When
Emory admitted its first two African American graduates,
Verdelle Bellamy and Allie Saxton, to the nursing school
in 1962, it was quietly hoped that their arrival would bring
the end of segregation for the University and the blossoming
of a truly diverse academic community in which blacks, as
well as other racial and ethnic minorities, would share
full and equal membership.
Each
year since, amid routine calls for increased diversity
on campus, the number of African American students has
risen steadily in step with Emory’s stated goals,
and the University now consistently ranks high in national
diversity surveys. In 2002, Emory’s enrollment comprised
nearly one-quarter minority students and more than 10
percent blacks, the largest percentage of black students
among the nation’s twenty-six leading universities,
according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.
Yet
many question whether the University has, even now, achieved
a fully integrated community. Do the right facts and figures,
the right policies, and the right number of African American
faces on campus add up to a healthy community, no matter
how often those faces are seen next to white ones outside
the classroom?
When
asked a few years ago whether Emory has become as diverse
as it should be, former University Chancellor and visionary
Billy E. Frye wondered as much: “There is a question
of whether we have increased the numbers without increasing
our interaction with one another, that people have come
on campus and resegregated,” he said. “There
is no question the campus is richer in human as well as
fiscal resources, but we must put the question to people:
Are you taking advantage of this richness, or are you
isolating yourself from it?”
That
question has been intensely explored during recent months
as a result of a campuswide controversy sparked by a remark
made by a faculty member at an otherwise innocuous panel
discussion. At an open event planned to commemorate the
anthropology department’s twenty-fifth anniversary
in September, a chaired professor, who is white, used
“the n-word” to describe the way biological
anthropologists—her specialty—are regarded within
a field dominated by cultural anthropologists. “We’re
like the six n-----s in the woodpile,” she said,
choosing a colloquial phrase that probably originated
when slaves used the underground railroad to escape to
the North and were hidden beneath woodpiles.
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