Statue honoring Furman’s first Black student can help change ‘reality of racism’

On Jan. 4, 1965, newly elected President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his “Great Society” domestic agenda to end poverty and racial injustice. Two months later, on March 7, state troopers brutally beat civil rights activists in Selma, Alabama, on a day that would come to be called Bloody Sunday.

Between those historic events, on Friday, Jan. 29, 1965, a tall, young Black man named Joseph Vaughn walked across Furman University’s campus in Greenville, South Carolina, and became the school’s first African American undergraduate student. A photo taken on a cool, sunny morning that winter shows him ascending the steps of our library, books tucked under his arm and a sweater buttoned against the chill.

Fifty-five years later, on Jan. 29, 2020, before Ahmaud Arbery was murdered in our neighboring state of Georgia, before George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were killed and Black Lives Matter protestors marched in cities across America, and before the nation was gripped by a pandemic that would disproportionately affect people of color, hundreds gathered on campus for the first annual Joseph Vaughn Day to honor and celebrate the great-grandson of slaves, the son of a single mother who saw education as an opportunity for advancement, in a profession and in society.

This year, on Friday, April 16, in a ceremony delayed by the pandemic, we will unveil a life-sized sculpture of Vaughn, replicating in bronze the photograph that has become iconic to the Furman community. We’re placing the statue in the most prominent place on campus, on those library steps where the snapshot was taken.

Why does it matter that a small, private, predominantly white, liberal arts and sciences university in the South is erecting a statue of a Black man? We’re not the first university to do so, and we’re not the first university in the country to wrestle with a history entangled by slavery. Here’s why it matters.

Vaughn was a ‘jewel’

In the 1960s, the trustees of the university were at odds with the South Carolina Baptist Convention, which still governed Furman (the relationship legally dissolved in 1992). In 1963, the trustees voted to consider “all qualified applicants,” but months later the convention asked the university to postpone its new enrollment policy for a year. The Baptist church, the faith Joseph Vaughn grew up following, wasn’t ready for desegregation. According to a news article at the time, the convention’s members voted 943 to 915 against its own board’s proposal that admissions policies be left up to the university’s trustees.

Interim President Francis Bonner and university trustees were eagerly courting Gordon Blackwell, a Furman alumnus who was president of Florida State University. Blackwell agreed to take the position on the condition that Furman integrate.

Bonner, an English professor who had grown up the son of a minister in eastern Alabama, worked with community members to identify a local Black student to desegregate Furman. Vaughn, who had been an honor student at the all-Black Sterling High, quickly became the leading candidate. Xanthene Norris, one of his high school teachers, now a Greenville city councilwoman, described Vaughn as “a jewel,” bright, witty, gregarious and confident.

In December 1964, the university trustees voted to uphold their 1963 decision, and Vaughn, who had spent his first semester at the historically Black Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, matriculated a few weeks later.

The day after Vaughn’s enrollment at Furman, the Greenville News wrote a front-page story, referring to Vaughn as “the Negro student.” When asked if Vaughn’s enrollment “might cause a reaction” among the Baptist Convention, Bonner told the newspaper, “I would hope any reaction at all would be favorable, but I wouldn’t venture a guess on the reaction of anyone.”

According to the newspaper, Vaughn said, “My desire is to help my people, in a constructive way, to become better educated so that they may become more responsible and productive members of our citizenry.” Knowing Vaughn’s future activities, one could read “productive” as “engaged” or “active.”

Vaughn also was quoted saying he was glad that Furman students accepted him “as another student and not as some sort of symbol,” but it didn’t take him long to become well known and well liked on campus, in the community and across the state. He was a cheerleader, a member of ROTC, and an honors student. As a member of the Southern Student Organizing Committee he helped plan a demonstration in downtown Greenville after the February 1968 Orangeburg Massacre. He led another march after Dr. King’s assassination. As chair of a committee that planned forums on race relations, the Vietnam draft and other hot-topic issues, he invited the Grand Dragon of the KKK to campus.

One of Vaughn’s friends, Lillian Brock-Fleming, who knew Vaughn in high school and became one of the first two Black female undergraduate students at Furman, once said of his intellect, “He could embarrass you in three different languages and you wouldn’t even know it.”

Vaughn graduated Furman cum laude with degrees in English and French. He went on to get two master’s degrees as he taught in the Greenville County public schools. In 1982, Vaughn was elected president of the South Carolina Education Association. He later served on Governor Dick Riley’s Task Force on Critical and Human Needs and a task force on the South Carolina Education Improvement Act. (Riley later became President Bill Clinton’s secretary of education.)

Vaughn died in 1991, when he was just 45. Had he lived longer his impact on the world would have been immeasurably deep and wide. I can imagine Joe protesting the murder of nine innocent people inside Mother Emanuel Church in 2015 and leading BLM marches in the summer of 2020, and having his thoughtful and informed voice heard on education policy and other matters.

In April 1986, Vaughn said in a speech on campus, “I knew that things were changing, and they would continue to change. We would no longer be isolated into communities that would be identifiable as either all Black or all white.” He said he knew there were probably people who didn’t want him at Furman, but that his enrolling, and graduating, “shows that people of various and varying backgrounds can live together peacefully and can serve as a model for the rest of the country.”

At times it might seem like nothing’s changed in the 56 years since Joe Vaughn became the first Black undergraduate student at a small, all-white university. Racism and racial violence still exist, and universities and cities across the South and across the country are still reckoning with their racist pasts.

How some things have changed

In recent years, Furman has taken other steps toward the more diverse community that Joe imagined. In 2017, we formed a Task Force on Slavery and Justice that recommended a number of initiatives. Ones we have completed include removing the name of the first president, who was a slave owner and secessionist, from a prominent academic building; naming a housing complex for a long-time and beloved Black custodian of Greenville Woman’s College, which merged with Furman; and launching a diversity, equity and inclusion strategic plan created by our chief diversity officer. We also created a Black alumni advisory group.

Despite these efforts, Furman is not an island and diversity alone is not a goal. Striving for diversity, equity and inclusion will be a process.

Furman’s campus is adorned with many statues, bronze replicas of athletes and important figures from our past. Until now, everywhere our students, faculty, staff and visitors of color looked, they saw the figures we chose to exalt, and none looked like them.

Joseph Vaughn’s statue at Furman University is important to the nation because we are a predominantly white university in the South. Because, even in 2021, our campus is a place where someone would least expect to see a young Black man in a place of prominence. And until we change that perception, every Joe Vaughn and every statue deserves national recognition. Indeed, perhaps it is the recognition of every person of color, in a place where we least expect them to be seen, that will change not only the perception, but the reality of racism.

Elizabeth Davis is the 12 th president of Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.