Tuesday, Feb. 25,1986
Black Ink
7
IJNC graduate
continued from page 1
photo by Tammie Foust
college, where he received his license
in 1941. But Beech did not want to be a
barber, so he eventually he enrolled at
Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga.
Beech said when he first set foot
on the grounds of Morehouse, he did
not know anything about college.
When he first walked into the admin
istration office, it was during the sum
mer when no one was in school. The
man in the office told him that he was
in the wrong place if he wanted a job,
not understanding that Beech had
come to enroll.
After the misunderstanding was
cleared up, the administrator told
Beech that he could work his way
through school, since he had brought
no money from home. So, he worked
his way through Morehouse by paint
ing floors and cutting hair in his
spare time. He graduated in three
and a half years.
“I was completely ignorant about
college when I came there,” he said. I
was just a little boy from North
Carolina who had never been away
from home.”
Beech said after he graduated
from Morehouse with a BA degree,
he had no place to go to law school.
For a time, he had a job selling ham
burgers in Durham, but he did not
want to do this for the rest of his life,
he said. Something that had occurred
in his childhood kept on urging him to
be a lawyer.
“In the town of Kinston, there
were two water fountains, one for
whites and one for coloreds. They
were right next to the courthouse.
Beech said. “I could not understand
how such injustice could happen so
close to a courthouse.”
Beech said his church lessons
also made it very hard for him to
understand why there was so much
hatred and ignorance. “I learned
about how Jesus was so fair, but I
couldn’t understand how he could let
this happen.” he said.
With this in mind, he enrolled in
North Carolina Central Law School,
then called North Carolina College. I
was disappointed because the school
had three classrooms — one for class,
one for the dean and one for the
library.” He said the books in the
library were stacked on top of each
other, instead of being on a shelf. You
could not get to them, he said.
In 1951, he was approached by
Thurgood Marshall and others
involved in desegregation, and asked
if he would think about being one of
the first blacks to attend the Univer
sity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The action came as a result of legal
action bought by Floyd McKissick
against The University asking for
desegregation. According to Beech,
McKissick received his under
graduate degree from another univer
sity before the case could end, so civU
rights leaders asked he and another
student, Kenneth Lee, now a lawyer
in Greensboro, if they would want to
attend UNC. Both men said “yes” and
Beech enrolled in classes in the
summer of 1951.
Beech said being a student here
was not the best experience in the
world. “Kenneth and I were room
mates. They put us in Steele Hall
alone on the top floor. There was no
elevator. We called it the Buzzard’s
Roost,” he said. “There were catcalls
and people called us ‘niggers’ from the
other rooms, but we didn’t let it
bother us.”
Beech said both he and Lee did
fairly well in their law classes, but
they still had some bad experiences.
He said once when all the
students had to receive physicals
before they enrolled in classes, the pre
judice was all too evident. He said all of
the black students, about four or five,
were put in a separate room with a
different doctor to be checked out—all
of the black students except him.
“Because they had so many
foreign students,” Beech said, “and I
had very light skin like one, they just
put me through the line.” He received
a card allowing him to use the school
swimming pool after he took his
physical, but he later found out the
other black students had not received
such a card.
“Three weeks later, the Dean of
the Law School called me in after
class. He said Chancelor Robert House
had told him I had to give the card
back,” he said. House said that Beech
had gotten the card by mistake, but
Beech refused to give the card back.
In another incident, the
Chancellor gave the black students
football tickets, but turned right
around and told them not to go to the
game. Beech said House was basically
a good man, but was chained to the
ways of the antebellum South.
“He was a fine person,” he said,
“but was just embedded with pre
judice.” Beech said he was never
critical of the man, because he could
not help the way he had been brought
up. “He would make a great grand
father,” Beech said. Later in his life,
Beech said House would make a stride
against racism. Last year. House was
quoted as saying in a Daily Tar Heel
article, that resisting integration was
the biggest mistake he ever made in
his life.
Beech said, “It took, a big man to
admit that.”
Reflecting back on his life in
Chapel Hill, Beech said the exper
ience was worth the heartache.
“There’s a lot of give and take in this
racial business. Somebody had to
suffer first.”
Donnie Smith and Anurid HolUnd
selling tickets for Phase Two of their
Sickle Cell Anemia Drive
Hawkins
“My entire family had to uproot
. , . had to take my son out of a school
he was confortable in and a neigh
borhood he’d grown up in,” Hawkins
said. His family adjusted well,
however, and, “will probably not want
to leave Chapel Hill when I graduate.”
Hawkins is scheduled to
graduate in December. He said he
planned to attend law school but he
wasn’t sure where yet.
He said he chose UNC because he
knew that to get accepted into law
school he needed to attend a good
school for undergraduate study.
But coming to school was a hard
transition for Hawkins, he said. “It
was hard to focus my attention on
attending classes, reading books,
studying and having someone else
evaluate my work after I’d been work
ing as a mechanic for nine years with
»^v dad.”
He said he attributed the
greater part of his success to his wife
and son. “They’ve had confidence in
me even when I didn’t have it in
myself.”
His family was very supportive
of his decision to attend UNC, he said.
“And they are supportive of the fact
that depending on where I attend law
school, we might have to move again.”
As a freshman, Hawkins said he
didn’t have a major in mind, “but I
was leaning toward political science
and history.” He began thinking
seriously about English his
sophomore year.
continued from page 1
Hawkins said that aside from
familial support he was helped a lot by
professors and classmates. “And the
academic skills sessions under Dean
Renwick’s minority advising program
really helped a lot.”
Hawkins said he has utilized
those sessions since he arrived at
UNC. “I encourage all students to
take advantage of them.”
He said it was important for
students to recognize when they
needed help rather than to wait until
the day before the final exam.
“There is no substitute for hard
work,” he said. “To do well here
academically isn’t beyond the reach of
any student admitted.”
Hawkins said it was important
not to take a course load that can’t be
handled. He said he took course loads
that he thought he could handle.
He averaged two to three hours
of studying per day but used his
weekends to do a lot of studying, he
said.
Hawkins was a minority adviser
his sophomore and junior years. He
said he found it very rewarding to
assist freshmen.
He tutored in the Chapel Hill-
Carrboro City School Systems his
junior year and also found it reward
ing, he said.
Hawkins said he didn’t know why
there was a lack of blacks in campus
activities but, “I would like to see that
problem rectified.”
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