WORLD WAR II WAS AN early TEST OF ETHNIC DIVERSITY
T
he times of Dr. Don H. Morris (’24) accustomed him to dealing with large, serious trends. He rose to vice president of Abilene Christian in the Depression year of 1932, and Homecoming planning was his responsibility in the context of war looming in Europe in 1938. As the centerpiece of Homecoming, which fell then on Armistice Day, he and president James F. Cox invited Lt. James V. Leak of the World War I “Lost Battalion” to speak. Morris undoubtedly sensed that some of the students who heard Leak would be called to war. Leak told them, “Let us not be confused by those who seek to divide and confuse and turn us away from the will to serve America.” Pacifism still reigned in some Churches of Christ, and a few of ACU’s faculty were conscientious objectors. Morris, however, would write in 1960, “I was not and am not a conscientious objector.” Morris became ACU’s seventh president in 1940. In 1943, he opened the campus to five Japanese students at the height of anti-Japan sentiment during World War II, the global conflict that would eventually take the lives of 40 of his students and alumni. ACU’s relationship with the Japanese began when Hirosuke Ishiguro, one of Abilene Christian’s first missionary students, graduated in 1922 with a degree in Bible, a few months before Morris arrived on campus as a junior. In 1941, Pearl Harbor changed the lives of Morris; Ishiguro, now minister of the Westside Church of Christ in Los Angeles; and members of Ishiguro’s congregation, who were arrested and placed in internment camps. But five Westside Japanese students from two of the internment camps – at Rivers, Ariz., and Amanche, Colo. – enrolled at Abilene Christian in 1943-45, became campus leaders, and signaled the coming social-cultural change of racial reconciliation. Ishiguro’s own son, Masaaki, founded and served as first president of men’s social club Frater Sodalis; Lorraine Hasegawa, who had been secretary to pioneer missionary J.M. McCaleb in Tokyo, was elected a Girls Training Class leader and honored as a Who’s Who selection; and Michio Nagi was sergeant-at-arms of Frater Sodalis. Alys Watada, who married Nagi, and Emma Hasegawa also enrolled. Internees could leave the camps for a college approved by the War and Navy departments if they went through the same background screening and signing of loyalty 18
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ACU TODAY
oaths as Army-bound Japanese-Americans. Hatred of Japan was intense, so universal acceptance of the five was not guaranteed, but they served as a two-year micro-test of ACU’s ethnic tolerance. On Jan. 12, 1945, the Optimist editorialized, At a table in the ACC Bean last Tuesday sat six students: one of Japanese extraction, one with German blood flowing in his veins, one of Chinese parentage, two descendants of the English, and one citizen of Mexico. They sat there laughing, talking, breaking bread together – friends. … Let us give thanks, as we look at our neighbors, that we have the privilege of adding to the world’s store of tolerance and love. A majority of ACU students argued against segregation, keeping integration at the forefront in the campus marketplace. For instance, Dr. Walter H. Adams (’25), dean, moderated an Alpha Chi forum in 1944 at which four students, including Nena Gutierrez from Belen, N.M., presented arguments for integration. Although ethnic minorities made their mark in World War II – albeit in separate-but-equal fighting units – churches, colleges, schools and the nation lagged in their treatment of African-Americans. The more typical behavior at ACU was students engaging in worship with African-Americans on their ground. Students from The Hill, including the A Cappella Chorus, often worshipped with their brethren at what is now North 10th and Treadaway Church of Christ. In retrospect, integration – though still two decades away – was foreordained by the war and the social changes brought by it. By the end of World War II, seven years after Leak’s address, the campus welcomed back hundreds of men and women who brought with them new attitudes about the structure of society. Likewise, international enrollment was rising, and Morris and the Board of Trustees prepped the campus and faculty for a college with new challenges. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the doctrine of “separate but equal” public educational facilities in Brown v. Board of Education sealed the inevitability of integration at ACU. While Morris was not a racist, he had a
Board of Trustees, faculty, student body and alumni base who did not agree with each other on the issue of integration, so his skills as a “Let’s bring ourselves together to work this out” leader – which had served him well before and during World War II – were tested at least as much as at any other time in his administration. In 1960, two years before ACU allowed undergraduate African-Americans to enroll, Morris served as a fact-checker for a forthcoming history of the Restoration Movement authored by James DeForest Murch, managing editor of Christianity Today. In it, Morris approved a section about integration policies in the movement’s colleges stating, “Most of the schools, as far as administration, faculty, and student bodies, would accept integration if their regional clientele could permit it.” Each African black turned away; each African-American referred to Southwestern
Morris was ACU’s seventh president.
Christian College; each student, alumnus and faculty member who spoke or wrote calling for integration from 1946 to 1960 moved the center of the debate closer to resolution. When he was felled by a fatal heart attack on a sidewalk near the Brown Library in January 1974, Morris died on a campus he had integrated. 䊱 – DR. CHARLIE H. MARLER