"To Command Respect"

He was a Quaker, just back from seven years as a missionary in the Orient, and he thought himself pretty tolerant. But one day in 1925 Thomas Elsa Jones walked into a washroom at Columbia University, and found himself resenting the presence of a Negro, washing his hands. "My old feelings of superiority came back," he said, and he was alarmed. Jones ran into the Negro again in a German class, and discovered that the Negro knew more German than he did. "Soon we were playing handball together--and in less than a year I had accepted the presidency of Fisk University."

Last week, after 20 years as president of the most prestigious Negro college in the South, 58-year-old Thomas Jones decided it was time to leave. His old Quaker alma mater, Indiana's small, earnest Earlham College (enrollment: 450), had offered him its presidency. Behind him in Nashville, slow-speaking, spiritual Thomas Elsa Jones left a tough challenge to his old students: "The Negro will get respect when he does things to command respect."

Shackles to Studies. Fisk began in 1866, in abandoned Union hospital barracks, and its first books were bought by selling a pile of old iron handcuffs found in the barracks. Most of the first students were freed slaves, who had to start from scratch, work up from the three Rs to college subjects (some took ten years). Eleven of the students barnstormed the U.S. and Europe as the "Fisk Jubilee Singers," in three years raised $100,000 for the University by singing spirituals.

When Jones took over in 1926, Fisk had only 531 college students, a debt of $216,000 and a ramshackle look. He begged money from whites and Negroes (the angels ranged from Lawyer Paul D. Cravath and Financier John D. Rockefeller Jr. to old washerwomen who scraped up $1 apiece). Jones's first purchase, over everybody else's objections, was an expensive power lawnmower. His explanation: "If Fisk is going to die, it will die with its face shaved."

Jones built up an interracial (50-50) faculty, soon boasted Negro names like Sociologist Charles S. Johnson, Librarian-Author Arna W. Bontemps (St. Louis Woman), the late Poet James Weldon Johnson. Northern Negroes, reversing the usual tide, began to go South to Fisk. (1946 enrollment: 1,034, with 48% from above the Mason-Dixon line. In 1926, all but 11% were Southern Negroes.)

With Quaker faith in good works, Thomas Jones decided to give his students community chores. A Nashville judge paroled young Negro offenders to Fisk "custody." Soon Fisk "internes" were running social centers in Nashville's tawdry red-light district, in rural Whiteville, in Indianapolis, had made case studies of racial tension in 67 cities. By 1944, local hostility had retreated enough for Fisk to hold an interracial institute at Nashville, with whites and Negroes sharing dormitories and dining rooms.

Every now & then Jones ran into opposition from two extremes: what he calls "radical, direct-action Negroes and whites" and "status quo whites." Said he last week: "When the Earlham call came, those pincers were closing in again. I think I could have pushed them open, but I said, 'Let them find a younger man.' My work at Fisk has reached the point now where it cannot slip back far."

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