Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. As much as I’ve loved celebrating Black History Month by republishing from our archive, I believe it’s important to take what we learn about our history here forward into every day of the year. Enjoy, and take the time to soak in lessons from this Classic article from our Spring 2004 issue.
In 1961 Judge Abner V. McCall was inaugurated as Baylor University’s tenth president. He was a southerner born into rural poverty, a graduate of the all-white Fort Worth Masonic Home and Baylor University, a leader of the historically segregated Southern Baptists, a Texas Democrat dismayed by what he viewed as an intruding federal government, and a conservative proud of his support of such Republican presidential hopefuls as Alf Landon, Thomas Dewey, Strom Thurmond, Dwight Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon. McCall the conservative southerner was now, however, a racist. He did not make racial slurs or tell racial jokes. In all of the hundreds of boxes of correspondence and memoranda in his personal papers, he never denigrates African Americans. He often told people that racism was not part of the true Christian philosophy and that all of society should have integrated long before the 1960s. McCall’s views on race were not shared by a majority of his fellow southern white Christians, but he did represent one kind of southern moderate.
McCall never confused principles, which are not negotiable, with issues, which are the trading pieces of every negotiation. For example, the equality and brotherhood of all people were uncompromisable Christian principles that mandated integration, while the timing or best means to bring integration about were issues shaped, negotiated, and, if necessary, even swapped. Ideally, McCall’s pragmatic leadership style assumed a position in the political center of a dispute and then quietly negotiated the outcome from behind the scenes by listening to and trading with both sides, gradually moving the outcome. In a civil rights context, McCall neither led massive resistance against integration nor stood idly by.
Competing voices
At the beginning of the 1962 school year Baylor sent a reporter, Harry Holcomb, from the Lariat, the school’s student newspaper, to Oxford, Mississippi, to cover the integration of the University of Mississippi as its first African-American student, James Meredith, enrolled. From September 27 through October 11, Holcomb filed reports about the tense build-up in the city, Meredith’s arrival and enrollment, the violent white reaction, Meredith’s and federal marshals’ courage under fire, and the aftermath of the conflict among President Kennedy, Governor Ross Barnett, and the white southerners who violently opposed integration. The significance of Holcomb’s Ole Miss assignment, however, was not found in the content of his stories, which differed little from the reporting of the national media, but from the fact that a student reporter from Baylor was allowed to travel to Mississippi to witness and report such a significant moment in civil rights history.
The Baylor campus was clearly interested in integration. A majority of students had voted to integrate seven years earlier, after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and reaffirmed that position in a sample poll taken in the spring of 1962, when 819 students supported Baylor’s admission of African Americans, countered by 355 against. The Student Congress followed up the poll results by introducing a resolution, similar to one already adopted by the Baptist Student Union, urging trustees and administration to integrate. After a long and heated debate, with those in opposition led by law students, the resolution passed by a vote of thirty-five to five. McCall issued a statement in which he said that he intended to present the referendum to the Board of Trustees and that it would have “some” influence, but he reminded all that the issue was up to the trustees to determine. Until that time, McCall had frustrated integrationists by concealing his own position and maintaining the status quo.
McCall’s pragmatic leadership style assumed a position in the political center of a dispute and then quietly negotiated the outcome from behind the scenes.
In November of 1962 a new, young faculty member in the history department, Dr. Paul Armitstead, introduced a resolution before the College of Arts and Sciences faculty to endorse “the principle of accepting qualified students of race.” The issue passed unanimously. Armitstead commented proudly, “The students . . . have shown that they are in favor of integration, and I think that it is now [the faculty’s] turn.”
Integration at Baylor also received support from off-campus constituents. The Christian Life Commission’s executive board, an arm of the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT), unanimously commended the faculty and student body for their stand against discrimination. O. D. Marting, director of the BGCT’s Stewardship Division, articulated what McCall believed but refused to publish: “that the action barring qualified students from entering Baylor because of race is not consistent with Christian teaching.” In that same vein, renowned evangelist Billy Graham, while speaking to a Baylor-Waco audience of four thousand, chastised the South for a “lack of togetherness racially” as was “witnessed at Ole Miss.”
Others wrote McCall privately and eloquently. Jarrell McCracken, a Baylor alumnus and publisher of Christian books and records, thought it unquestionably clear “from all of the teachings of Christ, and the practices demonstrated in Jesus’ own life, that it is immoral and unchristian to deprive any people of the basic opportunities . . . which would be available to all others.” And alumna Gloriana Simmons Parchman pleaded with McCall to lead Baylor in a manner consistent with the role of an “outstanding Christian university” by taking the initiative on integration as an affirmation of the “brotherhood of man.”
First-person perspectives
Baylor’s integration in 1964 affected many groups of people, from white students who had entered a segregated school to Baylor alumni and the Texas Baptist community at large. But the people most directly and profoundly shaped by Baylor’s integration in 1964 were the first African-American students who enrolled in the years immediately following the trustees’ pro-integration decision in November 1963. The Line talked with a few of these alumni and asked them to share their memories of what their lives, and campus life in general, were like back then. – Todd Copeland
Barbara Walker enrolled in Baylor in the fall of 1964, having transferred from Waco’s all-black Paul Quinn College. She earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Baylor in 1967, becoming, with classmate Robert Gilbert, one of the school’s first black graduates. She went on to earn a master’s in social work from Florida State University in 19y69. In 2001 she retired from her position as a mental health specialist for California’s Department of Mental Health. She currently lives in Arizona.
Baylor Line: Many of the first black students to enroll in Baylor came from all-black high schools, but you had been bused to a formerly all-white high school near your hometown of Redbird, Oklahoma. Did that experience help prepare you for entering Baylor in the first years of its integration?
Barbara Walker: Baylor was a much more pleasant experience than my high school had been, because in Oklahoma neither side had prepared for integration and there was a lot of outright hostility. I found Baylor to be very different. You know, there’s always going to be a group of people who say unpleasant things, but there were students at Baylor who made an effort to make sure I felt comfortable and really went out of their way to surround me with people who were warm and friendly. I pretty much ignored the rest of them. I had very nice professors, although there were a few who had problems with integration. For the most part it was a pleasant experience, and I would not trade my days at Baylor for anything.
BL: How would you characterize the way integration unfolded over the three years that you were at Baylor, from 1964 to 1967?
BW: A lot of the black students who came to Baylor did not live in the dormitory their first year. That first year, there were only two full-time students anyway, myself and Robert Gilbert. He was local, so he didn’t live on the campus. I think whether you lived int he dorm or lived in the community made a big difference in terms of becoming part of campus life. After I had been accepted to Baylor and the housing assignments were made, I was informed that I would be assigned to a single room. I immediately told them I preferred to have a roommate. I understand that during dinner one evening in a summer session they made an announcement that a black student was coming and asked if anyone was interested in sharing a room with her. My roommate, Barbara Blair, who was from Alabama, said yes. Having a roommate made a big difference because it exposed me to a different way of life. But basically I found that, underneath, we were all very much the same; we had the same kind of ideals, dreams, hopes, and faith.
My second year at Baylor, two of the black females who came that year were suitemates with my roommate and me. I know it was very difficult from them, and they both ended up leaving. They had grown up in all-black schools, and it was difficult for them to make the transition to Baylor because there weren’t a lot of activities to be included in socially. Fortunately, I still had friends from Paul Quinn, and when they had dances at Paul Quinn I was included and some of my friends would come with me.
I can’t say that I never experienced any problems or racial remarks, but I had learned from my mother that it was not work responding to people like that. I just made a point of not honing in on any negative stuff around me, because God placed so many warm, beautiful people in my life at Baylor.
McCall also heard from many who disagreed. W. B. Carroway, the pastor of a Baptist church in Port Arthur, related to McCall that he supported integration but admitted that it was a challenge for Southern Baptists. When a motion to integrate was offered at his church, he wrote, he was surprised at how fast it was seconded by one of his deacons. He was not surprised, however, when the issue was dismissed just as quickly in a ten to five vote because “our church stood just isn’t ready to take a stand on something like this.” McCall understood Carroway’s predicament and obviously appreciated the challenge of such a stand.
When the Waco Baptist Pastors Association called for the integration of all Baptist schools, D. K. Martin, an aging and reactionary but loyal former Baylor trustee, warned the pastors to mind their own business since they were “more interested in Nigeria than our Baptist schools.” Martin bragged that he raised millions of dollars for Baylor because its constituents contributed willingly to a segregated Christian university, and he was certain “the ‘rule or ruin’ preachers wanted to make a ‘Washington, D. C.’ (60% chocolate/40% nuts),” out of Baylor’s campus. He thought more of “good Negroes” than he did of “any people who agitate and confuse them by such resolutions” as the pastors’ call to integrate. Such warnings to Baptist pastors were repeated to Baylor’s president, and there was other resistance as well.
When the results of the student poll were published, the president of the Texas Baptist Institute of the American Baptist Association sent McCall a resolution that declared “the concept and practice of racial integration is heathen in origin” and “primarily promoted by atheism, infidelity, and communism.” The Citizens Council of American for Segregation, headquartered at the First Baptist Church of West Dallas, called segregation God-inspired and, like many other, correspondents, offered McCall generous doses of authority from scripture: Genesis 10:32, Hebakkuk 3:6, Matthew 5:17, and Acts 16:26-27 among others. Believing the Word of God on its side, the organization threatened to lobby others not to send their children or their money to an integrated Baylor.
McCall could not enjoy the luxury of ignoring anyone. Wacoan Horace Sherman Miller, leader of the Ku Klux Klan, called Baylor’s president at least four times a week to rant against African Americans and integration. When McCall refused to take any more racist phone calls, the Klan chief warned the president that he was physically disabled and had nothing to do all day but tie up McCall’s phone line. So as not to paralyze his telephone, McCall agreed prudently to receive a few ten-minute calls per week, which were radical and abusive but short.
Careful negotiations
McCall answered most of his constituents on both sides of the issue with patience, sensitivity, and diplomacy. His challenge was to retain the support of conservative Baptists and others while orchestrating the integration he favored and felt was imminent. Although other motives are also possible, he definitely wanted to keep the peace on his campus and, like a seasoned fox night-trekking between a roost of hens and a pack of sleeping dogs, McCall’s trail was quiet and careful—arguably even duplicitous. Technically, his responses to both sides were true; but, if those in favor of integration read his letters to segregationists, or if the segregationists saw his correspondence to the integrationists, both sides would have felt deceived.
Looking back at his letters provides no obvious line on McCall’s motives or feelings. For example, he often offered immediate comfort to worried segregationists by assuring them that Baylor remained segregated until the board changed the rules of admission. He seldom, however, ended there. McCall wrote to one critic: “I frankly believe that at some future time the Baylor Board of Trustees will vote to accept Negroes in the graduate and professional schools and we will eventually have a few there. Perhaps it will go even further. I have not recommended or advocated any of this, but I believe that it will come in the future and that you and I will have to adjust thereto.”
The Ole Miss riot was the watershed. In light of student and faculty support for integration, the changing faces and attitudes on the board, everyone’s desire to avoid a violent confrontation, and the ongoing debate over moral examples, the time was ripe for McCall to attempt a change in policy at Baylor. After the campus violence in Mississippi, Baylor’s board appointed a special committee of trustees in November of 1962 to study the issue of integration.
The chair of the Baylor Board of Trustees was Hilton Howell, a senior partner in the largest law firm in Waco and a close friend of McCall’s. Knowing there were still board members who favored segregation—five members had voted against the appointment of the integration study committee—Howell and McCall recruited Earl Hankamer, described by McCall as “a gentle Christian loved by everyone” and perhaps the most respected lay trustee on the board, to chair the committee. McCall then advised Howell and Hankamer to add a few members, such as Ben Wooten and Horace Jackson, who openly opposed integration. The majority of the committee, however, was loaded with men who favored integration, or at least recognized it was inevitable. Because of Oxford’s violent reaction at Ole Miss, Baylor trustee and McCall confidant Orba Lee Malone suggested the committee include some influential Wacoans whose support could help calm Baylor’s hometown. In response, Howell added wealthy church furniture manufacturer Ross Sams and popular Baptist pastor Joe Weldon Bailet, both from Waco, to the committee.
McCall was not a racist, but avoiding a split in his constituency was essential to him.
The committee report, due in April of 1963, was postponed to November, but neither the committee nor McCall was inactive in the interim. Wooten, a Dallas banker and vice-chair of the Baylor board, wrote a letter to Hankamer, which the chair copied for the others on the committee. Known to oppose integration, Wooten prefaced his letter by stating that he “presented a cased neither ‘for’ nor ‘against’ the issue.” He related that as chair of the Board of Regents of North Texas State University, he and his fellow regents had deflected criticism over integration by forcing the issue before a federal court and then blaming the judge for his order to desegregate. Wooten argued that the Baylor trustees, in a similar strategy, should refrain from taking any action and force the BGCT to make the decision and take the blame.
McCall, who believed the BGCT was unlikely to order integration, concentrated on the Baylor trustees. They were easier to sway, and, furthermore, he believed that they were elected by the convention and charged to make this type of decision. McCall thus was already on the offensive. He directed law professor Margaret Harris Amsler to share with the committee her research establishing that Baylor’s charter did not prohibit African Americans’ enrollment. He also circulated a favorable report he requested from the recently integrated Mercer University in Georgia. Finally, the president then sent the committee a letter he wrote in favor of integration that tactfully avoided framing the issue on moral grounds so that he did not offend any trustees by suggesting they were immoral.
His logic and style seemed matter of fact: “It is my belief that within about five years by executive and judicial rulings the federal government will force all private schools in the South to integrate. . . . Within the past year we have seen the following administrative rulings from Washington: no teacher-training summer institutes can be segregated; and Baylor was passed over for a Peace Corps program because the university is segregated.”
After predicting that the federal student loan program would also be withheld from segregated schools, McCall hammered his point home: “This is the reason that I believe that wholly apart from denominational reasons and internal policy reasons we should go ahead and begin the process of integration at Baylor.
Eural Davis came to Baylor in 1966, after graduating from Carver High School in Waco, and earned a bachelor’s degree in social work in 1970. At Baylor, he was a member of the Baylor Chamber of Commerce. He went on to earn a master’s in social work from the University of Houston in 1974. He serves as the manager of chapter services for the National Association of Social Workers in Washington, D.C.
Baylor Line: How many African-American students were at Baylor when you arrived on campus in 1966?
Eural Davis: I think there were about ten, because we were members of what we called “The Ten.” Some of us lived on campus, and some commuted from home.
BL: How would you characterize those early years of Baylor’s integration?
ED: There were some awkward moments on both sides because Texas was practically segregated at the time. Our white counterparts had not been around black students, nor had we been around whites. Baylor was really one of the happiest times in my life because I really enjoyed being there and living on campus. Some of my friends who’d gone to the University of Texas and some of the other schools talked about all of the overt racism at the time. But that wasn’t the case at Baylor.
BL: No doubt it helped that, starting in the late 1950s, the Baylor student body had voted in favor of integration on a couple of occasions.
ED: Exactly. On both sides, everyone tried to make it work because we were the first group. I’d say that many of us black students thought, “Oh, I’ve got to graduate. I’ve got to succeed.” All of us felt that way initially since we were the first. We had to succeed; we had to get through Baylor. But once we got there and found out the climate of Baylor, which was peaceful, we soon forgot all about that and became our own persons. We concentrated on our career and stopped feeling that we had the weight of our race on our shoulders.
BL: To what extent did the enrollment of African-American students grow by the time you graduated in 1970?
ED: When I graduated, there might have been thirty, at the most. I recall that it was during my senior year when Baylor really set out to diversify the student body. Basically, as Baylor grew, they began to think, “Okay, we need to begin to see what we can do in terms of diversifying and actively recruiting minority candidates.” That process might have been slower than at other schools, but on the other hand we didn’t have a march on the administration saying, “We want this and that.” Because at that point we were still trying to find our identity at Baylor. And as I graduated and others came on, I think some of them became involved in the administration and also in other areas of the university, rather than in just athletics. So I think that helped Baylor begin to really change.
“Our white counterparts had not been around black students, nor had we been around whites.” – Eural Davis
The decisive vote
In the spring of 1963, trustee Roy Bass passed to McCall a copy of Bass’s response to a Baylor alumna who was opposed to integration. Bass defended McCall and integration by arguing that Bapist missionaries abroad found the racist customs of southern white Christians in the United States “one of the hardest obstacles to overcome.” The idea that racism was an obstacle to international evangelism was a powerful weapon among Baptists, and McCall now brought it to bear upon the committee.
In January of 1963, McCall met with John Mills, a missionary in Nigeria, and asked him to reproduce and resend a letter of protest that Mills originally posted in 1957 to W. R. White, then president of Baylor. McCall, in turn, forwarded the resurfaced letter, signed by twenty-two Baylor alumni serving as missionaries, to committee members. The letter stated that the fact that African Americans weren’t admitted to Baylor caused embarrassment to the missionaries and made it more difficult for them to do their jobs.
The summer of 1963 brought horrible violence against civil rights protestors, especially in Birmingham, Alabama, that was graphically reported in the media and called up memories of Ole Miss. It also inspired President Kennedy to make the final break with southern white Democrats over his push for civil rights legislation. At Baylor, McCall now anticipated victory and prepared a resolution for Hankamer to submit to the committee guaranteeing the president the “broadest authority as to means and procedure” for integration. The committee met without record in executive session and divided over the issue after what McCall later described as a “very vigorous discussion.”
At the trustees’ meeting on November 1, 1963, Hankamer presented the committee’s pro-integration majority report that included McCall’s resolution. Wooten spoke for the minority by arguing that the BGCT, not the board, should make the decision and absorb the blame. After a strained debate that included threats of resignation, the board voted to integrate Baylor. The board’s minutes did not record the results of the vote other than to say it was “a majority vote,” but in a Lariat article Howell was quoted as saying that while “the final vote of the board was not unanimous, the decision was reached by amicable discussion and democratic procedure.” In separate interviews recorded years later, McCall remembered the vote as either a two to one or three to one majority.
Days after the board’s historic action, McCall wrote with typical understandment to Bruce McIver, a pastor in Dallas, that this “has been a difficult and controversial matter which I have been working on for quite a while. . . .” Ever the politician, he went on to request the pastor’s help in lobbying Dallas Baptists for their support. Baptist Ira Carroll attacked McCall and the trustees for acting like the United States Supreme Court by “trying to force [integration] on the people who are concerned about Baylor University.” M. O. Faires was convinced that “Baptists state-wide would have voted it down,” and noted that he did not want his money going to a place where “Negro children will be takin in a few years. Let the Negroes and the Kennedys take care of their own.” Another constituent threatened to do all in his power to dissuade others from patronizing McCall’s integrated university. A Baptist parent asked, “Why plan to send our daughter at greater expense to Baylor instead of a state-controlled university, if while there she is still surrounded by the results of the practice we consider far more repugnant and portentous of evil than either dancing or drinking, both of which we strongly oppose? To be sure, it is now out of the question.”
The tone was much different on campus, where most of the faculty and students applauded the trustees’ decision. The Student Congress passed a resolution, opposed by two law students, in favor of the new policy. The editor of the Lariat went further by commending the manner in which the issue was introduced, discussed, and approved. McCall heard from many off campus, such as Rev. Bay Burchette of Hamilton, who expressed his wholehearted support and trust that the board’s action would lead “some of us to go where we have been to timid to walk,” and W. F. Howard of the BGCT’s Education Commission who thanked McCall for the part he played “in guiding the matter wisely.”
Harvey Browning entered Baylor in the fall of 1967 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1973. At Baylor, he was president of Delta Delta Gamma in 1972. He went on to earn a master’s degree in public administration from Southern Methodist University in 1976. He serves as an internal consultant and recruiter for the Texas Department of Health.
Baylor Line: What was Baylor’s culture like when you enrolled three years after the school had integrated?
Harvey Browning: The year I entered was the year they actually admitted the first full class of black students. There had been a sprinkling before then, but that year there were actually seventeen blacks in total on campus—twelve guys and five girls. Most of the guys were athletes were athletic scholarships. I was one of only two male non-athletes in my class.
The only thing I would fault Baylor for is not saying, “If we bring black students in, what are they going to do socially?” Baylor had not done a lot of thinking ahead about mixing and mingling. Things were very limited in terms of the dating options for black male students. We tended to date the black girls at the high schools. At the time I had a girlfriend back home, so it wasn’t a major issue for me. But nature took its course in terms of relationships forming between white and black students, even though interracial dating was frowned upon. When that started happening, people at Baylor had other problems to deal with because they hadn’t thought of interracial social interaction. But as more black students came in, they started dating each other. My wife and I were probably the first interracial marriage of Baylor. She came into Baylor as a junior in the fall of 1972. We started dating that fall semester and got married in July of 1974.
BL: Were you prepared for what you would find at Baylor?
HB: I was from an all-black neighborhood in Houston. My elementary school, junior high, and senior high were all black—students and faculty. So I went from a socioeconomically middle-lower class black world to a university whose students were almost totally Anglo Saxon and fairly affluent. It was like going from night to day. There was an element, in terms of white students, who would make offensive racial comments. The ones who did it were basically just redneck-type individuals. A lot of these folks had never seen blacks before except in servant-type positions—maid or butler, that kind of thing.
BL: Did you have doubts about staying at Baylor?
HB: I was in the top of my class in Houston. I’d heard all of my life that—when you started comparing blacks and whites—blacks couldn’t compete. I expected the academic challenge, but what I did not expect was the challenge of the social and cultural differences. The white students really hadn’t much involvement with other cultures because they’d gone to white schools, so it was a learning experience for both of us in terms of attempting to figure out how to live with another culture. For instance back in the day even the black athletes were not allowed to eat at Waco restaurants such as George’s.
I’m an extrovert, so I became acclimated because I was doing a lot of things, like running for the office of Freshman Class President, playing intramural sports, and going to church at Seventh and James. I received a wonderful education at Baylor, and I wouldn’t trade my Baylor experience for anything; my blood is still green and gold, and I collect bears. I will always value the relationships I formed with other black students during my Baylor days. I brag about Baylor and recommend Baylor to lots of kids who are thinking about where to go for college.
Difficult realities
Early in 1964, as fast as integration swept Baylor into the civil rights movement, the issue faded from McCall’s mail stack; he carried the day on the issue of integration and then retreated. There were no riots, no violence, no property damage, no group protests, no signs, and no shouting. There were also few African Americans. With little publicity Baylor admitted five black evening students at the semester break in January, mainly in the School of Education. By 1967 only eighteen blacks were carried on the university rolls out of a total that exceeded seven thousand, although that year marked the graduation of Baylor’s first African Americans, Barbara Ann Walker and Robert Gilbert.
Baylor’s integration, however, was neither complete nor completely satisfying. McCall’s timing, his use of events such as the Ole Miss riot, and his political and brokerage skills in orchestrating the trustees’ vote exhibited a little luck and a masterful understanding of Baylor, Baptists, and the South. It was an important and historic decision moved, at least in part, by McCall. After integration, however, the few African Americans admitted to Baylor received little support from the administration, which leaves McCall vulnerable to charges of tokenism – the idea that McCall opened Baylor’s doors to a few blacks so as to preserve immediate peace and long-term white hegemony. After integration, McCall refuted such notions by openly condemning racism in an attempt to connect the Baptist church to civil rights.
Remarkably, in light of the opposition to integration, McCall was re-elected by acclamation to his last term as president of the BGCT in 1964, almost a year after African Americans entered Baylor. His controversial second inauguration address, published throughout Texas, was a direct challenge to segregation and the traditional role of southern Christians. Maligning those Baptists stuck in the past, McCall expressed disappointment in people who ignored the country’s racial problems, and he called for a recommitment to a “social gospel” that did not signal a welfare state, but rather personal commitment, personal action, and personal sacrifice to help eliminate unnecessary injustice.
In a letter to another of his critics McCall drew no quarter: “We as Baptists should be concerned with and apply Christian principles to all problems of our society today. I advocate that we attempt to solve these problems by private action and not by governmental action. . . .”
He elaborated that it was not for Christians to quarrel over the causes of racial problems such as “the minority races whose educational and economic status could stand improvement,” but rather to seek solutions. He reminded his racist critics that the Good Samaritan in Jesus’ parable neither assaulted, robbed, nor abandoned the injured traveler, but still rendered aid and was “good” for doing so.
The sincerity of McCall’s conviction against racism is best exemplified by a letter he wrote to missionary John Mills, who had been helpful in the fight to integrate. McCall asked Mills to encourage any Nigerian that the missionary felt could succeed at Baylor to apply for admission. The president promised to help personally all the students he could.
There is a veneer of inconsistency to McCall: biding his time, playing both sides from the middle, capitalizing upon fears of violence, abdicating the initiative after integration, and virtually abandoning his new black students to fend for themselves. Contrast those characterizations with McCall’s orchestration of integration, the open call to Baptists for a “social gospel,” and the never-ending individual defenses to the verbal attacks of racist constituents. However, inconsistent words and silence, as well as deeds and inaction, are the telltale signs of a pragmatist such as McCall—one who knows the ingredients for success, understands the price of victory, and is willing and able to do almost whatever is necessary to achieve a desired end.
McCall was not a racist, but avoiding a split in his constituency was essential to him. Timing was his excuse for tolerating segregation and prudence his reason for the finesse others would have called duplicity. For whatever reason, McCall worked effectively to integrate Baylor and then stopped. He argued against tokenism, but he admitted few blacks. He must have understood the challenges the first few African Americans faced at Baylor, but he did little to actively support them. He expected students, faculty, staff, and alumni eventually to accept integration as a Christian principle, but the narrow-minded racism of many of those same constituents forced him to delay action and orchestrate a policy change by stealth from behind the scenes. These inconsistencies represent more than shrewdness. In McCall, they demonstrate the clash of two principles he could neither negotiate nor reconcile—his Christian belief in the equality of all people before God versus his southern heritage that extolled the independence of the individual.
In letters and speeches. McCall argued that people were equal—both spiritually and legally—and that the fortunate must accept and help the rest. Acceptance of others should occur, however, not by law, order, or injunction but by individual choice—the “states’ rights” mantra of the South. The Christian McCall recognized the equality of others and persuaded Baylor’s board to integrate, but the southern McCall could not mandate others to accept the change.
It is ironic that McCall understood the South well enough to know that the successful and peaceful integration of Baylor required a quiet back-room skill; but, once the deed was done, he was left in the open preaching equality to many of those same southerners who he knew were not listening in the first place. This was the basis of McCall’s explanation that it was “possible to be a political conservative and an advocate of states’ rights and still believe that segregated education was no longer sound policy.”
McCall’s Christian principles and political skills made integration possible, a remarkable and significant accomplishment, clouded by the fact that his southern philosophy required its tentative and glacial acceptance—one individual conversion at a time. This was also the source of failure—the pragmatist won the victory of integration, but the southerner was left jousting with windmills to make it more than a symbol.
Vince Clark ’83, JD ’85, MA ’91, teaches history at McLennan Community College in Waco. This article originally appeared under the title “Abner McCall and Civil Rights: The Integration of Baylor University” in Volume 20 (2000) of Texas Baptist History. Reprinted with permission for the Texas Baptist Historical Society, located at 4144 N. Central Expressway, Dallas, TX 75204.
