappy with what they see transpiring in the region.  Latinos and Asians are moving into the state, upsetting the demographic balances that have been the norm for decades.  I hear Spanish spoken and see Spanish-language signage in certain establishments making me wonder if I’m in Alabama or back in Colorado sometimes.

My old neighborhood was entirely black when I lived here in the seventies.  Latinos have moved in now, even establishing a Spanish-speaking church just a few blocks from my house.  Old timers grumble about that, saying they want to keep Smithfield and East Thomas black.  The newcomers are regarded with deep suspicion and resentment by some.  I marvel at that, telling my neighbors that whites resisted the integration of their communities in much the same way thirty and forty years ago, and how we should be the last people in the world to adopt that attitude.

It’s not just Latinos who are changing community demographics, either.  Other traditionally black areas are seeing an influx of white folks.  Streets that have not had white residents for seventy years or more are becoming integrated.  Many come because housing is so cheap with a home costing a small fraction of what it would in Denver or Boulder.  In a stunning reversal of roles, some areas are seeing “black flight” as whites return to the city proper and blacks head out to the suburbs and exurbs.

On another front, technological progress is evident everywhere.  From the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, which was one of the training bases for space shuttle astronauts, to the continually sprawling campus of the University of Alabama in Birmingham, the state has embraced the twenty-first century.  Birmingham’s skyline has new skyscrapers; and upscale lofts and condominiums have appeared in once rundown areas on the south side of town.

Alabama itself seems to be more open, more willing to move forward even if that progress is slow.  I think the newcomers and economic necessity have been the engines of that progress.  Otherwise, I would expect matters to be much the same as they were when I moved away.  I will certainly see and learn more when I finally secure some transportation for myself; and I will travel and see as much of the state as possible.  I don’t doubt there are more surprises waiting for me.

Then there are the things that have remained the same, college football being among these.  The game is the top priority in Alabama.  That was true in the past, and if anything the fervor and intensity its fans display have only increased during my absence.  I’ll go into more detail about that in a future entry but for the moment I will say that fanaticism is not too hard a word to describe what the sport means to Alabamians.

Race relations are about the same as they were in the past, which is something I will examine in greater depth later.  For now I will say that there is an equilibrium between the two major demographic groups—black and white folks—in Alabama.  That’s not to say that the old attitudes don’t exist anymore because they most certainly do.  But they have been driven underground more or less these days.  Many factors have contributed to that, not the least of which is Barack Obama’s election as president.

So I have “awakened” to a different world just as old Rip Van Winkle did.  He had to make adjustments to accommodate the new reality and I must do the same.  Thankfully, I’m being ably assisted by my family and friends.  Without their help, I would be unhappy and dissatisfied.  My biggest problem has been homesickness for Colorado.  Some days are better than others fighting it and my family has patiently listened to my lamentations.  I know I’ll always love Colorado and the West.  The challenge now is making room in my heart for Alabama and the South.