President Emeritus J. Fred Young visited campus on Sept. 18 to share stories of desegregating the Lynchburg City Schools in Virginia, where he worked as superintendent in the late 1960s prior to serving as Elon's president for a quarter century.
Before coming to Elon as its seventh president, J. Fred Young had made a career in public school administration, and his leadership of Virginia’s Lynchburg City Schools in the late 1960s coincided with school desegregation efforts affecting every public school in the nation.
Young was named superintendent in 1968 and knew that desegregation meant more than existing “token” efforts to integrate white and black children in the same classrooms. On Friday afternoon, in reflecting on his work, Young pointed to several factors that made desegregation easier in Lynchburg than in other places across the nation:
- There existed a small but solid black middle class.
- That middle class had community leaders who worked well with white leaders and whose trust Young earned early in his administration.
- The school system itself had a strong board of education willing to spend money.
Young’s solution? Close down inner city schools that were in extreme disrepair, and create a transportation system that could take children to recently built suburban schools with excess capacity and pristine facilities.
It didn’t make everyone happy – some whites because of integration, he said, and some blacks because of the closure of community schools – but it advanced the city and created equitable opportunities for all families. It also proved to be a more harmonious transition than what was experienced in many other communities.
“What you were trying to do as superintendent was to run a good school system, do what the law required, and help keep a stable community,” he said.
Young visited nearly two dozen Elon freshmen during a Sept. 18 guest appearance in a section of “The Global Experience,” a foundational course required of all first-year students as part of the Elon Core Curriculum. Young had been invited by Professor David Cooper, who wanted the former Elon president to relate his own career experiences to themes from the university’s 2015-16 Common Reading selection, “Why We Can’t Wait” by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Associate Professor Jeffrey Coker, director of the Core Curriculum, as well as three alumni of E.C. Glass High School in Lynchburg were also in attendance.
Young’s remarks included historical context of race, economics and education in the South, dating back to the Civil War and Reconstruction.
“I knew when I came to Lynchburg I would need to desegregate the schools,” he said. “I just didn’t know exactly what that would mean.”
A native of Burnsville, N.C., Young was educated at Mars Hill College, Wake Forest University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Columbia University. In 1973 Young was named the seventh president of Elon College and served until 1998, making him one of the longest-serving presidents in Elon history.
During the 25 years of his tenure starting in 1973, the college more than doubled enrollment to 3,685 and became one of the premier undergraduate institutions on the Eastern seaboard.
Young’s early career in public education included positions in Halifax County in eastern North Carolina, as well as Alamance County, home to Elon University.