Former professor and retired lawyer Jim Vickrey spoke to a crowd in Auburn last week about his new book on racism in Alabama and the latest challenges the state faces.
“I don’t believe anyone infected with the scarlet fever of racism ever overcomes all of its effects,” Vickrey said. “That is why affirmative action is still needed in public higher education in America and Alabama.”
Vickrey spoke to an audience gathered at Pebble Hill at Auburn University last week about his fourth published work, Awakenings to Racism in Alabama: The Education of a Native Son and the Lessons He and His Peers Learned Resisting Jim Crow.
Tracing his personal “epiphany on race” to a March 11, 1965, event at Aubuwhile he was researching his master’s thesis on the KKK, he related the changes it wrought in his life. Two results were his development of the first affirmative action plans in public higher education in Florida and Alabama. The latter permitted the University of Montevallo, which he then headed, to be excused from what turned out to be the two decade-long course of the statewide desegregation lawsuit in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Vickrey said he is glad to no longer be a professor “in this new Age of McCarthyism, with its limitless topics for censorship and endless numbers of people for blacklisting and firing.”
Affirmative action plans are part of the umbrella of “DEI” that has been attacked at both the state and federal levels by the Trump administration and Alabama Republicans.
While at the University of Montevallo, Vickrey said he hosted the nation’s only 25th anniversary of the seminal 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, which brought to the campus experts on the historic decision and civil rights advocates. He recalled meeting Dr. M.L. King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders as well as federal judges Frank Johnson, who became his friend and mentor, and Justice Hugo Black, who helped him with his master’s thesis.
Awakenings to Racism in Alabama is available from Amazon. Vickrey will speak to the Friends of the Pike Road Library on October 16 and at First United Methodist Church in Montgomery.
