by Ty Seidule
While much larger, Mobile shared many of Monroe’s attributes concerning race. The local government had no Black citizens in positions of power, even though the city was more than a third African American. Mobile also had a history of lynching. White mobs lynched at least a dozen Black men from Reconstruction through World War I.
In 1906, three thousand white people took a train ride to see the bodies of two African American men lynched and dangling from a tree. As in Monroe, they took pictures and created postcards. The crowd surged forward to cut pieces of cloth off the corpses as souvenirs. In 1909, a white lynch mob dragged an accused Black murderer out of jail and hanged him beneath a stately live oak next to Christ Church. The Mobile paper applauded the lynch mob for their good manners in keeping the noise to a minimum while “impromptu justice was being meted out to a guilty human who had put himself beyond the pale of pity.”85
Just like in Monroe, I had no idea about the racial violence in Mobile until spring break of my freshman year in college. While I was home in March 1981, two members of the Ku Klux Klan went searching for a lone African American man. They found nineteen-year-old Michael Donald walking to a convenience store to buy his aunt a package of Marlboro cigarettes. Henry Francis Hays and James “Tiger” Knowles, members of the local Klan, asked Donald for directions. When he came over to their black Buick from the sidewalk, the white men stuck a gun in his face and told him to get in the car.86
They took Donald to a deserted area. The entire ride, he pleaded with the Klansmen not to kill him. When they got out of the car, Donald tried to get away. Then he found a tree branch and began pummeling the two men, desperately trying to save himself. During the fight, Hays and Knowles eventually overpowered Donald and began beating him with the tree branch and pistol-whipping him. Finally, they retrieved a rope prepared with the Klan’s signature, a thirteen-coil hangman’s noose. Pulling the rope as hard as they could, the two Klansmen finally strangled Donald to death after an epic fight. To ensure they killed him, Hays took a utility knife and slit Donald’s throat.87
With Michael Donald dead, they stuffed the body into the Buick’s trunk and drove back to Herndon Avenue, about four miles from my house. There, they tried to hang the body from a tall tree, but no tree on that street had a branch high enough to provide the visual recognition the men hoped for. With a full moon silhouetting them, Hays and Knowles had to work fast. They tied the corpse to a thick camphor tree that had no branches. Incredibly, they left the body a block from their own homes.88
The next morning, hundreds of African Americans gathered around the body with many keening in their grief. More than twenty-five years had passed with no lynching, and now the terror had returned. The Mobile police sealed off the area, while the lynchers watched the scene from their porch.
For two years the crime went unsolved, but the Department of Justice and the FBI broke the case when Knowles confessed. The outcome in Mobile was different this time. Knowles testified against his accomplice and took a plea deal, saving him from the Alabama electric chair nicknamed Yellow Mama. Knowles would serve twenty-five years before his release.
With Knowles’s testimony, an Alabama jury convicted Henry Hays of first-degree murder and sentenced him to life in prison, but the judge, in a nearly unprecedented move, overruled the jury’s verdict and sentenced him to die. On June 6, 1997, the state of Alabama executed Hays in Yellow Mama for the murder of Michael Donald. The first white person to die for murdering an African American in Alabama since 1913.89
Then the Southern Poverty Law Center sued the United Klans of America (UKA) for conspiracy in the murder of Michael Donald. An all-white jury found the UKA guilty and ordered them to pay $7 million to Donald’s mother. The successful lawsuit bankrupted the UKA. The New York Times Magazine trumpeted, “The Woman Who Beat the Klan.”90
I wish I could report that the Mobile lynching changed me. That I finally saw the effect of racial violence. I want to kick my eighteen-year-old self. Racial violence haunts me now, but it didn’t then. When I was a teenager, my life revolved around college. I couldn’t wait to get to my school. For college, I left the Deep South to go back to Virginia to be an educated Christian gentleman like my hero Robert E. Lee. And what school would best prepare me for a life as a Virginia gentleman? Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.
4
My College: The Shrine of the Lost Cause
I wanted to be a Virginia gentleman, not a lawyer, not a teacher, not a businessman, and certainly not an army officer. Those were all careers, professions, jobs. I wanted to be a gentleman. That meant something to a white boy growing up in the South. A gentleman meant honor, chivalry, and good manners. It meant status.
When I was a junior in high school, my dad took me on the southern college swing. We visited Sewanee, Duke, Davidson, and a few other schools for a status-seeking white southern high schooler. Then we visited Lexington, Virginia, in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley, between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains. I felt as if I were in a real college town. Washington and Lee University (W&L) occupied the hill just north of downtown. Adjacent to W&L on the eastern spur of the hill was the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), the state’s military college.
If the colleges were the main industry in Lexington, tourism was second. The two greatest heroes of the Confederacy, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, were buried in Lexington. Both Virginians, of course. Almost everything in Lexington refers to the two men. As a sixteen-year-old boy, I saw Lexington as a city imbued with history by gentlemen scholars and gentlemen warriors. Today, as a historian, when I walk the streets of Lexington, I see evidence of the Lost Cause myth. The late Tony Horwitz, the author of the brilliant book Confederates in the Attic, called Lexington “the second city of Confederate remembrance: Medina to Richmond’s Mecca.”1
I felt at home in Lexington because of its history and its link to the Confederate generals. If I wanted to be a Virginia gentleman, what better place than the home of the greatest educated Christian gentlemen? My dad tried to interest me in the U.S. Naval Academy, but a military college held no interest for me. I knew no one who had served except for my grandfather, a World War II veteran, and an uncle who joined the navy to avoid the army during the Vietnam War. In the late 1970s, the military held little allure.
For my campus tour, a student sat down with me and talked for an hour about becoming a W&L gentleman. He dressed like the boys I remember from Alexandria—khakis, blue blazer, and a rep tie. I could feel the status I craved all around me. He told me the history of one of the oldest colleges in the country and the second oldest in the South after William & Mary.
The SparkNotes history of my alma mater has three elements. The first part is the origin story, a complex tale of a struggling school on the western frontier. Hardy Scots-Irish Presbyterians founded Augusta Academy in 1749 twenty miles north of Lexington. Barely surviving with no firm location, the school was renamed Liberty Hall Academy in 1776 by the trustees to show its patriotism. In 1779 it moved to the new town of Lexington, named for the first battle of the American Revolution. Liberty Hall Academy built a schoolhouse in Lexington that lasted for ten years until it burned down. The ruins still survive on the northern edge of the campus.2
The second part of the university’s origin story set the hook for me. In 1796, President George Washington received $20,000 worth of stock from the James River Canal Company. Washington had supported projects that would help develop the western frontier, and the company wanted to show its gratitude. As the U.S. president, Washington accepted the gift under the condition that he could pass it on to a worthy recipient. In keeping with his desire for westward expansion, he chose a school west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. When Washington gave the stock to Liberty Hall, it represented the largest single gift to a school in North America. The Liberty Hall trustees realized that the link to the president could be as valuable as the monetary gift and smartly renamed the school Washington Academy and, in 1813, Washingto
n College.3
If Washington’s gift hooked me, the third part of the school’s origin story reeled me in. The college barely survived the Civil War. In 1864, U.S. troops under Major General David Hunter, West Point class of 1822, leveled VMI, shelled Lexington, and ransacked Washington College. By the end of the war, Washington College looked terrible, with dilapidated buildings, almost no students, and no money in the coffers. The school would need a miracle to survive.4
The trustees had a brilliant but outlandish idea. Offer the presidency of the school to the most famous and popular man in the South, the revered leader of the Army of Northern Virginia. In August 1865, the trustees asked Robert E. Lee to assume the presidency of a troubled school at a location far from Richmond, or his former home in Arlington. While he was no academic, his qualifications to serve as a college president were better than most. Lee had served as superintendent at West Point. Of course, it wasn’t his academic acumen the trustees wanted. They knew that the Lee name would bring in students and money, not only to Washington College, but also to Lexington.
Incredibly, Lee accepted. In turning down more remunerative business offers, he wrote that it was “the duty of every citizen to do all in his power to aid in the restoration of peace and harmony.”5 Washington College had its miracle. Lee’s wife wrote that “a more active employment would suit him better.” Of course, the annual salary of $3,000 helped too. With no possibility of returning to the Custis mansion in Arlington, Mary Lee’s homeless family needed to settle somewhere. “This would give us a comfortable home & I have no doubt his name would be a great advantage to the College.” For more than a hundred years, Mary Lee’s prediction proved prophetic. Lee saved the school.
Today, however, the Lee name on the masthead honoring a soldier who resigned his commission to fight for a slave republic haunts the university and will for decades to come. Only two other colleges bear the name of a Confederate general, Gordon State College in Georgia and Nicholls State University in Louisiana. Both are fine schools, but Washington and Lee University is ranked among the Top 10 national liberal arts colleges.6
Lee served as president for five years. During that time, he revitalized the school as a truly innovative educator, saving it from extinction. In 1867, the board of trustees approved his sweeping changes to the curriculum, creating an education focused on the “practical pursuits of life.” In this way, he mirrored the education at West Point, which focused on mathematics as the basis for further study in engineering and science. Also, as he had at West Point, Lee attended many of the exams. In all ways, he was a hands-on college president, transforming every aspect of the school.7
Lee wanted to transform the college even more. He started a school of civil and mining engineering and a business school, although neither flourished during his time in Lexington. Next, Lee hoped to start an agriculture school at the college. To fund it, he tried to persuade the Virginia legislature to name Washington College as a recipient of the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862. That law gave each state tens of thousands of acres of public land to fund agricultural and mechanical colleges. One codicil in the Civil War–era law required each school that received money to teach military science as well. Congress wanted to “seed military nurseries” in each state to ensure the country no longer had to rely only on West Pointers, especially treasonous ones, to lead the army.8
Lee, however, lost his bid to turn Washington College into a land-grant college. Most of the money went to a small Methodist school called the Preston and Olin Institute in the far southwestern part of the state. It would become the largest university in the state, now known as Virginia Polytechnic Institute or, more commonly, Virginia Tech. The rest of the Morrill land-grant funds went toward African American education. Lee did, however, vastly improve the school’s finances by finding wealthy benefactors in the North and South to put the college on firm fiscal footing. Moreover, the sons of the South flocked to General Lee’s college. In 1868, Washington College had 441 students, making it one of the most successful schools in the South.9
On October 12, 1870, Lee died. Even before he was buried, the trustees renamed the school Washington and Lee University. Or, as my student guide called it, “General Lee’s College.” A school named for the two greatest Virginia gentlemen; a school named for the two greatest American soldiers. The aura of Washington and Lee overwhelmed me. W&L had a storied reputation among elite white southerners. Here, I would become a gentleman of status. When I told people in the South that I went to Washington and Lee, they recognized me. After years of living as a teacher’s son with a strange name among status-obsessed white southerners, I felt the warm glow of enhanced social status.
As we finished the tour, the student and I walked along the Colonnade, the antebellum buildings that make up the most visible and memorable part of the campus. I felt the history all around me. The Colonnade felt like what a college should look like, featuring imposing redbrick buildings with enormous white columns, a great expanse of green grass, and a patterned walkway. Washington and Lee looked to me like a collegiate Tara.
Teenagers choose colleges for irrational reasons. W&L had a good academic reputation, as did other small liberal arts schools, but it was different from other colleges in one way. The school admitted only men. As a straight man, I chose to attend one of only a handful of all-male schools in the country. I don’t remember thinking, “Gee, I would like to go to school with women.” I don’t remember worrying that the only women I could see socially were an hour’s drive away and I didn’t have a car. As a teenager, I should have been far more concerned with the social life, but the combined aura of George Washington, Robert E. Lee, and the social status of the Virginia gentleman was far more important to me. With the tour over, I met my dad and told him I had found my school.
* * *
DURING FRESHMAN ORIENTATION, the three hundred and forty young men in the class of 1984 filed into Lee Chapel to receive the Honor System Orientation from the senior who led the Executive Committee, the student government.10 He told us the Honor System came directly from Robert E. Lee and his insistence that “we have but one rule—that every student must be a gentleman.” The Honor System worked. We took unproctored exams all over campus. Yet, as I researched more of the institutional history of W&L, more recent scholars have argued convincingly that the Honor System in fact predates Lee, but that’s not what I heard in 1980. I went to General Lee’s College with General Lee’s Honor System in General Lee’s Chapel.11
As we settled into the chapel’s pews, the nervous chatter among teenagers fell to a reverential hush. One young man sat next to a plaque that read, “This marks the place where General Robert E. Lee sat during daily chapel worship while president of Washington College.” After the senior finished his talk, we pledged to obey the Honor System and Lee’s prescription of gentlemanly conduct. Now we were W&L men.
Part of the solemnity of the ceremony came from our surroundings, especially their link to Robert E. Lee himself. A college education, Lee believed, should develop a student’s character. And by “character,” he meant a person’s moral development determined by parents, race, and religion. Lee saw the moral development of his gentlemen students as part of his mission, especially through religion. Yet he did away with mandatory church attendance twenty years ahead of Harvard, sixty years before Yale. West Point continued mandatory chapel attendance into the 1970s. By personal example, Lee hoped to influence Washington College students to develop their character by never missing daily religious services. One student in 1868, Milton Humphreys, walked a mile and a half to attend daily services. A friend accused Humphreys of “worshipping Lee not Jehovah.” Humphreys readily agreed.12
But Washington College had no existing chapel when Lee arrived. It had only a room that doubled as a place of worship. The arrival of Lee brought far more students to Lexington. Lee wrote that “a large chapel is much needed.” What Lee wanted Lee got. In 1868, the college dedicated a new chapel. Lee described the
new building, which could seat several hundred people, as a “pleasing as well [as] a useful addition to the college buildings.” Surprisingly, the architecture did not match the classical Colonnade. Instead, the chapel had a Romanesque exterior, influenced by the recently built Smithsonian buildings in Washington. On the inside, the design seemed to mirror Lee’s old parish in Alexandria, Christ Church. Plans for the chapel had Lee’s annotations, which would later ensure it received mythic status. Little evidence, however, suggests Lee designed the building, but his aura would eventually make it Lee Chapel.13
When Lee served as president of Washington College, he attended daily worship services and even placed his office in the new chapel’s basement. After he died, no Christian denomination held regular worship services in Lee Chapel. The chapel worshipped another religion—that of Robert E. Lee. It would take decades for the full beatification process to finalize, but it commenced in earnest when Lee died in 1870. As the college prepared for the funeral, students stood watch over Lee’s coffin on the chapel’s stage. And they would continue to stand guard over Lee’s tomb daily until 1878. VMI cadets walked by and saluted the building, a tradition that continues to this day.14
The morning of the funeral, the trustees met and voted unanimously to rename the school. Retaining Washington’s name as the “Founder” and adding Lee’s name as “the restorer of our beloved college.” At the same meeting they upgraded the title from college to university. The trustees also agreed with a faculty recommendation to leave Lee’s office in the basement of the chapel exactly as he had left it. So it remained at least through my time at W&L as a relic to the sainted Lee.15