Remember pioneers for desegregation
Courage is an underlying theme that has resonated at the University of South Carolina this year. We are marking the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of our campus, and the Carolina Leadership Initiative is joining this effort with the third annual President’s Leadership Dialogue. We hope to use this occasion to help invoke the courageous spirit of Henrie Monteith Treadwell, James Solomon, and Robert Anderson who desegregated the campus in September 1963.
Just last week, Benjamin Todd Jealous, former president of the national NAACP — the youngest in history — challenged a group of students gathered at the Russell House to have the courage of their convictions. “Your generation needs you to decide what you will fight for,” he said. “What you’re willing to die for.”
At the Carolina Leadership Initiative we help students consider how they will respond to that challenge. Many students don’t believe they can be leaders. Our goal is to teach them that leadership is about how individuals interact with each other to pursue particular goals. It is about making a difference in our corner of the world, our community or our circle of friends and family at virtually any moment in time. Students have the potential to be strong leaders and the guest for Tuesday’s President’s Leadership Dialogue demonstrates that point.
President Harris Pastides will host Diane Nash for his Leadership Dialogue at the USC Law School auditorium at 7 p.m. You may not know her name, but she is an extraordinary example of someone who had the courage of her convictions and dedicated herself to a cause she was willing to fight for.
Nash was a founding member of SNCC — the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — during the 1960s civil rights movement. A Chicago native, she was moved to action as a student at Fisk University in Nashville due to the humiliation she felt at being denied basic human rights in the segregated South. She advocated nonviolence and led student marches, eventually convincing the mayor of Nashville to become the first Southern city to integrate lunch counters.
Her leadership was essential in continuing the 1961 Freedom Ride after students trying to integrate Greyhound buses and facilities were met with firebombs and riots in Alabama. Years later she would say, “It was clear to me that if we allowed the Freedom Ride to stop at that point, just after so much violence had been inflicted, the message would have been sent that all you have to do to stop a nonviolent campaign is inflict massive violence.”
Later, she was even jailed while pregnant for teaching nonviolence to children in Jackson, Miss. By this time she caught the attention of President John F. Kennedy, who appointed her to a national committee that promoted the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Nash continued her activism and her passion for social justice throughout her life. She was an outspoken advocate for the end of the Vietnam War and eventually became an instructor in the nonviolent tradition of Mahatma Gandhi. Her courageous leadership has won Nash numerous awards and made her the focus of a number of documentaries, books and news reports.
She is a true leader in the face of adversity like previous President’s Leadership Dialogue speakers — Deo Niyizonkiza, an escaped refugee from war-torn Burundi and the protagonist in Tracy Kidder’s book “Strength in What Remains,” and Charlayne Hunter-Gault, one of two African-American students to integrate the University of Georgia in 1961 and author of “To the Mountaintop: My Journey Through the Civil Rights Movement.”
All of these speakers help us to think about Jealous’ challenge — what will you fight for?
It is easy for us to become complacent in our daily lives bogged down by our own personal struggles. However, true leaders have the courage of their convictions to take on something greater than themselves. President Harry Truman said it best: “Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.”
Please join us on Tuesday to hear from the courageous leader Diane Nash. Who knows what you may be inspired to fight for?