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OUDAILY
The University of Oklahoma’s independent student voice since 1916
Professor Emeritus George Henderson speaks at the Martin Luther King, Jr. choir concert Jan. 21.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY AUSTIN CARRIERE AND CAITLYN EPES/THE DAILY
BREAKING BARRIERS How George Henderson’s 52 years at OU have sparked diversity, change and understanding in the community
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efore going to work, George Henderson s p e nt m o s t o f h i s mornings picking up trash that had accumulated on his lawn overnight. The trash was from No r ma n re s i d e nt s w h o wanted to show their distaste for Henderson’s decision to come to OU in 1967. Henderson’s family moved to Norman so he could work as a professor. He would be the third black faculty member on campus, and his was the first and only black family to live in town. “I would wake up in between 6:30 a.m. and 7 a.m. and clean all the garbage off the lawn that people would throw so my children would not see it,” Henderson said. One morning, Henderson went out to clean his yard once again. But instead of trash, he found two of his students sitting in a car in front of his house. “I said, ‘Why are you here?’” Henderson recalled. “They said, ‘We have come to make sure nobody throws a ny t h i ng o n you r l aw n again.’” Moving forward, this gesture and many others like it gave Henderson hope that he was where he needed to be. Henderson met students
JERICK A HANDIE • @JERICK AHANDIE o n ca mpu s, p ro m i n e nt members of Oklahoma’s black community and white students and faculties who desired to be allies. He realized he could use his knowledge and experience to build up students of color and effect lasting change at the university. “I was at the right place at the right time with the right group of students to continue my journey in terms of being an activist,” Henderson said. “For the very first time now, I am teaching race and human relations and I am living it, and I am learning and growing. By coming here, I got a chance to be authentic.” In his time at the university, Henderson created the human relations department and has won upwards of 50 awards and honors from the university and the broader Oklahoma community. He was inducted into the Oklahoma African American Hall of Fame in 2003 and helped to create programs and groups for high-achieving students and students of color. It’s been 52 years since Henderson joined the University of Oklahoma faculty as a full-time professor in sociology and education,
and he said OU has come a long way since discrimination in administrative policies kept some students from excelling at the university. “As bad as some people believe OU is now, it is lightyears in social change ahead of where we once were,” Henderson said. “But if you have not lived that past, it is difficult to understand this.” Henderson has continued to be outspoken on issues at OU, such as the closed presidential search process and recent racist incidents on campus. His influence will continue to strengthen community relations on and off campus in decades to follow as more students feel empowered to advocate for racial equality. EARLY YEARS Born in Alabama in 1932, Henderson’s family lived in de ep p over t y. W hen Henderson was 6 years old, they fled to East Chicago, Indiana. “My father had a fistfight with a white man who swore that he would put him in his ‘black place’: hanging at the end of a rope. It was not an idle threat,” Henderson wrote in his book “Race and the University.” “Consequently, we fled from
the racism of the South to its northern version in East Chicago, where some of our relatives lived.” Henders on str uggle d through his elementar y years, still poor and wrestling with a rocky start to his education. But by the time he graduated high school, he had secured a track and academic scholarship to Michigan State Agricultural and Mechanical College. In 1951, Henderson met and married his wife Barbara. After Henderson served for two years in the Air Force, he, Barbara and their children moved to Detroit, and Henderson spent the next decade earning academic degrees, working professionally and leaning into community and racial activism. “I believe that making friends with people who come from races different than my own can be accomplished through civil conversations, but I did not always believe that,” Henderson said at a talk in 2018 as part of OU’s “This I believe: OU” essay reading event. In the 1960s, Detroit was seeing its most violent and destructive racial conflicts, which led to a deadly riot in 1967. Henderson was
spending time serving in a wide variety of community leadership positions in Detroit while getting to know civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Among other things, Henderson advocated for racial equality and gradually learned more about advocating for civil rights through community programs. In 1967, after accepting an offer to teach at the University of Oklahoma, He n d e r s o n w a s a p p re hensive about moving to Norman. Because Norman had only white residents, he worried that the people would not embrace him as the black community in Detroit did. “Imagine spending all your life in a black neighborhood and then waking up one morning and everywhere you look in your neighborhood is all white faces,” Henderson said. He addressed moving to Norman in his book, as well. “As I found out later, the transition would be difficult for me as a professor, and it would be excruciating for me as a husband, a father, and a son-in-law,” Henderson wrote. “Indeed, it was one thing for me to jump into a hostile fire of
community race relations; it was something else very troubling to pull my family in with me.” But Henderson was elated to start learning and experiencing more about social relationships within the context of race and class divisions, and he was excited to begin hands-on work with Oklahoma students. “If I had neglected and systematically ruled out relationships with students who came from families whose parents did not like people who looked like me,” Henderson said, “ I would have been teaching to a very few small number of students in terms of helping them to change, because most of the students who came to OU who were white came from those communities who did not want us living among them.” Henderson said in his first memories and moments in Norman, students guided his efforts for an establishing a more inclusive university. “I was put into a position where individuals who did not want me living in their neighborhoods, going into their social clubs, did not want me teaching them or See HENDERSON page 3
Donations to OU down amid campus chaos Donors hesitating to give during time of change NICK HAZELRIGG @nickhazelrigg
Donations to the university are down 41 percent compared to the last fiscal year amid a chaotic period in the university’s history compounded by the departure of multiple high-level development officers and a rocky presidential transition. As of Jan. 10, according
to an internal office of development memo obtained by The Daily, the university has raised $48,905,322 during fiscal year 2019, which started July 1, 2018. At this point in fiscal year 2018, which started July 1, 2017, the university had raised $82,980,776. Fiscal year 2019, which began the same day OU President James Gallogly took office, has been marked as one of the most tumultuous at OU in recent years. With a presidential transition that ended in a public rift between Gallogly and his
predecessor David Boren and the terminations and retirement of several high-level development officials, some may wonder about the trajectory of future donations to the university. Now, with reports the university has opened an investigation into Boren related to sexual harassment claims, it does not appear the chaos will die down in the near future. Boren was skilled at soliciting donations for the university, said Alan Velie, OU’s longest serving faculty member. Velie said the effect
on the university could be catastrophic if perceptions don’t change. “(Boren) was very widely loved throughout the state,” Velie said. “He was a revered figure in the state, and everybody who felt they loved him is going to be outraged.” Velie said he regularly donated $1,000 a year to the university but chose to stop after the university announced in December that a plan to name a room after former OU Vice President of Development Tripp Hall would be rescinded, a decision that came after the
university investigated misreporting of donor data on the part of the department of development. Velie said he won’t give to the university any longer. “If they wanted to terminate Tripp Hall, he works at the pleasure of the president,” Velie said. “Why the president would go out of his way to stop an honor to a man who worked here for 25 years and was beloved by the university community is gratuitous cruelty. That’s why I’m not giving a penny until things change around here.” The departures of Hall,
Paul Massad and J.P. Audas rattled many potential donors to the university, Velie said. Together, the three had more than 70 combined years of experience of institutional knowledge and donor relationships that have now been lost. Judith Wilde, an academic at George Mason University who studies higher education policy, said presidential transitions and times of turmoil at a university usually leave donations lagging. “Any time donors see See DONATIONS page 4