Prof. Roger Wilkins assured a crowd of more than 250 yesterday that he "still bleeds maize and blue" despite his challenging experience as an African American student at the University nearly 50 years ago.
Wilkins, a professor of history and American culture at George Mason University, delivered the seventh annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom at Rackham Ampitheatre yesterday. The lecture is given to honor three instructors who were interrogated - two of whom were fired - during communist investigations in the '50s.
Wilkins was president of the University's NAACP chapter during the early '50s and petitioned the Board of Regents on behalf of the three professors honored by the lecture. Wilkins, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Watergate scandal, drew on his experience at the University to deliver a message about American citizenship, race relations and the implications of the nation's changing demographics.
"Somehow we have to figure out how to negotiate the next 50 years - that Americans come in all colors and that we're not afraid of each other because if we are, we'll tear each other apart," Wilkins said. "This is the most difficult task, because I don't think any other country has done it."
Wilkins spoke to a nearly silent audience when he said he didn't believe he ever encountered a black adult who worked for the University during his seven years as a student.
"(While I was a student here) I never read one book, essay, play or poem by a human being that was not white," Wilkins said. "Nor do I remember any textbook that asserted that any black person had done anything of value ... until I studied Brown vs. Board of Education in my constitutional law class."
Wilkins said the country is not currently immune to the type of "pathologies" that took place during the early 1950s, sighting the current situations in Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
Wilkins said the challenges of diversity are evident at colleges and universities, which often respond to these difficulties inappropriately.
"I don't think it's enough to just pull people on campus and say, 'Okay, that's enough, we've satisfied our diversity requirement,'" Wilkins said.
University of Toronto mathematics Prof. Chandler Davis, who was fired from the University after the investigations, was honored at the lecture.
"I think it was a very good thing that (Wilkins) was immersed back into the University community again, even if it was only for a very short time," he said.
LSA sophomore Greg Tepper said the lecture motivated him to read some of Wilkins' writings.
"I really didn't know that much about him beforehand," Tepper said. "He really struck me, just everything he had to say."