A little more than a half-century ago, back in September of 1949, when I was a boy of seventeen, and shy and uncertain, I was driven by my parents from our home on the southern coastline of New Jersey to a rail terminal in Philadelphia, where I would board an overnight train that I hoped would carry me away from everything I wanted to forget.
I wanted to forget who I was, or who I thought I was, and whatever it was that I lacked. I had lacked distinction in high school as a student, as an athlete, and as a charmer of young women. During classes I often doodled, and dreamed, and wondered about other people. After class, in my role as a schoolboy reporter for our town’s weekly newspaper, I indulged my curiosity about our student leaders by interviewing them and writing articles about their achievements and their opinions on what they deemed to be important. Thus did I make use of my escapist tendencies. I became the chronicler of other people’s situations and satisfactions.
After graduation from high school, however, as most of my fellow students prepared to leave home to attend colleges elsewhere in New Jersey, or in neighboring New York or Pennsylvania, I felt very isolated and without a story worth writing about. What I had been good at – listening to other people, being curious about what motivated them, and giving expression to their diversity—lacked any connection to our school’s curriculum and therefore had no positive effect on my standing as a mediocre student.
The only faculty member who seemed to approve of me was my typing teacher. More than once she expressed admiration for my nimble fingers and my flawless speed at the keyboard, and I believe she also liked the fact that I was always very deferential and polite and came to her class each day wearing a jacket and tie.
My father, born in Italy, was a classical tailor. It was important that I represent him properly—and I did. He made the finest suits in our town for our town’s finest men. One of these men was a Birmingham-born physician whose wife was the sister of my typing teacher.
It was this connection, I have no doubt, that prompted the physician in the early summer of 1949 to write a letter of recommendation to The University of Alabama, contending that I had a growth potential beyond what was indicated by my unimpressive scholastic standing. He urged that I be given a chance to prove that I was worthy of a second chance. A month later, in mid-August, I was surprised and pleased to receive a letter of acceptance.
And so it was that in September I boarded a southbound train in Philadelphia and embarked upon an eighteen- hour journey through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and then into the Carolinas and Tennessee and the northwestern tip of Georgia and finally into Alabama.
As a journalism student I was usually ranked in the middle of the class, even during my junior and senior years when I was the Crimson White’s (UA student newspaper) sports editor and columnist as well as the campus correspondent for the Birmingham Post-Herald.
But unlike my English teacher in high school, the journalism faculty complimented me at times for the outside writing I did; and one story in the Crimson White that they liked was my interview with a lumbering seven-foot tall student who, in spite of many pleas from the school’s basketball coach, refused to try out for the team. He explained to me that he preferred devoting his out-of-class time to trimming trees.
Another article that my teachers praised was my profile of an elderly black man, the grandson of slaves, who was the football team’s lockerroom attendant and was also considered to be the players’ good-luck charm. Before each game, as they lined up to trot onto the field, they would take turns stroking the black man’s head.
Without overstating the situation, it was clear to many readers that I was describing the only interracial physical contact that then existed within the then-segregated world of Alabama athletics.
Had I myself possessed an admirable social conscience in the 1950’s, I might have honored my student days here on this campus with a valiant renunciation of racism that might have earned me a citation in Dean Culpepper Clark’s wonderful book about segregation’s last stand at The University of Alabama, a book entitled The School House Door.
And yet I believed in those days, and I would continue to believe after I graduated and moved to New York, that racism in many unacknowledged and unreported ways was as present in the North as it was in the South.
It had been so casually accepted in my hometown on the Jersey shore during the 1930’s and ‘40s that I grew up virtually unaware of it.
At our Village cinema on the boardwalk it was customary for African-Americans to view movies from seats in the balcony, and, without any directional signs or signals from the management, they did so without objecting.
While those students joined the whites in our town’s public schools, there was little social contact between the races outside the classrooms and athletic fields; and the racial divide in real estate was maintained from one generation to the next by various rental and home-loan banking policies that, no matter what laws might exist, black residents were essentially banned from white neighborhoods, thus creating a century-old black quarter in my hometown that was as decrepit with decay and deprivation as was the gigantic and ungentrified Harlem that has existed through all the years I have lived and worked in New York.
In 1965, twelve years after I graduated from this University, I returned to the campus as a reporter for The New York Times to interview Alabama’s first African-American graduate, Vivian Malone.
In the decades since then I have returned dozens of times to the state of Alabama to reacquaint myself with my many old friends in Mobile and Birmingham and Montgomery, and occasionally I have revisited this campus and been reminded of the fact that I can barely recognize it.
Dozens of new buildings have altered the skyline as I knew it. I can no longer wander around without losing my way.
The University I graduated from has faded into vaguely familiar forms that loom large only in my memory. But I do not lament this fact. I celebrate it. Because the campus that I knew has been replaced by something grander, more impressive, more humane, more inclusive.
Indeed, it—and the entire state of Alabama along with it—has changed for the better more than any other state that I have recently traveled through in this nation during the last half of the 20th century.
I cannot say as much for New York, where I reside, nor for my birthplace on the Jersey shore, where I still maintain a home.
Which is why today I have no words of wisdom to impart to you students, as many old grads do when they make speeches on such occasions as this.
You have nothing to learn from me.
I have much to learn from you.
Your graduation class represents now, as my class in 1953 did not, the ideals of an emerging egalitarian society. You are moving into a world, now called a global community, fortified by what you have learned here on this campus. And wherever you go, we all will benefit from you being there.
Thank you very much.
Note: Acclaimed author and journalist, Gay Talese delivered the commencement address at The University of Alabama’s spring commencement ceremony held Saturday, May 19. Here is that speech.
Contact
Suzanne Dowling, (205) 348-5320