DENTON, Tex. — As she prepares for her commencement at the University of North Texas here on Saturday, Burlyce Sherrell Logan can still hear the words the institution’s president spoke at her freshman welcoming ceremony.
“ ‘There are some people here — you know who you are — that we don’t want here, but the state says can be here,’ ” she recalled the president telling the class of 2,155, clearly referring to her and the dozen other African-Americans among them. “He said we couldn’t eat in the cafeteria, we couldn’t live on campus. They set up a little area, with a little television, for us to be in when we weren’t in class.”
That was in 1956. What followed were two brutal years in which, Ms. Logan said, people threw rocks at her, pushed her in front of a moving car and burned a cross on the lawn of the house where she and five others boarded.
“One day I was walking across campus, going to another building, and I saw a bunch of placards out,” she said. “I thought someone was going for office.” She recalled that she started reading the signs and they said, “ ‘Jungle bunnies go home,’ ‘Africans go home,’ ‘Burrheads go home.’ And I was totally shocked, but I had noticed there were a bunch of kids ganging up behind me. And I don’t know what made me do this, but I just started knee-slapping laughing, and I couldn’t stop. I think they think I went crazy, and they all ran away.”
She quit as bad grades piled up; moved west; married, divorced and remarried; raised three children; worked as a banker and a secretary. Then, in 2006, Ms. Logan returned to a changed university, now with 36,000 students — about a third of them black, Hispanic or Asian. It took 55 years, but she has earned a bachelor’s degree, her only worry whether her cranky 73-year-old knees can carry her up the steps and across the stage to collect a diploma that is as much about a life journey as any academic achievement.
“I know it’s the same place I used to be, because I recognize the buildings, but it’s really like a different place,” she said. “Nobody shoves anybody, nobody stares at you, and even when I was in a wheelchair, nobody seemed to mind. It’s the way the world should always be.”
Ms. Logan’s long-awaited graduation is another act of closure regarding the turmoil of the civil rights era, alongside the recent reinvestigation of decades-cold murder cases across the South. While other pioneering desegregators left and later returned — Autherine Lucy, who was stoned by a mob when she enrolled at the University of Alabama in 1956 and expelled three days later by administrators who said they could not ensure her safety, earned a master’s degree there in 1992 — university officials say Ms. Logan is the first to do so in North Texas.
“It’s important for people to come to terms with their past, emotionally, symbolically and historically, and to deal with all the debris left from the era of segregation,” said Mary Frances Berry, a historian and former chairwoman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. “It’s also important for the local communities and nation.”
Far from the violence that rocked campuses Mississippi and Alabama, the University of North Texas is sometimes cited as a model of peaceful desegregration. At a 2004 celebration of five decades of integration, the president talked about how far the university had come; it has recently been listed among the 100 best colleges for black students.
But Ms. Logan recalled the discomfort of daily life on and off campus at what was then North Texas State College. “I had to walk several miles home from classes, and I never knew what would happen,” she said. “I didn’t want to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Classes were hardly a safe haven. “Growing up in Dallas, I would win spelling bees,” she said. “But in my English course, my professor gave me an F, and when I asked why, she said I had misspelled a word. I asked if I could see the paper, and she said, no, it would be against the law for her to show me. She gave me an F for the course.”
Ms. Logan’s only solace, in those years, was the music department, where “we were treated fairly.”
Sophomore year, the black female students were allowed to live on campus — but it took a flu outbreak, when they cared for their white dormmates, to break down the social barriers, Ms. Logan said.
In January that year, she married Raymond Logan, whose family has lived in Denton for a century. His father owned a barber shop, and in the old days, his mother ran the cafe out front, the only place in town, Ms. Logan said, where blacks could sit and be served a meal.
They divorced after eight years. Ms. Logan and the children moved around California and Arizona; Mr. Logan went to Oregon. Each found another spouse.
But Ms. Logan seems to have a gift for circling back and finding the value in what she left behind: in the 1990s, after the children invited her to their father’s family reunion, she and Mr. Logan reunited and remarried. A few years later, the whole family was back in Denton.
“When I was thinking about moving back, I called, and asked, ‘Is it nice down there now?’ ” she said. “And people said, ‘Yes, it’s fine now,’ so I came back home.”
Because of her bad grades from the 1950s, Ms. Logan had to start from scratch. Although she remains a serious piano student, and the university has one of the largest and most comprehensive music schools in the nation, she majored in applied arts and sciences. And this time it has been a good experience.
“This is a place of learning,” she said. “It’s my alma mater.”
She marvels at how well the students get along, how comfortable they seem — and how, even though she is about as different from the overall student body now as she was then, her age has not been much of an issue.
On the few occasions when she has been asked to speak about the past, the students paid more attention to their hair, their nails and their friends than to her story.
Though she enjoyed many of her classes, especially English and history, Ms. Logan still never got her “regular college experience.”
“I’m a senior citizen,” she said. “I missed out on all those things like joining a sorority.”
On Saturday, her husband and children, her brother and his children and grandchildren, and a 3-year-old boy for whom she is a kind of surrogate grandmother will all be on hand to celebrate.
“I waited a long time for this,” she said. “In September, I’m going to start on my master’s in history.”
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Saturday, May 14th 2011 at 10:30PM
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