As Strong Inside begins to hit bookstores, I’ve started hearing from some people who attended Vanderbilt with Perry Wallace and have new stories to share. In several spots in the book, I write about the often awkward encounters between white and black students at Vanderbilt in the late 1960s, and the day-to-day slights that made the pioneering experience so trying for Wallace and VU’s first small waves of black students. Steve Coleman and John Monroe have given me permission to share the stories they emailed me; both are quite illuminating:
Steve Coleman:
I look forward to your book with great anticipation. I was a classmate of Perry’s at Vanderbilt. We were both scholarship athletes (football was my sport). One of Perry’s freshman basketball teammates was Pat Toomay, who was also a footballer. I vividly recall listening to Perry and Pat tell stories about the receptions received by Perry throughout the South in that first year 1966-67. It was an education for an 18-year-old from an all-white Oklahoma City suburb, basically clueless about black-white racial issues.
My first day at Vanderbilt followed an 18-hour bus ride from OKC to Nashville in late August 1966. There was a bus change and a 1-1/2 hour layover in Memphis at 6 a.m. It seemed at the time that there were about 200 black people and myself in the bus station. I was terrified — positioned myself in a corner and waited for the assault that was likely to come.
By 1 p.m., I was unpacked in my dorm room. The first non-football player I met was Perry Wallace. He lived on a different floor and had answered the phone on his floor — a call from my parents wanting assurance I made it safely to Vanderbilt. He flashed that magnificent smile while proclaiming, “Your Mama’s calling.”
So it was that on my first day at Vanderbilt, my fear of black people subsided. Over the years I have wondered how much of Perry’s four years at Vanderbilt were like my 90 minutes in Memphis. I have high hopes that Strong Inside will answer that question.
From John Monroe:
During the summer of 1966, a “select” group of Vandy freshman engineering students were required to attend summer school. After our first dorm orientation speech, Perry announced that he was going to walk downtown to see a movie (freshmen were not allowed to have cars on campus) and any of us that wanted to join him were welcomed. A fellow student from Selmer, Ala. then made some kind of negative comment (don’t remember his actual words). Perry turned to him and said, “I am not asking you to marry me, I am just asking you if you want to go to a movie.” That did it for me and a bunch of other students from the Deep South — Perry became our hero that we admired from then on. I don’t think any us ever missed one of his games, even that summer’s High School All Star Game.
As a white, privileged, young student from the South, I did not understand the depth of what Perry and the other black students at that time where going through. We made stands and gestures but I am sure these acts were minor in their eyes. Example: On the way to Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 1968, our bus of Army ROTC Drill Team members stop at a BBQ shop in North Alabama and the owner of that place told our one black member of the drill team that he needed to go to the back entrance. And he had to get a “take-out!” Of course we all just got back on the bus and we were feeling really proud of our actions. But what was the black student thinking at that time and how did he feel about the incident? Unfortunately we didn’t go there