A Place of Distinction
by Alice Joyner Irby '54
Photo: The YWCA of the Woman's College in 1954, with President Alice Irby (standing, center).
We could not vote. We could not enter most jobs and professions. We were expected to stay home to care for others and grow our families. But one man of vision in North Carolina, Charles Duncan McIver, persuaded the legislature to borrow $30,000 to fund a normal and industrial school for women so that the young could be educated. His message: “When you educate a woman, you educate a family.”
Two hundred twenty-three students enrolled in business (largely secretarial skills), domestic science, and teaching. That was in 1892 when the state, a largely rural and poor land, was trying to get back on its feet after the Civil War.
Seventy years later, we women were still not allowed to enter University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and N.C. State University in Raleigh as freshmen. But. the school for women grew to become the North Carolina College for Women, then The Woman’s College (WC) in 1933, one of the three divisions of the Consolidated University, and in 1963 became the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), a co-ed institution along with other state universities in North Carolina.
But unknowingly—probably all the while looking at us as second-class citizens—the men did us a great favor. We had a place of our own with scholars who fostered our education, nurtured us into maturity, disciplined us and encouraged us to develop skills to compete in the world of work. We cemented lasting friendships among other women students. Our professors were accomplished men and women who listened to us! We could participate in our own self-government! We each became a “somebody.”
There it was: a JEWEL right in the middle of Greensboro, North Carolina, centrally located so that young women from all one hundred counties could reach its campus.
The college was large enough to offer depth and variety of programs, small enough for intimacy among students, mentors, and faculty. It could not have been better. With 2500 students, it grew to be the largest woman’s college in the United States.
And, for me, the influence of The Woman’s College started at the beginning: the beginning of me! My mother graduated from NCCW in 1926. My piano teacher, Louise Farber, an independent professional woman in her own right, was a graduate of NCCW.
Not until my junior year in high school did I lay eyes on the Woman’s College campus. Chosen to represent my town at Girls’ State in the summer of 1949, I packed my bags for a week’s study of Government and Civics sponsored by the American Legion Auxiliary--joining about a hundred other delegates from counties across the state. My first Ooh Ah! The campus was BIG! Brick buildings for blocks and blocks—and all for young women to live and study. Seeing so many young girls at one time was a bit overwhelming until we started introducing ourselves, and “Mr. Charlie” came to greet us. Mr. Charlie Phillips, Director of Government and Public Relations, was the perfect man to oversee the program: friendly, helpful, always cheerful. He didn’t seem like a highfalutin University administrator at all. Fate would lead me, years later, to return to the campus to join his staff.
It wasn’t just the impressive buildings we saw. Each day, we attended classes taught by professors at the College: experts in history and government. Who could forget Dr. Richard Bardolph, professor of American History--tall, full-bodied with an angular jaw and sharp features--telling us about how all politicians, when speaking, “point with pride” to their achievements and “view with alarm” those actions of the Opposition that will lead to ruin. And, Judge Richardson Preyer, a federal judge from District Court, explaining the inner workings of the federal court system. A trip to Raleigh to meet State officials and to conduct our “business” in the chambers of the Assembly lodged a dream in our minds that someday we might be there as legislators.
Deciding to enter The Woman’s College as a freshman a year later was no leap. Looking back, I don’t even know why I considered out-of-state schools and nearby Duke. I guess I wanted to be sure WC was right for me. That was the real beginning—the beginning of a lifetime of connections and bonds that supported, yet stretched me; pushed me into adventure, pulled me to safety, lighted fires in my heart and mind; and restored my soul in hard times.
There was more than attending class and studying or sleeping in the library. Courtesy, a virtue in short supply these days, was not only valued but expected of every student. It had to do with manners and consideration of others, something that was lost in the waning decades of the 20th century. But, in 1950, it was on the lips of freshman-hall counselors who insisted their charges behave well—with their elders and with each other. We were reminded again and again. Finally, we had heard enough. About forty of us decided it was time to bury Courtesy, which we did—breaking curfew--in a midnight ceremony in the middle of the freshman quad. Shrouded in sheets and blankets, we marched with candles in a circle around a small gravesite dug by our leader, Margaret Crawford. Committing the Virtue of Courtesy to eternal damnation, we quickly chanted a dirge, scampered back to our rooms before we could be identified, caught, and restricted to campus. Nevertheless, courtesy and our counselors prevailed; the lectures continued.
1950: Mid-century, when we entered, we were seventeen years old. We had recently witnessed and endured with our families, the largest and most destructive war in history. We had just learned about the USSR building an atomic bomb, setting in stone the Cold War. Life magazine reported that Mao and the Chinese Communist Party had gained control of China. And, we had just witnessed the invasion of South Korea by USSR-sponsored North Korea, which meant our school chums were going to war.
It was a time of uncertainty, even fear. Fear of the USSR dropping bombs on our homes; folks built bomb shelters in their backyards. Fear that Communists had infiltrated our military and government. Senator McCarthy went on a crusade to weed out Communists in all corners of the land. In doing so, he caught in his net many innocent people—artists, government workers, military officers, businesspeople.
The winds of change were stirring to achieve equal rights for young students who had been in segregated schools since the Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling of 1896. The buzz around campus—and other campuses in Greensboro, i.e. Bennett College and A&T University (A&T)—was that a landmark decision in the Brown vs. Board of Education case would overturn Plessy. Hope for expanded civil rights, anticipation of integrated schools, concern about implementation, and worry about retaliation and violence dominated conversations among students and our professors.
A few years later, in 1957, opportunity presented itself in the persons of Mr. Charlie, and the vice-chancellor, Mereb Mossman, who would become my exemplary mentor and dear friend over the next thirty years. I was invited to return to The Woman’s College and, within a couple of years, to become the Director of Admissions. Whoever dreamed it? The University had integrated its student body and was looking for well-prepared African-American young women who might thrive in the WC learning environment where they would contribute, along with other students from all over the state, to the educational and social life of the institution. The numbers grew each year. Having been a student when the Brown vs. Board of Education case was decided by the Supreme Court, I was not just observing history but living history!
When the Sit-ins brought national attention to Greensboro in 1960, I found myself in the middle of another major societal change. This time, students at WC were involved in the activities surrounding the action at the Woolworth’s counter. Another of my mentors, Warren Ashby, and I were approached by several students to help them navigate the requirements of the College’s rules while enabling them to participate in the events downtown. Times were tense. The students violated some campus rules, for which they were to be punished. Yet, there were signs that the Sit-ins downtown were more than just impromptu protests by A&T students. In the end, the Administration dealt fairly with students who violated the rules while supporting their desire to participate in what would turn out to be a major civil-rights movement of our time.
Armed with my ideals and experience at the Woman’s College, I joined the Johnson Administration (LBJ) administration in 1964 to participate in developing the Job Corps in the War on Poverty. Not until my retirement in 1999, back south in North Carolina, was I able to spend time on the UNCG campus again. But, even in the early 1990’s, when my mother died, who was there to help the family and to extend a hand of friendship but another Woman’s College alumna, Ruth Gregory Proctor. A former student of Mother’s, a native of Halifax, and a woman of extraordinary strength and courage, Ruth kept Mother’s memory alive. Each Christmas, we made our annual pilgrimage to the Weldon cemetery to lay a wreath on her grave.
In every decade since that September day in 1950 when my dad made trip after trip to the third floor of Cotton Hall, laden with sweaters and shoes, someone or something or someplace has connected me to the people and place of WC/UNCG. Sometimes I felt as if I were waltzing, other times more like dancing a mazurka. Sometimes my environment resembled the calm in a painting of Monet’s lilies; but other times reminiscent of the disruptive DeKooning that hung in the Freshman art lab at WC in the 50’s. Sober, lively, humorous, sad, aspiring, challenging—these dimensions of life are associated with a person, an incident, an achievement, or a place in the intellectual, physical, emotional homeplace I attribute to The Woman’s College.
In the early 2000s, UNCG was as welcoming to this aging alum as the Woman’s College was in the 1950s. Five times larger, populated by new programs and schools, with intercollegiate athletics, and recognized as a research university, the University prospered under the leadership of a visionary chancellor, Patricia Sullivan. Her masterplans called for steady but careful growth, building on each successive addition, and for endowment funding to augment the state appropriations. Anchoring it all was still the dedication to liberal learning that had so marked the Woman’s College as a place of distinction in the lives of so many young North Carolina women decades earlier.
So, things have come full circle.
Since that hot August day in 1932, springing from my mother’s womb, specific individuals—an alum, a classmate, a professor, an administrator, a relative—have formed with me an unbroken band of kinship, continuity, inspiration, and comfort throughout my life. It has been another, different kind of Southern home—no less embracing.
October 2020
Watch Alice's full Vanguard Virtual Series webinar from November 10th, 2020 below: