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Show UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY Ernest Wilkinson, told LDS official Adam S. Bennion a week after Brown that the “Negro Question” “arises more frequently and gives us more trouble than any other.”7 By late 1958, some students began to wonder if BYU’s lack of engagement with integration issues might contribute to “racial prejudice” on campus.8 Other students approvingly quoted LDS leader Mark E. Petersen’s August 27, 1954, speech to church educators: “The negro seeks absorption with the white race. He will not be satisfied until he achieves it by intermarriage. That is his objective and we must face it. We must not allow our feelings to carry us away, nor must we feel so sorry for the negroes that we will open our arms and embrace them with everything we have.”9 Rebuttals followed. “While some students strongly supported segregation,” historian Ardis Smith comments, “other students spoke out against [segregation]. . . . One student declared that the current racial strife was rooted in ‘the miscarriage of the meddlings of the post–Civil War Republican Congress.’ . . . Another student . . . stat[ed] that segregation was not truly decided upon or supported by the people because ‘thousands of negroes [were] kept from the polls by fear and unfair practices.’” “BYU students had very different views and opinions of the civil rights movement and specifically about segregation,” Smith concludes.10 In January 1960, following a campus performance by the Harlem Globetrotters, an all-black exhibition basketball team, BYU’s Board of Trustees, composed of high-ranking church leaders, decided not to permit the team future use of the university’s facilities.11 Two months later, the president of the Salt Lake City branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Albert B. Fritz, asserted that a Nigerian BYU student a few years earlier had been forced to live in the attic of a Protestant church because “the people of Provo would not rent their apartments” to black students, and that “Negro entertainers were not signed for [the 1959] junior prom because no motel or hotel” would lodge them.12 The following May 1960, Wilkinson learned that BYU had agreed to employ a black man—Edward O. Minor from Flor ida A. and M. University—to teach during summer school, a decision Wilkinson termed 7 Ernest L. Wilkinson to Adam S. Bennion, June 1, 1954, Ernest L. Wilkinson Presidential Papers, Perry Special Collections. 8 “Students Tired of Integration Issue,” Daily Universe, December 5, 1958. 9 Lila and Lurleen LaVar, letter, Daily Universe, December 10, 1958; see also George Hallock, letter, Daily Universe, January 5, 1959; for a history of LDS opposition to interracial marriage, see Patrick Q. Mason, “The Prohibition of Interracial Marriage in Utah, 1888–1963,” Utah Historical Quarterly 76 (Spring 2008): 108–31. 10 Smith, “CRM.” 11 Wilkinson, Diary, January 13, 1960, Wilkinson Papers; Brigham Young University, Board of Trustees Minutes, March 2, 1960, originals, Perry Special Collections; see also Board of Trustees, Minutes, March 3, 1965, and Executive Committee, Board of Trustees, Minutes, August 28, 1969. Copies of many of the documents cited in this article, including the minutes of BYU’s trustees, are in possession of the SmithPettit Foundation, Salt Lake City, where they are available to researchers. 12 “America—All Races and Religions,” Daily Universe, March 23, 1960. 206 |
