AWAKENINGS TO RACISM IN ALABAMA: The Education of a Native Son and the Lessons He and His Peers Learned Resisting Jim Crow

DR. JIM VICKREY was born in Montgomery the decade before the Bus Boycott, educated in its then-all-white public schools, except for the year he lived off Highway 80 in Lowndes County, where he met “Blue Jesus,” his first Black friend. He worked a decade later with his second Black friend at Sears Roebuck in the capital city while he was a student leader at Robert E. Lee High School. Matriculating to Auburn University in 1960, the year of the NC lunch-counter sit-ins, he found success as a student, graduating first in his class, and was SGA President his senior year, when his Alma Mater was racially integrated, later becoming friends with Anthony Lee and Harold Franklin, AU’s first Black undergraduate and graduate students. On March 11, 1965, while working on his Master’s thesis about an Alabama politician who showed a ”profile in courage” opposing the KKK -- during the protests in Selma, before the march down Highway 80 to Montgomery -- he experienced a personal “racial awakening” hearing radio news that Rev. James Reeb had been murdered.Thereafter, while teaching at Auburn, saving money for law school, and opposing the racial policies of Gov. George Wallace, he became active in civil rights, eventually meeting major Black figures there and elsewhere -- from Martin Luther King, Jr., Sidney Portier, and Whitney Young to A.G. Gaston, John Hope Franklin, and Benjamin Mays -- and federal judges Hugo Black, Frank Johnson, who became a friend, and Constance Baker Motley. Despite being first in his law class at the University of Alabama, he left for FSU to earn a Ph.D. in rhetoric, studying with his third Black friend, Jim Wills, a Movement associate of Dr. King. Originally planning a career in the Methodist ministry instead of college teaching, he reconsidered the choice after the 16th St. Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham and moved into higher education administration in 1970, mentored by FSU Exec. VP Dr. Cecil Mackey, soon named President of the University of South Florida. There, he served as his assistant and PR director, and equal opportunity coordinator until 1975, when he was tapped by Chancellor E.T. York of the State University System to be his assistant and public affairs director. When he returned to Alabama as the 11th President of the University of Montevallo, the youngest four-year college president in the nation and one of the then-most zealous white devotees of civil rights and quality higher education for all in Alabama, helping to bring the state’s only statutory liberal arts college national recognition and honors. Being named an honorary member of a local Black church his first year and honored by the campus African American Society his last were the Montevallo bookending honors he treasured almost as much as UM’s being excused from the statewide desegregation lawsuit, because of its demonstrated commitment to equal opportunity.Leaving Montevallo after 3,700+ days, he completed his law degree, practiced law in Montgomery, arguing three cases before the Alabama Supreme Court, and returned to college teaching at Troy University, where, from 1991 to 2014 he taught students of all races, served as Chairman of the Department of Speech & Theatre for 10 years, and occasionally advised his friend, Chancellor Jack Hawkins, retiring as professor emeritus. He also taught for nearly 30 years in the largest United Methodist adult Sunday School program in America and continued his career-long practice of writing for Alabama electronic and print media, standing up for public libraries (the Alabama Library Association honored him three times) and the First Amendment as well as writing some 1,500+ provocative commentaries, movie reviews, and articles for publication in his fields. Read more