Todd Wilson remembers the tension 50 years ago, the murmurs and the walk past state police.
Wilson, elected student body president before USC was ordered to desegregate, walked Robert Anderson, one of the first three black students to study at the university, to his dorm on Sept. 11, 1963.
They walked past officers and past white students, some opposed to the newly enrolled black students — Anderson, Henrie Monteith Treadwell and James Solomon, Jr. — some open to them.
Most notably, a year after the University of Mississippi was desegregated amid riots, they did not walk past violence or open resistance.
“It felt like campus was ready for it,” Wilson said.
The walk began a “tumultuous” year, Wilson said: USC was desegregated, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the basketball team grew in prominence and the South Carolina-Clemson football game was postponed for the first time. Wilson, now a 71-year-old Baptist preacher in Seneca, calls it the most significant year of his life.
The Daily Gamecock: I was wondering if you could describe what the mood on campus was like 50 years ago.
Todd Wilson: Well as you would expect, there was a very strong mixture among the student body and, I’m sure, even among the faculty and administration. Clemson had integrated the semester before, and that had helped some in kind of setting the stage. … Students were mixed. There were some that were very open to it, and there were some very opposed to it. … Even though there was some opposition, there was no blatant, open defiance or anything.
TDG: When you started on that walk, what was going through your head? You said that you felt like campus was ready, but did you have any nerves or fear about what might happen?
TW: Well, probably a sense of wonder about what we will encounter going across campus, and also, having met Robert, how he would be impacted by it, because that was an awkward place for him to be. He was much shier than Henrie Monteith. … He handled it well.
TDG: It looks like there were some flareups before the students came to campus. Do you have any memories of that?
TW: The only negative memories I have are some conversations in the dorms. Even in my own dorm, there was a student (who was) told by his father, “If there’s trouble, you’d better be leading it.” That kind of thing. We had some discussions among the students about what was coming, and some were very angry; others were very accepting. So really, as I said earlier, it was a wide diversity of viewpoints.
TDG: Going into your time as president, how did you manage the different feelings on campus as the representative of the student body?
TW: Let me put it in a little larger context, if I can. That was the most significant and influential year of my life, even to this point. … A lot happened that year, so it was tumultuous year, I guess. I became a minister, and all that was very shaping in terms of my outlook and perspective on just about everything, because the disappointing thing, to me, was that the most severe opposition we got was from religious students who based their prejudices on their religious views. I obviously had to interact with that kind of stuff. My overall perspective was that the time had come for the university to integrate — society was integrating — (and) that we could set a good example by doing it right.
TDG: Tell me a little more about how it shaped your perspectives, especially as you went into ministry.
TW: It helped me see how people’s religious faith shaped their behavior (and) shaped their views and what part religious faith was supposed to play in the way in which people related to one another, cared for one another. If religion became a source of persecution, then it really became a problem.
TDG: You said that year was tumultuous, but how did it compare to the rest of your time at USC?
TW: In actuality, it wasn’t vastly different. It was probably, for lack of a better word, more tense, but not vastly different. Once we got past the initial thing — which we did well — I thought it settled down.
TDG: What were your feelings about desegregation personally?
TW: Mine was that it was the right thing to do. … There was no negativity toward it on my part; there was concern about how we would handle it. I knew there was going to be a lot of opposition to it — some of the people who lived close to me in the dorms were opposed to it and that type of thing. The good thing is that we did discuss it. The discussions got pretty volatile, but we were able to communicate about it.
Editor’s note: This interview was edited for length.