chapter 1 Impatient for Change
Page 9 →It was an ordinary fall day in 1966 as I departed my room at the Honeycombs dormitory. I took my familiar walk across the beautiful USC campus to attend classes. My routine included taking the walkway past the glass-encased Thomas Cooper Library, stopping at the adjacent Russell House University Union for coffee, crossing Greene Street, and meandering through the alleyway between academic buildings and dormitories, eventually passing the university president’s house to the Horseshoe. The chill of November was beginning to set in as I hurriedly crossed the Horseshoe en route to Harper College, the political science building. The Horseshoe, USC’s original campus, is an oval-shaped expanse of grass and mature trees, primarily oaks, punctuated by several crosswalks with the Maxcy Monument at its center. A circular drive encases the Horseshoe with McKissick Library (later McKissick Museum) at the apex of the oval and federal-styled buildings, including Harper College, dotting the perimeter.
It was my senior year, and I savored the routine of my last year of college. I had time to reflect upon the struggles of African Americans to gain admission to USC and the fortitude it took for them to complete the ensuing years of study. That struggle began with a lawsuit forcing the desegregation of USC, which resulted in the admission of three Black students—Henrie Monteith, Robert G. Anderson, and James L. Solomon Jr.—on September 11, 1963. They were the first African Americans to enroll at USC since the university was Page 10 →temporarily desegregated during Reconstruction in 1873.1 I entered USC a year later in the fall of 1964, transferring from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, upon completion of my freshman year. I was part of the second wave of fourteen Black students to enroll in a student body of about 7,000 white students.2
On that crisp November day, I had no definite plan for life after college. I had spent the preceding summer working at the US Department of State in Washington, DC, considering a career as a Foreign Service Officer. My summer experience was sponsored by the Foreign Affairs Scholars Program, a governmental effort designed to attract and prepare Black people to enter the Foreign Service. Because I left high school after three years and entered Fisk ahead of my expected academic schedule, I was one year shy of the age requirement (twenty-one years) in the fall of 1966 to take the qualifying (and daunting) Foreign Service examination. The program director suggested that, while awaiting the year to take the exam, I should consider pursuing a master’s degree program in international studies. I took his advice and was admitted and granted a scholarship to study at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
Although I had professed an interest in the Foreign Service, I was ambivalent about that career choice. For a long time, I had the lingering thought of becoming a lawyer. In 1966, the country was in the throes of social turmoil spawned by the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam, and I felt that becoming a lawyer would provide a more useful skill to implement change. Through my participation in civil rights activities while growing up in Orangeburg, South Carolina, I became acquainted with several civil rights lawyers in the state, especially Matthew Perry and Earl Coblyn.3 Those role models were compelling. Matthew Perry represented Henrie Monteith in her legal battle to attend USC.4 Earl Coblyn was one of the lead attorneys who handled the lawsuit to desegregate the Orangeburg public school system. I was proud to see those attorneys deliver Page 11 →skillful arguments before hostile courts with aplomb and masterful explication.
I considered attending several law schools, including New York University School of Law and USC School of Law. However, confident of my academic ability and knowing that Harvard Law School was the premier law school in the country, I decided to take a shot at admission. With the encouragement of my Constitutional Law professor, Glenn Abernathy, I applied to Harvard Law School. I had also received support to attend Harvard University from Willard Davis, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Upper Division. In the application essay detailing my reasons for wanting to attend Harvard Law School, I stressed my family’s long civil rights history and my activities in the civil rights movement, including nonviolent sit-ins and community organizing. I emphasized my desire to return home after law school to continue the fight for civil rights. Pushing the envelope, I requested an early decision on admission (unheard of at the time) before Christmas. The Johns Hopkins scholarship to study international affairs would lapse unless I accepted it by that date, so I needed to know my options.
After a three-week wait, I was surprised to receive a Western Union telegram from Harvard Law School, informing me that I had been accepted. This was the proudest moment of my life up to that point. I could not believe what had happened. With that much-needed focus in my life, I was very optimistic about my future. Graduating from USC and gaining acceptance to Harvard Law School were both a validation of my ability and an affirmation of my family’s dreams and unceasing efforts to prepare my two brothers and me to challenge the stereotypical and demeaning views that white society held about Black folk.
Confronting the Realities of Race
Race was the predominant societal preoccupation in Orangeburg in the 1950s and 1960s. Jim Crow laws and customs were everywhere. Page 12 →“White only” and “Colored only” signs were ubiquitous—on drinking fountains, in restaurants, in movie theatres, on bathrooms, on buses, on trains—in essence, in all public accommodations and conveyances. Doctors’ offices and hospitals were segregated. Schools at all levels were segregated. Churches were segregated. And generally, Black citizens were denied the right to vote, which was evident in the all-white city government and the all-white police department.
Although manifestations of a segregated society were everywhere, I did not feel oppressed or deprived while growing up as a Black child in South Carolina. I certainly was aware of societal codes that governed where a Black person could or could not go, or things a Black person could or could not do. My parents and others taught me those rules as a matter of survival. But because an educated Black middle class, trained at two local historically Black colleges, Claflin University and South Carolina State College, infused the Black school system in Orangeburg with very talented teachers, and sourced the Black cultural life of the community with fine music, art, dance, and theatre, it was hard for me to feel deprived or want to be associated with white institutions. Because of the two historically Black colleges located there, it has been said that Orangeburg has more Black doctoral degree holders per capita than any town in the nation.5
My family has strong roots in Orangeburg. My mother, Anne Brown Bowers, was a quiet but courageous woman. She was the proud daughter of Professor James Alvirgus Brown, who taught at Colored Normal, Industrial, Agricultural and Mechanical College of South Carolina in the Mechanical Department from 1907 until his untimely death in the 1918 influenza pandemic. He was forty-one years old. Inheriting her father’s strong passion for Black educational advancement, my mother dedicated her professional life to teaching and advocating for academic excellence for Black students. When confronted with resistance to her goals from the white establishment, she looked segregation in the eye, defied the accepted order of Page 13 →the day, and paid a heavy price to advance equal educational opportunities for her students.
Bowers Chapel in Mars Bluff, South Carolina. Author’s collection.
My father, Walter Thomas Bowers, was the son of a Methodist Episcopal minister, Reverend Walter Backman Bowers. Reverend Bowers was a learned theologian who pastored many churches across South Carolina. As a testament to the impact of his ministry, one of his churches was named after him, Bowers Chapel, in Mars Bluff, South Carolina. My father was eight years old when his father died. As a teenager, he was thrust into adulthood because his mother needed him to help provide financial assistance to the family, and he felt obligated to provide emotional guidance to his younger brother and two sisters. My father grew up with a strong measure of self-reliance.
The values carried by my mother and father, passed down to them through their ancestors, are what define me to this day. The Page 14 →hardships they suffered, including both losing a father during childhood, had a profound effect on me. It created an urgency to define who I was and what I wanted to do with my life. During my formative years, I studied incessantly and focused singularly on high academic achievement. Exhausting my high school curricula by the end of my third year, I entered college as an early entrant at Fisk University.
After completing the first year at Fisk, I was impatient to move on. Fisk was academically challenging but too removed from what was happening in South Carolina. During my year at Fisk, USC and the University of Alabama had been desegregated, following on the heels of similar events at the University of Georgia and University of Mississippi. Following in the footsteps of my iconic classmate at Fisk, John Lewis, I wanted to be on the front line of social change and decided to return home to attend USC. The impetus that compelled me to attend USC was a commitment to improve the environment for African Americans at USC and to serve as a role model for all Black student of greater South Carolina. In the words of Booker T. Washington, the first principal at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, I decided to cast down my bucket where I was in service to the Black people in my home state.6
I knew before attending USC that I would be giving up a normal college experience. From the outset, my single focus was excelling in academic studies to demonstrate to the university administration that Black students belonged at USC and could successfully handle the work. Although white students generally did not include Black students in most social activities, I made it a point to get to know and bond with faculty members who taught me. The faculty, by and large, appreciated having Black students add to the much-needed diversity of the student body. They, in turn, reciprocated by extending support to those of us who sought it. Some of my closest friends at USC were faculty members, especially Professors Glenn Page 15 →Abernathy and Donald Fowler, who both taught in the Political Science Department.
After completing my degree at Harvard Law School, Professor Abernathy was determined to recruit me to return to USC as a faculty member. Through his efforts promoting me to his close friend, Robert Foster, dean of the Law School, I was offered a faculty position as the first full-time Black professor of law in the history of the USC School of Law. There have been many other firsts that I have achieved as a Black person in my professional and social life. I was fortunate to have received the necessary training that enabled me to break through barriers to opportunities that were historically denied to Black people.
As I ascended the legal citadel and social pyramid, congratulations abounded from my peers. However, there was little fanfare among family members. It was expected that I would do well. While none of my ancestors took the paths opened to me—matriculating at USC and Harvard Law School and appointment as a law professor at USC—they achieved more with far less. Foremost, surviving the cruelty and dehumanizing conditions of slavery was their quintessential achievement. They educated themselves and maintained some semblance of a family unit when the extant white society conspired to tear down that structure.
The resourcefulness of my paternal great-grandfather, Thomas Green, born into slavery, in amassing 277 areas of farmland in Bennettsville and Tatum, South Carolina shortly after the Civil War, and establishing a school for former slaves as well as raising an extended family with a strong education ethic, should be celebrated. I am mindful of the generosity of my maternal great-grandfather, Charles Thomas Riley, born into slavery, who later became a farmer and Episcopal minister and who donated several acres of land to build Mt. Zion Methodist Episcopal Church in Jamison, South Carolina. I celebrate the bravery of my other maternal great-grandfather, Page 16 →Edward W. Brown, a free-Black from Clarendon County, South Carolina, in escaping a lynching and establishing a productive life as a carpenter in Orangeburg. I acknowledge the scholarship and practical thinking of my maternal grandfather, James A. Brown, a professor of mechanical studies at two historically Black colleges, Biddle University and Colored Normal, Industrial, Agricultural and Mechanical College of South Carolina. I honor the ministry of my paternal grandfather, Reverend Walther Backman Bowers, that extended to eight churches across South Carolina and culminated in one of them being named after him, Bowers Chapel.
In the African and Afro-diasporic cultures, ancestors are venerated to thanks them and to ensure their continued well-being and sometimes to seek their guidance. I am eternally grateful to my ancestors for their many contributions and summon their strength to carry on their good works. Through the toil of those ancestors, my parents, and many others long before I was born, the present embodiment of my success was accepted by my family as merely a long-awaited validation and affirmation.