Last month a woman wrote to me and asked whether a town called Emory, Georgia, once existed. The answer, she said, might smooth the way for her mother’s international travel.

Her mother had been born at Emory University Hospital in 1944 and had always been told that she was born in the city of Atlanta. The problem was that when the mother recently ordered a certified copy of her birth certificate to apply for a passport, the space for “place of birth” indicated “Emory, DeKalb County” — suggesting that Emory was a town. This seemed to pose a potential complication for the passport application — Atlanta or Emory as place of birth?

After a little investigation, the daughter found that a 1940 U.S. census map showed three “cities” in DeKalb County: Scottdale, Decatur, and Emory. But was Emory really a city or a town? Or just a census tract?

Local folks whom the woman asked mostly said that Emory University was in the city of Decatur until January 2018, when it was annexed into the city of Atlanta. Staff at the DeKalb County department of vital statistics weren’t sure whether Emory had ever been a town or not, but they said the birth certificate was not a mistake. Births in 1944 would have indicated Emory in the town field because “that’s just how they filled them out” back then.

The question, then: In 1944, was Emory University Hospital in (A) the town of Emory, (B) the city of Decatur, (C) the city of Atlanta, (D) unincorporated DeKalb/militia district 531, or (E) something else?

By coincidence, I had recently been digging into something like this very question because I wanted to know when Emory began to use an Atlanta postal designation.

When Emory University began operations in Druid Hills in 1916, it was set in a suburb of Atlanta in unincorporated DeKalb County. It remained in unincorporated DeKalb County until January 1, 2018, when it was annexed into the city of Atlanta. It’s still in DeKalb County, of course, but for the first time it is within the boundaries of an incorporated city.

Back in 1916, the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad (now CSX) built a train station where the train tracks skirted the new campus. That station had its name painted on one wall: “EMORY, GA.” In 1947, the sign was repainted to read “EMORY UNIVERSITY, GA.”

In fact, the mailing address of the university was Emory University, Georgia, until May 1, 1958, when it was changed to Atlanta, Georgia 22, later Atlanta, Georgia 30322.

Campus stationery and letters to administrators through the first decades of Emory’s Atlanta sojourn were inconsistent. Sometimes the address was “Emory University, Georgia,” and sometimes “Atlanta, Georgia” or even “Druid Hills, Atlanta, Georgia.” Either way, Emory remained outside the city limits. The campus was still in an unincorporated section of the county and was not a city or town in its own right.

The original Emory post office bears the name EMORY UNIV., GA in the photo below, from the 1940s. This post office occupied the corner where the Center for Rehabilitation Medicine now stands, next to Egleston Hospital.

So, to answer the question: in 1944 Emory was not a town, was not in the city of Decatur, was not in the city of Atlanta, but was in unincorporated DeKalb County with its own mailing address. I’m not sure what that does for the mother’s passport application, but at least there’s an explanation for the oddly named location of birth.

Gary Hauk

Back in the 1960s, Robert Woodruff gave $4 million to the MERIT Campaign for Emory, which raised $35 million during the presidency of Sanford Atwood. (MERIT stood for Mobilizing Educational Resources and Ideas for Tomorrow.) Part of those funds from Woodruff went in 1969 to the construction of the library that bears his name. Twenty-five years later, the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation gave $2.5 million toward the expansion that opened in 1998 and included a room named for Joseph W. Jones.

Few spaces on campus see as much activity as the Jones Room, which hosts meetings of the University Senate, lectures by visiting scholars, poetry readings and literary discussions, and receptions for retiring faculty and staff. Yet while a handsome oil portrait of Joseph W. Jones hangs on the south wall of the room, hardly anyone knows who he was.

Joe Jones had begun work for the Cola-Cola Company in 1935 as a secretary in his native state of Delaware. The company had moved there from Atlanta two years earlier to avoid a tax on intangible assets imposed by the Georgia legislature. In 1946, after that tax was rescinded and the company prepared to return to Atlanta, Woodruff hired Jones as his personal assistant and later made him his chief of staff, executive aide, assistant treasurer, and eventually senior vice president and member of the board of directors of the company.

Calling Jones his “most trusted business associate,” Woodruff appointed Jones in 1972 as chair of the Trebor Foundation (“Robert” spelled backward), which was later renamed the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation. As chair of the foundation, Joe Jones partnered with Boisfeuillet Jones, who was by then president of the Woodruff Foundation, to dispense incalculable beneficence to the City of Atlanta and to educational, health, and other nonprofit institutions throughout the state. These institutions included, of course, Emory University, where Joe Jones served on the Board of Visitors.

As an indispensable aide to Woodruff, Joe Jones read all of Woodruff’s correspondence and answered much of it himself, whether dealing with US Senators or reviewing uniforms for the Ichauway Plantation softball team. He demonstrated a winsome kindness and tact in responding to the countless requests that came to Woodruff from people who knew of his great wealth and generosity and were in need of scholarships for their children or a new roof for their house or a new furnace for their church.

After Woodruff’s death in 1985, at the age of 95, Joe Jones served as executor of his estate and worked with Linda Mathews and Ginger Cain (now Smith) in Special Collections to place Mr. Woodruff’s and his own papers in what is now the Rose Library. Jones also supported placing the papers of Ralph McGill and other Atlanta notables there. The boards of the Woodruff, Lettie Pate Evans, and Joseph B. Whitehead Foundations followed Jones’s example by placing the records of those foundations and individuals at Rose Library as well. Pete McTier, longtime president of the Woodruff Foundation before his retirement a few years ago, continued Jones’s interest in Special Collections and helped garner foundation support for the latest renovation of the Woodruff Room on the top floor of the library.

In wrapping up this trilogy of blog posts about three very able servants of the common good, perhaps I can quote some of the citation read in 1985 when Joe Jones received an honorary degree from Emory. In some ways, it applies to all three of the wise men who helped guide Robert Woodruff’s philanthropic spirit. It reads:

“Remarkable administrator, public-spirited citizen, devoted friend and counselor, you have brought to your calling . . . that rare capacity to apprehend the whole of a worthy enterprise while yet attending to its every important detail. . . [Y]our sound judgment, as well as your friendship, have influenced the most wealthy and powerful of this city. No one could have proved to be a more effective or far-sighted steward of such a trust.”

May those of us who continue to benefit from their stewardship never forget these three wise men.

Gary Hauk

Not long before Robert Mizell departed this life, another great Emory alumnus came fortunately to the attention of Robert Woodruff. He was Boisfeuillet Jones. A 1934 graduate of Emory College and 1937 graduate of Emory Law, Bo, as he was called (for BO-fuh-lay), became the assistant to Emory president Goodrich White in 1946 and quickly rose to become vice president of the University.

In 1952, as Woodruff grew increasingly troubled by the continuing budget deficits in the Emory School of Medicine — deficits that he had pledged to cover, often for more than a quarter million dollars annually — he invited President White to develop a sound business plan for the school. White turned to Boisefuillet Jones. The plan Jones developed called for bringing the schools of medicine, nursing, and dentistry, as well as the hospitals, under the umbrella of a medical center. He also suggested establishing the Emory Clinic as a way for faculty-physicians to earn their living while helping to fund the medical school.

Woodruff bought into the plan, and the Emily and Ernest Woodruff Foundation gave $5 million toward its development, including $4 million for endowment and $1 million for construction. The subsequent growth of the clinical, research, and teaching enterprise of the health sciences center is a direct result of the synergy that came from this arrangement.

The success of the plan also captured the attention of the incoming administration of President Kennedy, and in 1961 Jones took leave from Emory to serve as special assistant to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Jones later told of being introduced at a press conference by Sargent Shriver, brother-in-law to President Kennedy and later director of the Peace Corps. Fluent in French, Shriver pronounced Bo’s first name in French — BWAH-fooh-yay. A reporter covering the announcement misheard the name and printed it the next morning as “Waffle A. Jones”–maybe all right for a guy from the state where Waffle House was born.

Expecting to be gone only two years, Jones stayed on after Kennedy’s assassination to help smooth the transition for President Johnson, but in 1964 Jones returned to Atlanta as president of the Emily and Ernest Woodruff Foundation.

Like Robert Mizell, Boisfeuillet Jones developed a warm relationship with Woodruff that flourished in part through humor but depended also on frankness, integrity, and trust. When the president of the Coca-Cola Company, Paul Austin, appointed Jones as a consultant to the company, Jones sent a handwritten note to Woodruff: “I’m sure the Chairman of the Finance Committee [Woodruff] has no influence in these matters. Nevertheless, my appreciation to him is just as real and deep as if he did.”

It was during Boisfeuillet Jones’s presidency of the Emily and Ernest Woodruff Fund that George and Robert Woodruff decided to donate the corpus of that fund to Emory – all $105 million. In 1984, when Emory needed space for admissions, financial aid, and other student services, Woodruff agreed to pay for the new building and expressed an interest in having it named for Jones.

Next up — the third wise man.

Gary Hauk

Last fall I received an invitation to speak to the library staff on any topic, but the invitation came with a suggestion: how about telling us about the man for whom the Joseph W. Jones Room in Woodruff Library was named? This invitation coincided with a question from President Claire Sterk about the source of Robert Woodruff’s desires and aspirations for Emory that led to his historic philanthropy. Knowing something about Joe Jones and curious to learn about Woodruff’s motivations, I headed first to the Woodruff papers in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. This post and the next two are the result of what I found.

My talk was scheduled for January 9, three days after the Feast of the Epiphany, which in some Christian traditions marks the visit of the three magi, or wise men, to the infant Jesus. It happened that I had also discovered three wise men, including Joseph W. Jones, who helped to shape Mr. Woodruff’s vision for how he could help Emory achieve greatness.

The first of those wise men is in some ways largely forgotten at Emory. His name was Robert Cotter Mizell, and he came from little Rhine, Georgia, halfway between Atlanta and the Okefenokee Swamp. In the 2010 census, Rhine, Georgia, had a population of 394 — not many more than the town had in 1910, two years after Bob Mizell left it for Emory College.

Mizell very likely met Robert Woodruff during their first week at Emory in Oxford, Georgia, where they both enrolled in the fall of 1908. Woodruff did not last long, but he seems to have formed a lasting respect for the quality of an institution that would challenge him as Emory did. Perhaps he also learned in those first months at Emory something of the qualities of the man who would become a beloved and trusted friend.

Certainly, by the time Bob Mizell graduated from Emory in just three years, those around him recognized his many gifts. His classmates voted him the “Most Original Senior” in the 1911 yearbook, The Kinema. He helped shape the intellectual life of the campus as a member of the Phi Gamma Literary Society, and he was tapped for membership in the DVS Senior Society, today the oldest senior honorary society at Emory. He helped organize the first student government at Emory and was elected to serve as its first president. His classmates then chose him to speak for them at the 1911 Commencement.

After graduating, Mizell taught school and served as a high school principal but returned to his alma mater in 1915 to become the first principal of the Emory University Academy, which the University established on the Oxford campus while preparing to move Emory College to Atlanta. In 1935, after a decade in real estate, he returned to Emory again, this time with the title of secretary of the University and responsible for development of the University in a broad sense, from raising money to helping chart the direction. He oversaw Emory’s centennial celebration in 1936, and during World War II he stepped in as acting dean of the business school while continuing to serve as director of development.

Mizell’s greatest contribution to Emory, however, came through his friendship with Robert Woodruff. The papers of both men are filled with letters, memos, informal jottings, cards, and transcribed phone messages that reveal a close, confiding, and trusting mutual affection and respect. They also shared a sense of humor. In 1944, for instance, Woodruff received an invitation to the installation of Emory members into the Society of the Sigma Xi, a distinguished national scientific research society. Attached to the invitation in the archives is a note apparently typed by Woodruff’s secretary: “Mr. Mizell: What is all this about — I don’t know anything about it. R.W.W.” Mizell returned the note with his comment inscribed in his neat penmanship: “A learned group. An important affair. You ought to go. I am going if I can’t get out of it. RCM.”

It is this kind of advice, on matters large and small, that Woodruff came to depend on from Mizell. In his role of friend and adviser, Mizell may have had no more significant impact than in helping Woodruff see a way to improve the well-being of people in his city and his state. Mizell secured from Woodruff the initial gift of $50,000 that established the Winship Cancer Center, now the Winship Cancer Institute. This was the first of Woodruff’s great largess that would make the health sciences center one of the premier medical centers in the country. Mizell also traveled with Woodruff to New York City to recruit Elliott Scarborough as the first director of the Winship Center.

A 1946 article about Woodruff in Fortune magazine included a photo of Mizell with the caption, “He [Woodruff] is advised on charity by Bob Mizell of Emory University.” It is no accident that when Woodruff chose to step down from the Emory Board of Trustees in 1948, the board elected Mizell to replace him the next year — the only administrator in the history of the university to serve simultaneously as a trustee.

Through two decades, Mizell sent Woodruff a steady and full stream of missives, reports, and journal articles about the potential and promise of Emory. His constant theme was that the South needed at least one great university, that Atlanta was the logical location for that university, and that Emory was the best bet to become it.

When Mizell died in 1955, at the age of sixty-six, still fully engaged in trying to build a great university, Emory sought an appropriate way to memorialize his monumental but relatively unsung legacy. The bridge leading from Fishburne Drive toward the Quadrangle was named in his memory, and Mr. Woodruff provided the funds to build a grand stairway for easier access from the bridge onto the Quadrangle. He said he wanted a memorial to Mizell to be something useful, in keeping with Mizell’s lifetime of useful service.

The Mizell Stairway would disappear in the early 1990s to make way for the Michael C. Carlos Museum, but if you look to your right as you descend the stairs next to the museum, you will see the plaque that was preserved and set into the wall of the museum to continue the memory of this great Emory wise man.

Next installment: a man whose name once was misheard as “Waffle A. Jones.”

Gary Hauk

Emory dedicated Longstreet-Means Hall in 1955, during a time of phenomenal growth of the campus and the student body, and one year after women had been admitted as residential students of Emory College.

The previous year also had brought the US Supreme Court ruling in Brown v Board of Education, which prompted “massive resistance” against integration in the South. Throughout the South in the 1950s, schools, buildings, streets, and highways were named for Confederate leaders, ostensibly to honor Southern “heritage,” but implicitly to resist federal mandates for integration. For instance, the University of Texas in 1955 dedicated a dormitory in honor of William Stewart Simkins, who had taught at the UT law school for thirty years but also had founded a branch of the Ku Klux Klan in Florida. (In 2010 UT removed his name from the dormitory.) In 1956, one year after the dedication of Longstreet-Means, the Georgia legislature changed the design of the state flag to incorporate the Confederate battle emblem.

At Emory, according to historian Melissa F. Kean, the response to Brown was generally positive. Editorials and “person-on-the-street” interviews in the student newspaper suggested widespread belief that the Supreme Court had gotten it right, and the Emory Alumnus editor, Randy Fort, wrote favorably about integration while noting legal hurdles. Fort pointed hopefully to Emory’s relationship to the Methodist Church, whose 1952 Book of Discipline said, “There is no place in the Methodist Church for racial discrimination or racial segregation.” Nevertheless, the board of Emory was not in a hurry to integrate and was led by a chairman, Charles Howard Candler Sr., who was staunchly “traditional” in racial matters.

No evidence suggests that the Emory trustees were motivated by resistance to civil rights in naming two new dormitories for presidents A. B. Longstreet and Alexander Means. The resolution passed by the Executive Committee on January 20, 1955, refers to Longstreet as “a widely known writer and minister who was President of Emory College at Oxford from 1840 to 1948” and refers to Means as “a minister and perhaps best known for his research in the field of electricity, who was President of Emory College from 1854 to 1855.” No mention is made of their owning slaves or their role in the division of the Methodist Episcopal Church over slavery. Still, the timing is striking.

Three years after the opening of Longstreet-Means, the university built Thomas, Hopkins, and Smith Halls (“The Complex”), named for one Emory president (James Thomas) who served before and after the Civil War and for two (Isaac Hopkins and Luther M. Smith) who served after the war. Together with Longstreet-Means, these halls served as a way of connecting the Druid Hills campus to the historic Oxford home of Emory. Similarly, names of streets on the Druid Hills campus—Pierce Drive, Dowman Drive, Dickey Drive—honor Emory presidents who served while the College was in Oxford.

The current Longstreet-Means Hall was dedicated in 2010. Its name, like that of Turman Hall, was intended to tap into the nostalgia of alumni who had lived in the original halls bearing those names for many decades.

Longstreet himself remains a very human figure, deeply flawed according to our lights, yet also grandly generous to the institution he helped put on a sound footing, compassionate in caring for yellow fever victims during an epidemic at risk to his own life, and oddly willing to break the law for the benefit of slaves, as he apparently taught his slaves to read, in violation of state prohibitions.

Whatever his name signals to our generation, Emory students should know something about this complicated figure in their alma mater’s history.

Gary Hauk

Generations of students have lived in Longstreet–Means Hall without knowing much, if anything, about the Emory presidents for whom the building was named—Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and Alexander Means.

Longstreet had practiced law and achieved fame and fortune as an author before entering the Methodist ministry and then becoming president of Emory (1840–48). Means was a minister and scientist as well as an educator. He served only one year as president (1854–55) because the trustees tired of his trying to juggle his job at Emory while teaching at Augusta Medical College and Atlanta Medical College. Both Means and Longstreet were slave owners and supporters of the Confederacy, but Longstreet was more prominent in defending the Old South.

A native of Augusta, Longstreet attended a private school in South Carolina, where he boarded in the home of John C. Calhoun, the state-rightist and apologist for slavery. Following Calhoun’s example, Longstreet attended Yale, then practiced law back in Augusta, eventually becoming a judge. He also bought the Augusta Chronicle, a newspaper that he renamed the State Rights Sentinel, which advocated political positions in harmony with Calhoun’s anti-Federalist views.

Longstreet’s lasting literary achievement, however, was a series of humorous stories about life in rural Georgia. He gathered some of these into a book, Georgia Scenes, which reviewers at the time universally praised and later critics viewed as a precursor to a genre perfected by Mark Twain. In 2000, Longstreet was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, largely on the basis of Georgia Scenes.

The book’s financial success provided Longstreet the wherewithal to enjoy a comfortable life. Shortly after its publication in 1835, however, he entered the Methodist ministry. He was serving a church in Augusta in 1839 when the board of trustees of Emory College offered him the college presidency. Longstreet accepted and served until resigning in 1848 to become the president of Centenary College in Louisiana and later president of the University of Mississippi and the University of South Carolina. During the Civil War, he returned to Oxford, Mississippi, where Union soldiers used his personal papers to build a fire and burn down his house.

When Longstreet stepped into the president’s office, Emory College had completed only three terms and was hanging tenuously to existence. A deep recession in 1837 had left the college nearly bankrupt. The trustees no doubt saw in Longstreet a person of intellect, energy, and renown who could lift the college out of its trouble. He traveled throughout the Southeast and as far as New York to garner support for the college. Longstreet also used personal funds to keep the college afloat. On leaving the presidency in 1848, he wrote off the $4,800 the college owed him in loans and back salary—about $149,000 in 2015. All of that totes up on the positive side of the Longstreet ledger.

On the debit side, Longstreet twice became embroiled — and not in a positive way, by our modern lights — in controversy over slavery during his presidency. The first instance grew out of the ownership of slaves by Bishop James O. Andrew, president of the Emory College board of trustees. When the national conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church met in New York City in 1844, abolitionist sentiment in the church prompted a month-long debate about Bishop Andrew’s fitness for office in view of his ownership of slaves. The church divided over the issue. Longstreet was thick in the middle of this debate, firmly on the side of Bishop Andrew and the slave-owning South.

Longstreet also became closely associated with slavery through A Voice from the South, a book he published in 1847 while president of Emory. Framed as ten letters from the state of Georgia to the state of Massachusetts, the volume is an extended argument not in defense of slavery but against the hypocrisy of the North. Longstreet points out that Georgia prohibited slavery until 1750, while New England profited handsomely from the slave trade. Now, with an industrial economy employing what Longstreet calls “white slaves,” the North has had a change of heart about slavery while not changing its heart about “negroes,” whom it excludes from Northern society in various ways. The book is a justification of increasingly popular Southern support for secession.

Remembering Longstreet at Emory, then, requires a balancing of accounts. On one side of the ledger lies his defense of a Southern way of life that we now see as reprehensible. On the other side lies his nearly decade-long work to help the struggling college to survive and, indeed, begin to flourish.

In the next post, more about the building named for Presidents Longstreet and Means.

Gary Hauk

Many Emory law students today might be surprised to learn that their school was not always simply Emory Law School. When the trustees established the school in 1916, they named it the Lamar School of Law, after Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, Emory College Class of 1845.

The minutes of the trustees don’t reveal their reasons for tacking the Lamar name onto the new law school. At the time, he was Emory’s most famous graduate, and he would later merit a chapter in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. When he died, in 1893, Lamar was remembered as a great voice for reconciliation between the North and the South after the Civil War and during Reconstruction.

But Lamar also happened to have been a prominent Confederate official. Was the name a way of memorializing the Lost Cause? It’s hard to know; the record is silent.

A native Georgian, Lamar married the daughter of Emory president Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and later moved to Oxford, Mississippi, to practice law and teach at the university. Elected to Congress before the Civil War, Lamar resigned in January 1861 as sentiment for secession grew. He helped draft the Mississippi ordinance of secession and raised an infantry regiment, earning himself the rank of colonel, although health problems prevented him from serving in the field. Appointed by Confederate president Jefferson Davis as a special envoy, Lamar sought to bring Russia, England, and France into the war on the side of the Confederacy. After the war, he resumed teaching law at Ole Miss and eventually returned to Congress as a senator. President Cleveland appointed him as secretary of the interior and, later, to the US Supreme Court, where Lamar served until his death.

In 1916, the trustees no doubt thought it fitting to attach the name of this well-known jurist and alumnus to the new law school. By the 1980s, however, the Lamar name was being used less and less in the school catalogue and stationery, ostensibly because “Emory Law” was a better brand, but perhaps also from some embarrassment at the association of Lamar with slavery and the Confederacy. Although his return to Congress required him to swear an oath to defend the Constitution, including the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, he continued to believe in white supremacy. He opposed Reconstruction and helped to negotiate its end during the compromise that followed the controversial presidential election of 1876.

To be sure, Lamar also demonstrated apparent repentance and redemption. As a US Senator in 1874, he offered a stirring and famous eulogy after the death of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, signalling an end to sectional recrimination. As Secretary of the Interior, he pursued a more progressive policy toward American Indians and sought to clean up the corrupt department. On the Supreme Court during the period of “Chinese exclusion,” Lamar joined in a unanimous opinion supporting the right of immigrants to habeas corpus and helped establish the authority of the Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal.

The timing of the naming of the Lamar School of Law at Emory, however, raises questions. In 1916, white supremacy was resurgent throughout the nation, and the Ku Klux Klan had been reborn atop Stone Mountain just the previous year. Was the honoring of a former Confederate a way of ratifying that noxious philosophy? It is impossible to know from the trustee minutes.

The minutes do say that the trustees aimed to establish a law school that would be among the finest in the South and as good as any in the country. It’s at least as likely that the trustees were drawn to Lamar’s eminence as a renowned political figure with a reputation for fostering national interests over sectional interests. Thankfully, the removal of the name in the 1990s makes the question moot.

Next blog: another name associated with a mixed history.

Gary Hauk

The past few years have brought intense controversy over questions about the legacy of the Confederate States of America—more than 150 years after the end of the Civil War. From Baltimore to New Orleans, from Charleston to Memphis, statues and flags have come down. In Georgia, the world’s largest bas relief, depicting Confederate leaders on the side of Stone Mountain, looms at the center of a debate about whether to chisel it into oblivion. Colleges and universities founded before the Civil War have wrestled with what to do about campus monuments to slave owners or the Lost Cause.

At Emory, too, the question has been raised—what monuments to the Confederacy do we have? The answer, I believe, is none. Emory has little in the way of sculpture of any kind on either the Oxford or the Atlanta campus, and nothing that would constitute a monument or memorial to the Confederacy.

The Few Monument—an obelisk standing in front of Seney Hall on the Oxford campus—was erected in 1849 to honor Ignatius Alphonso Few, the first president of Emory College. Dedicated by Few’s fellow Freemasons four years after his death from tuberculosis, the monument long preceded Southern secession.

Another obelisk stands about a hundred yards west of the Oxford College gym, in a small cemetery where at least thirty-two Confederate soldiers lie buried. They apparently died in the makeshift hospitals that occupied Emory College buildings after the Battle of Atlanta. The obelisk has no images or words other than the simple declaration that these were “Our Soldiers.” Federal soldiers who died in the same hospitals lie a mile away, across town, in a common grave in the town cemetery.

On the Atlanta campus, the Haygood-Hopkins Gate honors two alumni who became Emory presidents—Atticus Greene Haygood and Isaac Stiles Hopkins, both of the Class of 1859. Haygood was a chaplain in the Confederate army, but the gate, erected in 1937, honors him and Hopkins as educators, not for any Confederate legacy. Haygood left the Emory presidency in 1884 to help develop colleges established for newly freed slaves, and Hopkins left Emory in 1888 to become the first president of Georgia Tech.

Yet slavery and the Confederacy do appear in Emory history. All of the antebellum presidents, faculty, and trustees of Emory owned slaves. Many alumni and students fought for the Confederacy, thirty-five of them losing their lives. Three Emory graduates became Confederate generals—Edward L. Thomas, Class of 1846; James P. Sims, Class of 1855; and Reuben W. Carswell, Class of 1856. The sons of two Emory presidents, George Foster Pierce and Alexander Means, both fought in the Army of Northern Virginia. Professor Gustavus Orr, later the state school superintendent of Georgia, organized a Home Guard for Newton County in which he served as a captain, while President James R. Thomas served as a lieutenant.

All of this history has been told. Names on Emory campuses remind us of it. Buildings at both Oxford and Atlanta as well as streets on the Atlanta campus bear the names of antebellum presidents Few, Longstreet, Means, Pierce, and Thomas. More than anything, these names link the modern campus to its roots in Oxford, celebrating the survival of a fledgling college rather than remembering the unlamented demise of a way of life or the defense of that way of life by secession and war.

Yet Emory has honored two staunch supporters of the Confederacy. While Emory recognized them for other, extraordinary achievements, their association with the Confederacy complicates their legacy. The next installment will say more about the first of these two men.

Gary Hauk

Autumn brought an intriguing email out of the blue from a young man named Joshua Daniel Few. A native of Montana, Josh is part of the extensive family that includes a signer of the United States Constitution (William Few Jr. of Georgia), a controversial pre-Revolutionary rebel against British taxation (James Few, hanged by the British after the Battle of Alamance, in North Carolina), a president of Duke University (William Preston Few, buried in Duke Chapel), and someone well known to Emory–Ignatius Alphonso Few, the founding president of the college.

Josh now lives in South Dakota with his wife, Crista (a newly minted physician about to begin her practice), and their 13-month-old son, William James Few–the latest in a long and venerable lineage of William Fews.

As I understand the family tree, Josh is the direct descendant of William Few Sr.’s brother, James Sr., not to be confused with William Sr.’s son James, the one who was hanged. William Sr. was the grandfather of Ignatius Alphonso Few. That makes William Sr. Josh’s great-uncle times eight, and I.A. Few Josh’s first cousin nine times removed. If I have it right.

As the family genealogist, Josh had planned  a week-long pilgrimage to Few family sites all along the East Coast. The capstone would come with a visit to Oxford. Josh kept a blog of their journey, and you can read it here.

Thus, on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in November, my wife, Sara-Haigh, journeyed with me to Oxford to meet up with them. Joe Moon, the Oxford College dean of campus life, joined us on the Oxford Quad for a tour of Few shrines.

First up was Few Hall, one of the two oldest buildings owned by Emory University. Originally the home of one of the two debate societies organized by Emory College students in 1837, Few Hall was constructed in 1851 with funds raised by the society’s members and honors President Few. Renovated and expanded in 2001, the building now includes the Tarbutton Performing Arts Center.

A short stroll across the Oxford Quadrangle brought us to the Few Monument, in front of Seney Hall. Dedicated in 1849, ten years after ill health forced President Few to resign, and four years after his death from tuberculosis, the monument was the inspiration of Few’s fellow Freemasons — some 600 of whom showed up for the dedication.

After a tour of the Quad, including a stop into the library and Candler Hall, we drove down Wesley Street to the house that Ignatius Alphonso Few built in 1836. Since 1889, it has been home to the presidents of Emory College and, after the move of the college to Atlanta in 1919, home to Oxford College deans.

At the opposite end of town from the college campus spreads the old town cemetery. There, among generations of Oxford families, lies the grave of Ignatius Alphonso Few, who spent his last years in Athens, Georgia, before succumbing to tuberculosis. An inscription on his grave marker says that it was “erected by the Few Society of Emory College.”

Besides the pleasure of meeting this young family on a beautiful autumn afternoon, it’s no stretch to say that the occasion offered the first opportunity to begin recruiting little William James Few to the Class of 2038. That year will mark the bicentennial of the first classes taught on the Oxford campus.

Many will apply for admission, but let’s assume Few will be chosen.

Gary Hauk

It was a moment that called for a poetic home run, or at least a good cut at a high-floating fastball—maybe something like Robert Frost’s “good fences make good neighbors.”

 

The provost was draping a doctoral hood over the shoulders of Henry Louis Aaron—“Hammerin’ Hank,” the home-run king—at Emory’s Commencement in 1995. Somewhere nearby the ghost of President Warren Candler may have hovered in disbelief. Not only had his policy against intercollegiate athletics given way completely, but here was his beloved university honoring a professional baseball player, of all people, with the honorary doctor of laws degree, of all things.

Atlanta’s hometown hero, though, did not just swat baseballs magnificently. He lived with dignity and courage in the face of racist vitriol during his run at Babe Ruth’s career home-run record (which Aaron broke in 1974). Throughout his life, Aaron aimed to break down barriers and make civil rights a reality. This, Emory said, was worth recognizing with a degree that honored the law as well as the man.

As the university president read the accompanying tribute, the audience broke into applause at the line, “You showed good fences make good targets.” And thus, in awarding its highest honor to a man who hit balls over a wall, the university refreshed a tradition sometimes viewed as time-consuming and puzzling.

But Emory at that moment also raised in many minds the question about how it decides who receives an honorary degree. Scanning the universe of memorable achievement and the great men and women who populate it, how does the university’s gaze alight on this scientist and this poet rather than that musician or that politician? More curiously, why this Nobel laureate in medicine rather than that one?

Since the awarding of the first honorary degree by the University of Oxford, in the 15th century, the practice has implied a two-way exchange of esteem. We, the university, proclaim you to have earned a degree without all the study we normally require because you have done something great for humanity. You, in turn, elevate our status by associating with us. We are yours, as you are ours. You represent us as you inspire us.

Recent history may suggest how this works. Emory was pleased, in 1992, to be one of only two US institutions to grant an honorary degree to Mikhail Gorbachev, whom Time magazine had recently declared the “man of the decade.” (The other was little Westminster College, in Missouri, where Winston Churchill had given his famous “Iron Curtain” speech.) Gorbachev had precipitated such change in the Soviet Union that he set in motion the end of the Cold War. The Emory Commencement at which he spoke provided the occasion for a mini-summit, as Gorbachev met beforehand with former President (and University Distinguished Professor) Jimmy Carter to talk about the work of The Carter Center as a possible model for the Gorbachev Foundation.

Honoring a political rock star, Emory gained a lot of press.

On the other hand, it can be tricky to recognize the best in their fields while requiring that their lives reflect the university’s mission and vision. Although the intense public interest in seeing Gorbachev required fencing the Quadrangle for the first time to preserve seats for the graduates and their guests, one faculty member complained that Emory was besmirching its honor by celebrating someone he considered an unrepentant Communist. Other faculty members have protested degrees for Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland; Ben Carson, brain surgeon and current secretary of Housing and Urban Development; actor and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger; and Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist who advanced America’s race to the moon but had been instrumental in the Nazi war effort as well.

It is difficult, however, to imagine protests against the earliest recipients of honorary degrees from Emory. The place was smaller then, the faculty largely of one faith if not one mind, and the students under strict parietal rules that left them well-disciplined.

Emory awarded its first honorary degree, a doctor of divinity degree (DD), in 1846, at the seventh Emory Commencement (the sixth with actual graduates). The recipient was the Rev. William H. Ellison, a Methodist minister and a leader in establishing higher education in Virginia, Alabama, and Georgia. He thus was typical of those whom Emory recognized throughout the 19th century for their contributions to the church and education.

Indeed, many of the honorees (Oxford University prefers “honorands”) through Emory’s first seven decades were Emory faculty members and presidents. Two of those—presidents Alexander Means and Warren Akin Candler—received multiple degrees. Means, a medical doctor and minister, received the DD in 1854 and the LLD (doctor of laws) in 1858, even as Candler has the distinction of being the only person to receive three honorary degrees from Emory, which was also his alma mater.

Things have changed. The current guidelines of the Honorary Degrees Committee note that only in “extraordinary circumstances” will it consider “persons who have spent the greatest part of their careers as members of the Emory faculty or administration.” Still, the university occasionally makes exceptions, as in conferring honorary degrees on more-recent Emory presidents Sanford Atwood (1978) and James Laney (1994), as well as Emory’s first provost, Billy E. Frye (2015). (In a nod to their contributions to the university, Elizabeth Atwood and Berta Laney also received degrees when their husbands did.) Most recently, Natasha Trethewey, formerly the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing, received the doctor of letters degree before giving the Commencement address in 2017.

In the early days, when travel was more difficult, the conferral of an honorary degree required only a vote of the trustees. Yun Chi-Ho, the first international student to graduate from Emory and a national leader in his native Korea, could not travel to Emory to pick up his LLD degree in 1908. No matter—he still has his place on the roll of honor.

Nowadays, except for the rarest of reasons—death being one of them—recipients of honorary degrees have to show up to receive them. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a 1940 graduate of the theology school, Methodist minister, and survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bomb who established the Hiroshima Peace Center, died just before the 1986 Sesquicentennial Celebration at which he was to receive his DD degree with nine other distinguished alumni. His widow came to Glenn Memorial for the convocation and accepted the honor on his behalf.

At other extraordinary times, the university travels to the recipient. Sir John Carmichael, a Scottish businessman and longtime eminent supporter of the Bobby Jones Scholarship program, was in failing health when he planned to visit the Augusta National Golf Course for the 1994 Masters Golf Tournament. Emory kindly obliged his inability to return from Scotland for Commencement the next month and presented his degree at the Butler Cabin on the penultimate day of the Masters in the presence of that year’s class of Bobby Jones Scholars.

Robert Woodruff, whose place in Emory history is unique in many ways, declined an honorary doctorate when the trustees first offered it, but he finally agreed to accept it 30 years later, on December 6, 1979—his 90th birthday. President Laney handed him his diploma during a small celebration at Woodruff’s Ichauway Plantation, where the gathering included former Atlanta mayor Ivan Allen Jr.

Marvelous as an honorary degree may be, sometimes something else is called for. When His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama visited Atlanta in 1995, organizers of the visit asked Emory to host one of the planned events. On short notice, it was impossible to work through the process of consideration by the Honorary Degrees Committee, consultation with the University Senate, and approval by the board of trustees.

Instead, President Bill Chace commissioned the President’s Medal, to be conferred on distinguished university guests who have enhanced the prospect of peace or enriched cultural achievement. After bestowing the President’s Medal on the Dalai Lama in 1995, the university invited him back in 1998 to give the Commencement address, help inaugurate the Emory-Tibet Partnership—and receive the DD degree.

Three other persons have received both an honorary degree and the President’s Medal when circumstances fit the conferring of one honor years after the other: Congressman John Lewis (medal 2000, LLD 2014); former President Jimmy Carter (LLD 1979, medal 2015); and public health superstar William H. Foege (ScD 1986, medal 2016).

The university suggests its values and priorities with honorary degrees. For instance, the 14 Nobelists with Emory honorary degrees include 10 peace laureates, two in literature, and one each in economics and medicine. Although public servants and philanthropic business leaders tend to outnumber all others, writers also abound among the honored—appropriate for a university with a top-ranked undergraduate creative writing program.

The first writer honored was Joel Chandler Harris (1902), and the most recent was former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey (2017). In between came Eudora Welty (1982), Ursula K. LeGuinn (1986), Athol Fugard (1993), Wole Soyinka (1996), Alfred Uhry (2002), Seamus Heaney (2003), Melissa Fay Greene (2010), Rita Dove (2013), and Salman Rushdie (2015).

Other artists have included choreographers (Dorothy Alexander, 1986; Carmen de Lavallade, 2018); visual artists (Benny Andrews, 2007; environmental sculptor George Trakas, 2011); architects (Philip Trammell Schutze, 1979; Paul Rudolph, 1981; and Michael Graves, 2013); and musicians (Robert Shaw, 1967; Van Cliburn, 1994; and Robert Spano, 2009).

The university also proclaims other commitments through honorary degrees. With an entirely male faculty and student body well into the 20th century, Emory took until 1930 to award an honorary doctorate to a woman, Tommie Dora Barker, the founding dean of the university’s library school, but that honor signaled that women’s intellect now helped shape the institution. Not until 1970 did the first African American receive an honorary degree—Benjamin Mays, the legendary president of Morehouse College. This was the same year that Emory College decided to establish what is now the Department of African American Studies.

Occasionally, too, the university may confer an honorary degree to atone for its lapses. In 2000, Emory awarded the ScD degree to Leila Daughtry Denmark, a pediatrician who was then 102 years old and would continue practicing for another year. She had been the first female physician—indeed, the first physician—on the staff of Egleston Hospital when it opened on the Emory campus in the 1950s. She would live to the age of 114.

In 2000, diminutive but standing straight, and smiling on the stage to hear her tribute read, this centenarian must have basked in satisfaction: the university that had discouraged her from applying to its medical school in 1924 because she was a woman was now conferring belated but well-deserved recognition—“with gratitude,” the citation said, “that Emory at last can call you daughter.”

Though the process of nominating, evaluating, and choosing candidates for honorary degrees has changed slightly during the years, the Honorary Degrees Committee of the University Senate always has in mind two overriding criteria: is the nominee at the top of his or her game (whether jurisprudence, physics, or baseball), and does the nominee play the game in a way that reflects the highest values of the university? For everyone from William H. Ellison in 1846 to the honorees in 2018, the answer clearly was yes.

 

Gary Hauk 91PhD