Suffering Pitfalls of Civil Rights

MEMPHIS, Tenn. —  On his first day at LeMoyne Normal Institute, Theodore Roosevelt McLemore stood in the headmaster’s office.

McLemore, now 96, recalls that moment as if he were still 14 years old. It was a Monday morning in December 1916. He wore the only suit coat he owned. Tiny beads of cold sweat pooled at the base of his back. The headmaster, Earl Clippinger, sat behind a massive wood desk.

Miss Mary Peebles, McLemore’s eighth-grade teacher, stood beside him. She was the reason he was there. She had persuaded his father to let him leave the farm and finish high school in Memphis.

“Mr. Clippinger, I’m bringing Theodore Roosevelt McLemore from Collierville, Tenn., to work his way through school,” Peebles said. “He wants to matriculate here at LeMoyne.”

The headmaster rose and extended a fleshy pink hand. McLemore wiped moisture from his palms onto his knee britches. “How do you do, Mr. McLemore?” the towering white man said.

McLemore’s eyes still mist when he recalls that gesture. “It was the first time I’d ever seen anybody black treated with such respect. From that first handshake, I got a feeling I was somebody. I wanted to know what he knew, and I was willing to study whatever it took to learn.”

The small preparatory school that accepted McLemore is now LeMoyne-Owen College, one of the nation’s 103 historically black colleges and universities, almost all of which are in the South. For most of its history, LeMoyne-Owen has turned poorly prepared black students from Memphis and rural Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas and Alabama into middle-class professionals.

But LeMoyne-Owen’s glory days came when the restrictions of a segregated American South made the school’s job easier than it is today. Until the late ‘60s, black farm kids rarely went beyond high school. Few were affluent or lucky enough to escape a future of sharecropping or menial jobs. For folks like McLemore, higher education shimmered like an impossible dream.

In the contemporary South, black students can pick from a menu of schools that McLemore was never offered. Elite private institutions aggressively recruit the offspring of people they once excluded. State universities, many of which were militantly opposed to desegregation, are now open to all those who meet their criteria. And black students can still choose from a roster of black colleges and universities.

Amid these choices, LeMoyne-Owen resides in a netherworld. Unlike Spelman College in Georgia or Tuskegee University in Alabama, it does not boast a distinguished academic program that rivals its white counterparts. Nor is it like Bishop College in Dallas or Friendship College in South Carolina--two of the nine black colleges that have folded since 1976--an institution that nobody wants to attend.

Rather, LeMoyne-Owen shares a fate familiar to the great majority of black colleges: Beyond its tightly coiled Southern roots, it is barely known even among college-bound high school graduates. Teetering like a seesaw over its past reputation, LeMoyne-Owen tries to level itself for an uncertain and competitive future.

Precarious Fiscal Situation

LeMoyne-Owen’s student body of slightly fewer than 1,000 is drawn largely from black working-class and low-income families in Memphis. It has always attracted a sprinkling of white students. The school, which has more than 40 full-time faculty members, offers 15 majors in disciplines such as elementary education, fine arts, accounting and chemistry. Alumni include Duke University religion professor C. Eric Lincoln and Washington Mayor Marion Barry as well as such Memphis leaders as Mayor W.W. Herndon and City Council Chairman Myron Lowery.

But with an endowment of only $10.5 million, the school’s fiscal situation is precarious. The once-vibrant hilltop campus that greeted McLemore is tattered and worn. Classrooms have tiles missing from ceilings. Directly opposite the college, a drug-riddled housing project has been razed, but a rubble-strewn landscape remains. Until recently, the school had no dormitories, requiring resident students to live as boarders in the surrounding community.

The college is already a product of one lifesaving union. LeMoyne College merged in 1968 with Owen College, a junior college founded and run by a Baptist missionary organization. But even the combined resources of two black-run colleges failed to reverse the steady march of black students--and the money they carry with them--to previously all-white colleges.

In 1968, the Ford Foundation reported that 80% of college-educated black Americans earned their degrees at a historically black college or university. Twenty-six years later, the National Assn. for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education estimated that 1 in 4 black college graduates now come from black schools.

Just last fall, 939 black first-year students enrolled at the University of Memphis, a large, state-supported school that admitted its first black students in 1959. At LeMoyne-Owen, only 131 black students--of the 550 admitted arrived for freshman classes.

Although low for a private college, LeMoyne-Owen’s annual tuition of $6,000 is no bargain. In contrast, at the University of Memphis, tuition is $2,400 for in-state students and $6,400 for those from out of state. Given that upward of 90% of LeMoyne-Owen’s student body receives financial aid of some kind, the school not only is more expensive, it pockets less per student.

Faculty members are likely to teach three or four classes a semester, unlike the more leisurely one or two classes per term asked of professors at larger campuses. Though university officials decline to offer salary figures, the American Assn. of University Professors estimates that a full professor at the typical black college earns 22% less than the national average.

In the pre-civil rights South, LeMoyne-Owen pumped out nearly every black teacher, principal and official for Memphis’ and west Tennessee’s segregated public schools. Today, LeMoyne-Owen attracts black students who have never attended all-black schools. That means LeMoyne-Owen’s future graduates will enter a less-constricted South--and many will navigate a multicultural globe unimaginable to most of the school’s alumni.

Arose From Abolition Group

LeMoyne-Owen’s founding dates to the insurrection of 53 West African slaves aboard the Amistad in 1839. The revolt galvanized abolitionists to form the American Missionary Assn., a religious group that later became the United Church of Christ. As the mutinous slaves’ case inched its way to the Supreme Court, the association set about a program to educate free blacks in the North and West. After the abolitionist movement spread into the South, one of the first schools they founded was the Lincoln Chapel School in Memphis.

A race riot during the closing days of the Civil War reduced the school to a smoldering heap, prompting a Philadelphia physician named Francis Julius LeMoyne to donate $20,000 for the reconstruction of a new school for blacks in Memphis. By 1871, when the first building was dedicated, LeMoyne Normal and Commercial School came into being in a white middle-class neighborhood just beyond the Memphis city limits.

“Here is a place that has a tremendous history in this community but in recent years has gone through some turbulence,” says George R. Johnson, president of LeMoyne-Owen. A graduate of Amherst College and Columbia Law School, Johnson served as the academic dean at Howard Law School for nine years until he was asked to take over LeMoyne-Owen in 1996.

Johnson’s Enthusiasm Makes Impression

The previous two administrations had left the school deep in debt and on the edge of closure. LeMoyne-Owen suffered tremendous turnover. Its faculty fled to other colleges. Student population remained stagnant. Operating expenses rose, and tuitions couldn’t keep pace.

Given to understated blue suits and crisp white shirts, Johnson’s style is entrepreneurial. Although his tenure has been short, he’s already made an impression with his cheerleading. His day is packed shuttling between the campus and corporate suites and fund-raising dinners--asking Federal Express executives to hire his graduates, imploring alumni to return pledges, negotiating with city officials to fund urban rebuilding projects in the blighted neighborhood surrounding the school.

When Johnson arrived, he inherited a campus community filled with doubters. He went to work to turn them around, offering faculty and staff 7.5% raises this year--the first significant pay boost in nearly a decade. He’s filled long-vacant positions, including a senior vice president for fiscal affairs, a vice president for academic affairs and a dean of teacher education.

Johnson also spearheaded a successful 90-day, $4-million fund-raising campaign. The money will be used to renovate a campus building and to undergird the college’s endowment.

Johnson, though, knows better than to move too far, too fast. So he’s redefining, but not questioning, the role of teacher training at LeMoyne-Owen, believing his black college should be the primary institution for reaching “the urban learner,” a place to develop teachers for big-city school systems across the land.

LeMoyne-Owen’s primary function has been remedial, transforming underachieving high school students who finished in the bottom half of their class into college graduates four or five years later.

The typical freshman entering LeMoyne-Owen is female, has a full-time job and lives at home in Memphis. She most likely had a 2.58 GPA in high school. She probably scored about 700 (out of a possible 1600) on the SAT and will more than likely take five years to graduate with a business degree. She may even be two or three years older than the average college student because a LeMoyne-Owen student has to work. That means she’s less interested in the typical college diversions, such as sororities and campus parties.

Any discussion of changing LeMoyne-Owen’s remedial role sharply divides the faculty. Should a poorly capitalized black college spend its meager resources on less-prepared students? Wouldn’t the nation’s community colleges be the place for catch-up work?

“That would be fine with me,” says Perre Magness, a LeMoyne-Owen trustee. “Some of the biggest competition schools like LeMoyne-Owen has today comes from the public community colleges. It’s so expensive to do the remedial work, we should let them have it and allow us to concentrate on improving our programs.”

If LeMoyne-Owen were only to seek out the best and brightest, it would represent a radical break from the tradition of black colleges. For many, it would also be a cruel twist of fate for a black college to survive by giving up on the most needy students.

“I think that’s running away from the situation instead of hitting it head-on,” says Henry Ponder, president of the National Assn. for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education.

Randolph Meade Walker, an assistant professor of history and director of LeMoyne-Owen, likes to tell the story of a former student who entered the school with the barest grasp of her college courses. The college, though, provided support, and she not only graduated but went on to earn a master’s degree.

“I have seen that kind of thing happen over and over and over and over again,” he says. “People that maybe initially didn’t show the potential that they had, but because we kept working on them, they developed and became outstanding contributors.

“That’s the whole point, as I see it, in being educated. It’s to . . . lift the masses. As a black scholar by definition, you are involved in the struggle of black people.”

However, the few elite, historically black colleges that have charted exclusive admissions are the healthiest. Howard University in Washington, the nation’s wealthiest, has an endowment of about $152 million. Spelman College in Atlanta is next with $123 million, followed by Hampton University in Virginia at $97 million.

Still, those figures pale in comparison to America’s most prestigious, predominantly white schools. While rich entertainers, athletes and political leaders have showcased their annual “giving back” to historically black colleges, the habit has yet to sprout among the growing legions of black professionals. Except for the contributions of the Cosbys to Spelman and Oprah Winfrey to Morehouse College, most colleges like LeMoyne-Owen do not have a rainmaker for its endowment.

Dick Harter, a Boston attorney, joined the LeMoyne-Owen trustees in 1991.

“All my life I’ve lived near institutions of higher education,” says Harter, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., not far from Harvard Yard. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, near Ohio State, where his father taught briefly. He attended Yale College and the University of Chicago Law School. “But LeMoyne-Owen is very different from anything I had previously known.”

The difference is funding.

“This college has tried to scrape by,” says Harter. “So it has had to make do with underpaying its faculty and under-maintaining its buildings and plant.”

New Alumna Symbolizes Hope

Kerri Stone, 22, who graduated in May with a degree in business administration, is the hope for LeMoyne-Owen’s continued existence. An outstanding student at a private, suburban St. Louis school, she attracted notice from college admissions officers across the nation four years ago. Colleges like Washington University in St. Louis and Marquette University in Milwaukee as well as historically black schools like Tuskegee University and Spelman College admitted her.

The first cut was easy. “I knew I wanted to go to a black school,” she says, adding she had attended a predominantly white high school. “It was excellent. No question. But I wanted to have the all-black experience.”

Spelman was Stone’s first choice. But Stone needed more financial assistance than Spelman could provide. “They were going to offer her a grant, but it wouldn’t have covered everything,” says Shirley Graham-Warren, Stone’s mother. “She wound up at LeMoyne because when she was a junior in high school, she had done well enough to have been asked to the school during the summer for some classes. She really liked the environment of a small black college.” LeMoyne-Owen offered Stone a full scholarship if she maintained a high-B average. Stone agreed.

For much of her first year and well into her second, Stone was unhappy. Her reasons mirror the familiar problems at any college. Dorm life. Campus food. New friends. “I was homesick,” she says, lowering her eyes as she walked across the campus. “I was constantly going home.”

In time, she joined the gospel choir and cheerleading squad. She volunteered as a mentor to community youth at a neighborhood recreation center. She was elected president of the student body. “Before I knew it, I was always doing something. My attitude is, like, 360 from what it was when I first got here. I’ve had opportunities to grow and be a leader that I don’t think I would have at any other place. This has been a good experience for me.”

As she prepared for graduation last spring, a flood of memories from her college days washed over her. Her bubbly personality hardened for a moment when she recalled the turning point for her at LeMoyne-Owen. During her freshman year, she began to volunteer as a tutor for some of the junior high and high school kids at a community center run by the college. “I learned that I was fortunate and many others aren’t. From that experience on, I knew I wanted to work with community outreach programs in the corporate sector.”

Now out of school, Stone is devoting a year to AmeriCorp Vista Volunteers, serving as a counselor at Legal Services of Eastern Michigan. She is considering graduate school in nonprofit management as she works toward her ultimate goal: “I’m going to run the United Way,” she says with a toothy smile. “I’m giving myself 20 years, max!”

Stone wavers only to allow that she has developed a spirit of community service at LeMoyne-Owen that will remain a part of whatever she does with her life. “I don’t know if I would have had that same feeling, a need to give back, if I hadn’t gone to a school like LeMoyne-Owen.”