"Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, Rejection" Wayne Flynt, Auburn University Summersell Lecture Series Wayne Flynt was born in Mississippi and lived there ever so briefly, but he grew up primarily in Alabama. He graduated from Anniston High School, attended Samford University with the intention of joining the ministry, but he turned away from both the ministry and from the state of Alabama in light of the ferocious resistance of those struggling for racial justice found here in the 1960s. So he left Alabama, attended graduate school at Florida State, took a PhD in history, and then, to our eternal benefit, he determined to return to Alabama, where he accepted a teaching position at Samford University in 1965. He taught there for 12 years before leaving in 1977 to become chair of the history department at Auburn University. [laughter] Doesn’t it just sort of stick in your throat just saying it? He remained there until his retirement as a distinguished university professor in 2005. Now, Professor Flynt’s scholarship over his long career has been prolific, remarkable, and immensely important. He has published nearly 100 articles and book chapters. For those of us who write articles and book chapters, that’s kind of jaw dropping. He has authored or coauthored roughly a dozen books, several of which you see out here and are available for sale and signing after the talk. Most of those books center on faith, the less fortunate, politics, and especially on the state of Alabama, for which his deep affection is evident in his writing. His work has justly been recognized over and over again. Much of this introduction is going to involve my recounting the prizes, awards, and recognitions Professor Flynt has received, which is why it might take me a while. Two of his books were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The book for which he is perhaps best known, Poor But Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites, won the Lillian Smith Award for nonfiction from the Southern Regional Council. Three different times his books have won the James Sulzbey Award from the Alabama Historical Association for the best book on Alabama history. Twice he has won the Alabama Library Association Prize for the best book of nonfiction. Three times he has received the James McMillan Prize from the University of Alabama Press for the best manuscript about Alabama. In 2003 he was elected president of the Southern Historical Association, which is the leading professional organization for the study of the American South. Professor Flynt’s deeply committed scholarship has been matched by a deep commitment to teaching. During his teaching career, he taught more than 6,000 undergraduates, directed more than 40 masters theses and nearly 30 doctoral dissertations. He won nearly 20 teaching awards during the course of his career, including the award for best professor at both Samford and Auburn. Auburn history graduate students named him their top professor three different times. In 1991, he was chosen as Alabama’s Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. But, Professor Flynt has always been much more than a scholar and a teacher, although those are valuable in and of themselves. His dedication to numerous communities and to the people of the state as a whole has been evident ever since he organized a tutoring program at Rosedale High School and a voter registration drive among African Americans in Homewood during his earliest years working at Samford. Over the course of many decades, his public service has included being the founder of the Alabama Poverty Project, of sowing seeds of hope in Perry County. He served for a decade on the American Cancer Society’s committee for the socioeconomically www.as.ua.edu www.scss.as.ua.edu "Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, Rejection" Wayne Flynt Summersell disadvantaged, sat on the boards of Voices for Alabama’s Children, the A+ Education Reform Coalition, Alabama Citizen’s for Constitutional Reform, and the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, the nation’s largest philanthropy for eradicating poverty in the South. Oh, and in 1993, he worked as the court facilitator in Alabama’s lawsuit for equity funding in public education. Given such an extensive record of public involvement, it will come as no surprise that he has been recognized over and over again for his activism, as well. Just a selection of his other awards, and remarkably, I assure you that this is just a selection, include the Hugo Black Award for service to Alabama and nation, a child advocacy award from the Alabama chapter of American Academy of Pediatrics, the Bailey Thompson Awards for Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform, the Judson Rice Award presented to a Baptist leader who has demonstrated both leadership skills and integrity, induction into the Alabama Academy of Honor and an honorary doctorate from Samford University. Professor Flynt’s most recent book (although he tells me there’s another one in the works) is a memoir entitled Keeping the Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives. I encourage really everyone to pick it up and read it. It’s partly the story of a life, partially an insider’s tale of some tumultuous years at Auburn, partially a series of reflections on religion, civil rights, education, poverty, history, and other subjects that have been close to Professor Flynt’s heart. It’s beautifully written. It amply demonstrates that it is not unusual to see Professor Flynt referred to as “the conscience of Alabama.” Now, I would venture that a conscience is something that this state has always needed, continues to need desperately, and while it seems to me that that title is likely as much a burden as it is an honor, that Professor Flynt sees it as such. It’s a burden he bears with great humility and with grace. Please join me in welcoming Wayne Flynt. PROFESSOR FLYNT. Thank you, Josh. It’s worth noting that I received a number of major awards from The University of Alabama and none from Auburn. I don’t know what that says, those who know you best. Thanks also, Josh, I suppose, for inviting me to speak on the subject “Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, and Rejection,” though I do wonder a guy like me is speaking in a place like this on a subject like that. I’m not teaching in the classroom, though I teach a Sunday school class every week with a hundred people in it. I’m going to do some of the same things I do with them. Unfortunately, I cannot give them an exam at the end, and after nine years, I really crave an exam at the end, so there’s going to be an exam at the end of this reading. The reading is pretty transparent, but I don’t know the answer to the questions I’m going to ask you—something that a professor should never do unless he/she uses the Socratic method, in which case the questions are entirely appropriate. The reading is from Charles Shields’s biography of Harper Lee. Think September 1945, Tuscaloosa, your campus, thousands an army of young men descend on the campus, war over in August, GI bill, here they come. Sorority girls are thinking they’ll not only get a baccalaureate degree but an MRS. There’s no way you can miss with the ratio of men to women on the campus. With a see of men inundating the UA campus, coeds hoped to gain their “MRS degree” before graduation. The student newspaper, the Crimson White, added luster to their fantasies by featuring a “Bama Belle” on the front page almost every week—lovely as a Hollywood starlet. Nelle was www.as.ua.edu www.scss.as.ua.edu "Fraternities, Sororities, Acceptance, Belonging, Otherness, Rejection" Wayne Flynt Summersell apparently uninterested in any of this, which affronted the young women in the fifteen houses along Sorority Row. Her lack of makeup, her flyaway hair, and dun-colored outfits would have passed unnoticed had shed been an “independent”—someone outside the elite PanHellenic organization of sororities and fraternities. But she wasn’t. Through an error of judgment on the part of the girls of the Chi Omega house, she had become one of them—a sorority sister. They were outstandingly pretty, the girls who were taking her in. Chi Omega was a house that “specialized in blondes,” proclaimed the university yearbook, “long, short, thin and broad”— apparently it didn’t make any difference, size, if you were a blonde—including Miss Alabama of 1946. “Your sisters were watching you,” said Chi O member Polly Terry. “The did not want your behavior to reflect on them.” But Nelle’s did. In the purely feminine aquifer of sorority life, she floated like a drop of motor oil. “I kind of wondered at the time what she saw in a sorority to join it,” marveled Mary Anne Berryman, looking back. Regardless, with an optimistic heart, Nelle put her name on the PanHellenic Association’s list of young women scheduled to visit all the houses on Sorority Row during Rush Week in the autumn of 1945. As she and other rushees came through the door of Chi Omega, the members serenaded them lustily with fraternity and drinking songs. Nelle liked the humor. They invited her back. And a few days later, much to Nelle’s surprise (and later theirs), the Chi Omegas, founded in 1922, accepted her. That’s not the end of the story. As Nelle’s sorority sisters tried to get to know her better, they were at a loss to categorize her.