University of North Texas Oral History Collection

Interview with Dr. Henry Kamp
Interviewer: Tammi Price
Place of Interview: Denton, Texas
Date of Interview: October 10, 1995

Ms. Price:
This is Tammi Price, interviewing Dr. Henry Kamp for the University of North Texas Oral History Program. The interview is taking place on October 10, 1995, in Denton. I am interviewing Dr. Kamp in order to obtain his recollections concerning the desegregation of North Texas State College [now the University of North Texas].

Dr. Kamp, would you begin, please, by telling me a little bit about your childhood: where you were born and educated and that kind of thing?

Dr. Kamp:
I was born in Conway, Arkansas, on November 5, 1922. My father and mother had come to Arkansas as a result of his being offered a position at Hendrix College in Conway. My father was a Latin and Greek scholar who had done his graduate work at the University of Illinois. My mother was a German language scholar. At that time, there were two of us, after I was born -- I had an older sister -- and then two other children were born later.

My childhood was a very happy one. We spent a lot of time with nature. My father loved to camp. He was no hunter, but he loved to fish. So we did a lot of that. Languages, later on, came very easy to me, because there was Dutch and German spoken around the house. That was a "plus" in my growing up.

Price:
What was the racial climate like in Conway?

Kamp:
Oh, it was very segregated. Conway was on the edge of the Black Belt in Arkansas. There was “Colored Town” across the tracks, on the east side of town. Of course, the schools were all segregated. The churches were segregated. Everything was segregated. The rest rooms, if they had any, were segregated. I don't even remember that they had any. Everything was segregated. It was old Reconstruction South.

Price:
How did that affect your views to racial issues?

Kamp:
Of course, it affected them. I'm sure I didn't give it a thought while growing up. It wasn't something that you thought about. I think it was a settled, conventional way of life. I don't recall it ever having been brought to my attention, or anybody's attention in the family, that segregation had something that was wrong with it. From time to time, my father and mother had a cook who was, of course, always a black. It was an Old South atmosphere.

Later on in life, things began to occur where it became a question in my mind. My father was not a bigot, but he believed that black people were inferior. I frankly don't know about my mother. It was simply never a topic of conversation. But that unfortunate, derogatory epithet, "n*****," was common parlance from the president of the bank in Conway down through a laborer. That was the word that was used. So it was segregated. Of course, the schools were segregated.

Price:
Tell me a little bit about your education.

Kamp:
All right. I went to Conway public schools. We were very fortunate in that school because of the very high caliber of teachers. Almost of all them were ladies. There was a man or two, but not very many, and whoever the man was, in actuality, he was some kind of coach. There were no male teachers in the grades, first through sixth grade. There was one male teacher in the junior high school, but he was also a coach. Then there were several in high school. Latin and Greek was taught. I had an English teacher, Miss Lea Rose Hicks, in the eighth grade, in junior high school, who was absolutely wonderful. She taught us English so well that I never had to take another English grammar course. I tested out of it when I went to college with ease. That was the experience of most young people who had Miss Hicks. So it was a good school.

When I graduated from high school, I, fortunately or unfortunately, had become very interested in the game of football, though I had never gone out for football or any other regular sport. But I did go out for football in the beginning of my senior year in high school. I made the starting team and won my letter, and that only exacerbated the interest (laughter). When I entered Hendrix, which, of course, I was destined to do -- I never thought I would go anyplace except Hendrix, because that's where my father was on the faculty -- I must confess that I was much more interested in football than I was in any academic subjects. I played football at Hendrix the first two years. Then the war came along, and they disbanded it for the duration.

At any rate, I continued my education at Hendrix. I was a biology major, but I had had some serious difficulties with the professor of biology at Hendrix, a small Methodist school, a very fine four-year liberal arts college. At any rate, I changed my major toward the end of my junior year, because I had no choice. It was either take Dr. Spessards's biology course or go somewhere else (laughter). And I wasn't about to do that.

Price:
Is that when you chose political science?

Kamp:
In a way, yes. I guess that I became interested in politics and government because of a man named Richard Yates. He was their political scientist at the time. I took a course in, of all things, county government, which he offered. I have no idea why Yates would have offered a course in county government. He offered others, too. At any rate, I became very interested. There weren't many courses in political science, but I took what was offered and then, of course, took economics and a lot of history. I changed an academic interest, although I must confess that I never lost my interest in the natural world and have returned to that as an avocation after retirement.

All of this time, much of my attention was still drawn to athletics of various sorts, although not football. To my embarrassment, I guess, at this time, one of those interests was the rather brutal sport of boxing. They had a boxing team. Unbelievable! I was a heavyweight-class boxer the last two years of college.

I became also interested in campus politics and was elected president of the student body for my senior year. So that was also political, and it was fun.

I left Hendrix for the military service in late winter of 1942-43. A friend of mine and I had volunteered in November, and then we were called to active duty before the spring semester was over. Later on, they granted us our degrees in absentia, because by that time we were off in military service. I was granted a bachelor of arts from Hendrix in the spring of 1943.

Price:
How did you decide to go into... I mean, it doesn't seem as if you thought of an academic career. How did you get turned into that?

Kamp:
Really not until toward the close of World War II. I obviously didn't do much thinking about it for three years. I can remember, however, when I was waiting to start my training as an officer in the infantry. I'd been overseas for ten months and was asked to return to the United States after I had expressed a desire to gain a commission. I was an enlisted man, a non-com, overseas. I wanted to go to Officers' Candidate School and was ready to leave the part of the world where I was, which was Africa.

At any rate, I took a walk on the grounds of Fort Benning one afternoon. There was a woods there, so, of course, I had to walk through the woods. I started thinking about: "If you live through this, what are you going to do?" It sort of quietly occurred to me that that might be fun. I was still interested in politics and government and had even done a little recreational reading, but it wasn't some kind of total commitment. Obviously, I had another year and a half of military service to perform, although at that time I had no idea how long it was going to be. I was going to be a combat platoon leader in the United States Infantry. If I got through that in some way, relatively in one piece, then I might have a future, but you didn't really think about things like that, especially during wartime; and especially a combat platoon leader didn't think about things like that.

After the war, then, of course, that was a different situation. I had to decide then. My wife and I were living in Little Rock, Arkansas, and I had taken a job. I was now on reserve [duty status]. I was released. The war was over. I took a job with the Veterans' Administration for that summer. In the meantime, I had applied for graduate work in political science or whatever it happened to be called at the university. If it was Harvard [University], it was government. If it was Columbia [University], it was public law and government. Today we call it political science. I took the GRE [Graduate Record Examination]. I evidently did well enough to make a sufficient impression that Columbia responded rather quickly to my amazement, but great pleasure. They invited me to come to Columbia in September of 1946, which was that same year, and so we went.

Price:
What did you think of Columbia?

Kamp:
I loved it. I was a little bit confused, I suppose, at the beginning, and uneasy. I had had only one three-hour course in political science, as such, Yates's course in county government, but I had read a lot of history. I had had several history courses, economics, sociology, etc., whatever it was Hendrix had to offer, which was limited but good.

It was a wonderful experience. The faculty at Columbia at that time, in every field except political philosophy, was very strong. They needed to build their faculty in that field of what we called political theory and political philosophy now. They were in the process of doing it. While I was there, they were not successful in that. They were pretty choosy, as you can imagine. They tried a lot of people. Professor Robert MacIver actually taught the courses in political theory, and he was, of course, internationally known as a sociologist. He specialized in politics.

Price:
Did you always plan to go into teaching, or did you think you might enter something else?

Kamp:
Pretty much so, teaching had an attraction for me. An infantry officer is very much a teacher. You teach the young men in your platoon. You are called upon to teach company and battalion work, and I enjoyed it. I found that I enjoyed lecturing to a group of "young warriors" about how to shoot an M-1 or whatever it happened to be. So I had done a little teaching by that time and enjoyed it.

Price:
Did you teach at Columbia at all?

Kamp:
Yes, I did. I was offered a job as a teaching fellow before I left there. They called it "lecturer in government," which raised its status a little bit, you know (chuckle).

Price:
Sounds impressive.

Kamp:
Well, you had your own office, and you taught a course in national government. That's what they had us teaching. We were on the third floor of the main library building, so, sure, it was "Prestige City."

Price:
How did you get to North Texas?

Kamp:
I have to think about the years. In 1948, I had written a thesis and was granted a master of arts degree and completed my residence and had yet to meet my final Ph.D. orals and write a dissertation. That all remained to be done. I attended the American Political Science Association convention in Chicago in the winter of 1947-48. I believe that's correct. Those years kind of went by. At any rate, there was a representative from the University of Texas government faculty there. We had dinner. He asked me to come to him and talk to him. He knew a number of the faculty members at both Columbia and Harvard. His association with Harvard was closer than it was with Columbia, but, nevertheless, I talked with him. When he got back to Austin, he offered me a position.

While I was considering that... I didn't really know if I wanted to do that yet or not, or get along a little bit more toward finishing the degree, but it was pretty attractive. The man's name was Emmett Redford. About that time -- and I'm not sure of the dates-the University of Texas ran into trouble with its reputation in the United States. Three young economists had been fired because of pressure that came upon the university. At least one of the persons who put pressure upon the university to fire them was a member of the Board of Regents. There is a record of this, by the way, in the Oral History Collection, so you can check on the names. At any rate, unfortunately, the University of Texas ended up on the censure list of the American Association of University Professors. I was called in when it came to the attention of the chairman of the department at Columbia. This fact was pointed out to me. They did not veto the offer, but it was called to my attention. You can imagine my response (laughter).

Then a year later, I was in the apartment of Frank Bowen Evans, a close friend of mine, also a teaching fellow. "Bo" Evans had attended college at a place I'd never heard of, North Texas State Teachers College, before World War II. Like myself, he was getting ready for the Ph.D. orals. As a matter of fact, he and Gene Setzer and I studied for the orals together, and we took them within a few weeks, by the way, that spring, "Bo's" professor at North Texas, in government, had been a man by the name of Samuel B. MacAlister.

One night, I had to come into town, into Manhattan, to the "Bo's" apartment close to the campus. My wife and I lived in Shank's Village, which was a housing project for medical students, law students, and graduate students, twenty miles up the Hudson, close to Nyack. It was always night when I got in. This gentleman from Texas was staying that night with "Bo," his former student. MacAlister was on his way to some sort of seminar at Harvard in constitutional law. We fell to talking and visited most of the night, I'm afraid. We really hit it off. But that was it.

A week or two later, I had a letter from MacAlister wanting to know if we would be interested in coming to Denton. I was now one more year toward finishing. They had offered me a full-time position in the Government Department at Columbia College, which was the undergraduate college at that time for men. I was in the process of deciding whether or not I wanted to do that. If I did that, we probably would have stayed, at least on the East Coast, and very likely at Columbia, for my entire academic career. It was a good offer and very flattering, but there were family considerations. My wife and I talked about it at length. I'd also had an offer from a number of other colleges all over the East Coast. There was nothing outside the East Coast. There was one from Bowdoin [College]. There was one from [the College of] William and Mary and several others. So we had to decide: "Are we going to live in the East, or we going to go back home, back to the South or Southwest?" There were a number of other family considerations. Her brother and his family were returning to the States. He was a West Pointer [graduate of the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York], who had been stationed in Europe after the war.

At any rate, we decided that we would give Texas a try, and we did. My wife was with child, and that was also a consideration. We wanted our family growing up here, not in New York City, so we came to Denton.

Price:
What did you make of Denton? What was it like?

Kamp:
I was appalled. There was no highway to Denton open from the east at that time. They were building a bridge across the Elm Fork of the Trinity River, on what at that time was State Highway 24. So when I got to Greenville, I checked the maps and was told at a service station that the highway was not open to Denton. So I had to come in from the north. I came in from Gainesville. It was late in the day. It was about a 380-mile drive. I was driving the same 1940 Ford that we had taken with us to New York City, "Grapefruit" by name. At any rate, it was late in the afternoon. It was late August. It was hot; it was dry. I took that drive south from Gainesville to Denton through the rolling plains. I had grown up in the cool, wooded mountains of Arkansas, and I was appalled.

My first impressions in the town were really very pleasurable. I liked MacAlister. I liked his plans for a department. It had been a department of three or four before the war. None of the professors had returned. They had gone elsewhere to other jobs. He was building the department, and he offered me pretty much carte blanche. He told me, among other things, "You will never have to teach Texas government," (laughter) which pleased me. He stuck to it. I never did. That was pleasant.

The department was in the Manual Arts Building, which has been removed. There were, I believe, four members of the department in the fall of 1949. One or two of them were off, however, doing graduate work -- Mary Evelyn Blagg Huey and Ray Griffin. I think one or two of them were off on leave, trying to finish up a Ph.D. Bullock Hyder in sociology and Bob Proffer in the school of education each taught a course or two in the department. I guess that was it. It was very small.

Price:
Did you notice anything about the racial relationships that were going on in Denton between the townspeople?

Kamp:
Frankly, no. I probably should have. It was in no way an issue professionally. I don't recall having a single thought that, negatively or positively, North Texas was a segregated state school. That was the way it was done. Had it had black students, I would have been amazed. I don't know if I would have been positive or negative, but it would have been most surprising because all colleges, private or public, that I knew anything about did not have Negro students. Denton, of course, was segregated, in every way of speaking: housing, schools, churches, and drinking fountains at the courthouse. It was, of course, also an atmosphere with which I was familiar, having grown up in Conway, Arkansas.

Price:
Did there seem to be any kind of tension? I think that Conway would have been a bit more tension-filled than Denton.

Kamp:
I don't remember any tension in either place. The Ku Klux Klan in Conway had run its course, not because whites thought that the "colored people," as they were at that time frequently called, were equal, but because violence -- death and lynching -- was not, as I remember a member of my wife's family saying, "not the way we should be doing things." But there wasn't tension. People knew their "proper place." That would be the general atmosphere and general attitude, and that was true in Denton.

Price:
So you must have come to North Texas at about the time when Brown v. Board of Education and the different kinds of decisions were coming down in the early 1950s.

Kamp:
I don't believe Brown v. Board of Education was quite that early. There had not been any decision by the Supreme Court with the impact of Brown by the fall of 1949. You'll have to check the dates. There were, of course, beginning to be federal court decisions dealing with the constitutionality of segregated public institutions. The general approach, both legally, and in some places actually, was "separate but equal": Plessy v. Ferguson, the Louisiana case.

Price:
I'd like to talk a little bit now about the college itself and about Dr. Matthews. From what I've read, there are some who criticized his leadership style, and there were others who supported him. What were your opinions of the way he ran the college and of his personal leadership style?

Kamp: Carl Matthews was a product of, I suppose, the usual attitudes concerning the responsibilities of a university president. He thought that the president should run the college, and he attempted to do so. As the college grew, in both quantitative and qualitative ways, it became less possible for him to do that. The usual saying that you quite often heard from faculty members was that "President Matthews tries to run this place like it was a junior high school." It is my judgment that that was correct. It was a constant process, for instance, for even minutiae to be decided in the president's office. It was unbelievable.

I was not unfamiliar with that philosophy of university and college management because it wasn't uncommon in the 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1940s for the president of the college to be the "Big Eagle." President John Q. Reynolds at Hendrix College approved the hiring of any faculty member. Nicholas Murray Butler was well-known for his able, but sometimes rather despotic, use of power at Columbia University. So it wasn't a shock for me, on my first full-time job, to see a president who was acting that way.

Price:
Would he just not allow others to make decisions? He wouldn't delegate at all, would he?

Kamp:
No, no. In actuality, there was a great deal that was done and decided without Matthews's permission. For instance, the institution of an oral history project, you will notice. This was done, when I started it, in a studied fashion. I did not want to go to the president's office. I didn't want him to have anything to do with it. So what did I do? I did it without going [to see him]. That wasn't the only such activity going on, as you can imagine. If you didn't want Matthews to make the decision, you didn't ask him.

Now then, as far as hiring was concerned, nobody was hired without the approval of the president's office. Deans, for the most part, were puppets. The dean of Arts and Sciences at that time, when he first came here, was an extremely able person, but he had no authority.

I don't regard Carl Matthews as having been an evil person. Don't misunderstand me. That was simply his educational philosophy. He came from a school of education background, so I suppose it was natural for him to be that way. I'm not saying that they were undemocratic at that time. He made some very good decisions. This is getting a little bit ahead, but I think that his role in the desegregation of the university was well-done, with good judgment and effective tactics. Its success owes a lot to President Matthews.

Price:
How did he go about handling the desegregation issue?

Kamp:
By doing just as little as possible publicly. I do not know what Carl Matthews's personal beliefs were about race. He and I never talked about it. When the time came that something was going to happen, either through the courts or by voluntary action of the university's Board of Regents, he saw the handwriting on the wall, I suspect, and took a very practical course, a very workable method, of keeping it off the front page, getting the court decision favorable to desegregation without being forced into a negative position. It worked.

Price:
Why do you think he decided to wait on the court decision, rather than just going ahead and saying, "Okay, we're desegregated."?

Kamp:
Probably to protect himself, as well as other people at the university, from public criticism. He may well have had members of his Board of Regents whom he did not want to alienate. In any case, I can see why he would have chosen to do that. There was a lot of racism in the state of Texas at that time, and there was very little integration at that time. They had a long way to go. I'm sure that there were public attitudes, alumnae attitudes, that he did not want to embroil. He's never told me that, but knowing him quite well, as I do, I would imagine that was it.

Price:
You mentioned the Board of Regents earlier. What was his relationship like with his Board of Regents?

Kamp:
Inside the university, they pretty much let him do what he wanted. A man named Ben Wooten was chairman of that Board for a long time. My impression was that Wooten had almost a casual interest in the university. He, as well as all of the Board members, was appointed by the governor, usually because of political support in the governor's campaign (laughter). I don't remember the Board having bucked Matthews or gone against him in any way. At least it never became public.

Price:
Even with the desegregation?

Kamp:
Yes, yes. There was no spark that ever came to my attention. You must also realize what the internal organizational atmosphere was at North Texas at that time. The faculty did not participate in important policy decisions at all. That was becoming galling. That's another story. That, by the way, is the reason that for some years President Matthews and I were anything but good friends. He did not approve of what I was doing, as one of a group of a few faculty members who were trying to get faculty participation in university policy-making. He let me know that very plainly. I let him know very plainly that I disagreed with him, but it never came to verbal blows.

Price:
Well, that's good.

Kamp:
To his credit. He never once, as far as I know, discriminated against me in any way, including salary questions, because I was something of a rebel in that matter. I continued to provide what help I could, sometimes leadership, in accomplishing faculty participation in policy-making at the university while he was president. Then shortly thereafter, of course, we got a Faculty Senate, but not while he was there.

Price:
I had read something to that effect, that some people thought that he held the college back. Especially since he was from the College of Education, he kind of kept it more of a teachers college when it should have been going forward.

Kamp:
Possibly so. There was a lot of criticism, of course, of him within the faculty and from outside. One thing that Carl Matthews certainly did not want was any interference from the outside in what was going on here on the campus. Therefore, he shied away from any suggestion that we should bring the financial power and resources of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metropolitan Area to support the university. He didn't want to have anything to do with them, including raising money. Now that was galling and backward.

Price:
You mentioned earlier about him wanting to keep a very low profile, especially with the press, in everything. What was his relationship like with the press? I've read that he was good friends with the editor of the Denton Record-Chronicle.

Kamp:
Riley Cross.

Price:
Riley Cross, right.

Kamp:
May have been.

Price:
Do you think that worked to his benefit?

Kamp:
Probably so. I would be surprised if Matthews had very much trouble with Riley. Riley knew how to make a newspaper pay off at the bank, but as far as any kind of leadership in social reorganization, Riley had no interest whatsoever.

Price:
In 1954, a graduate student was allowed into the college, Tennyson Miller. In the next year, the suit was brought by Joe Atkins to go ahead and let undergraduates in. At that time, what was the reaction of faculty, especially in your department? Did they start preparing for it? Did they perhaps kind of see the handwriting on the wall, thinking that they'd prepare for African-American students, or did they kind of take it in stride?

Kamp:
I don't remember any overt attitudes. Certainly there was no preparation. I wouldn't prepare for something like that. By this time, the characteristics of the faculty at North Texas had changed and were continuing to rapidly change, even the place of origin where the new, young historians came from. There were a lot of faculty members who came from other parts of the United States, and not all of them from the South. I suspect that had a poll been taken -- there was none that I know of -- the prevailing attitude, the large majority attitude, would have been, "Let's open the gates. We're out-of-date " In addition, there were many faculty members who, I'm sure, by this time thought that it was an example of moral degradation to keep students from coming to North Texas because of their color of skin. I do not recall one single conversation with any faculty member... and at this time, you must remember that I was much involved in campus politics. The fact of the matter is, I had a rather wide acquaintance. I had been president of the local chapter of AAUP [American Association of University Professors] and president of the local chapter of TACT [Texas Association of College Teachers]. So I was talking with a lot of people. I don't recall a single faculty member expressing a racist attitude-not one.

Price:
So they were ready.

Kamp:
I think the majority were, certainly. That's not saying that there were not racist attitudes, because I'm sure there were, but overt, no, nothing of the sort.

Price:
Were any of the faculty concerned about grading differently or treating them differently, or were there some problems perhaps with their performance in the school?

Kamp:
I heard of such things, and from time to time there would be hints of something like that. I don't recall any famous incident. It was, for the most part, quietly done. It really was.

The people in the administration building were a great help. You probably have heard the story about the Life magazine reporter and cameraman that came on campus. I don't recall if this was for the graduate student or the undergraduate student. She had registered, and it was in the newspapers, going to class. At any rate, the Life magazine crew showed up. I don't how where they went first. To the administration building, I think. I do know that they ended up at the registrar's office. Alex Dickie was registrar at the time. They asked somebody where this student was going to go to class. I believe it was a woman.

Price:
Yes, Mrs. Sephas.

Kamp:
They wanted to know where she was going to go to class. They hit a brick wall. Alex refused to tell them. He spread the word throughout his office. They were not to be told. Sure enough, they weren't told (laughter). So they weren't there, and there weren't the big picture splashes and publicity. There was no place for them to get that kind of publicity. They didn't get any pictures.

Price:
That was Matthews's doing?

Kamp:
I don't know that. All I know is that Dickie refused to give them that information. Whether or not he had had a conversation with Carl Matthews, I do not know. I have no idea. Knowing Alex Dickie, he was capable of doing that himself. The family, by the way, had a progressive attitude in the town of Denton, both Alex Dickie, Sr., and Jr.

Price: You mentioned Abner Haynes earlier. I have had some reports from other people, saying that they thought that he did more for desegregation at North Texas than anybody else, I think because he brought people together with football. Do you think so?

Kamp:
No, I don't think Abner did more than anybody else (chuckle), but he certainly helped. I'd say that he didn't provide leadership, obviously, but he was a popular football hero, and that certainly helped with the public and probably with the alums, certainly with the newspaper coverage and to some extent, I guess, with the students, who were going to root for the home team. But you must remember that most students did not attend football games at North Texas then, and still don't. So I don't know. He had something of a restricted impact, but it was a help to some extent, I'm sure.

Price:
Did you hear much about the student reaction? What was the student reaction like to the desegregation?

Kamp:
At least on the surface, very mild, very quiet. If there were incidents, they must have been at the social level. I'm sure those still go on. There is the matter of fraternities and sororities. It was very quiet and uneventful. I mean, there is no sense in trying to drum something up or remember something. At least, in my experience that was true.

Price:
Later, in the early 1960s, there was a professor named Jesse Ritter, who was in the English Department and was let go. He believed that it was because of an incident where he was involved with students downtown at the Campus Theatre, to desegregate the theater. I was wondering if that had much effect on the campus or whether it was just more of an isolated incident?

Kamp:
I don't have any recollection of that. I don't know what that shows. It certainly was not a celebrated case. If it were a celebrated case, I think one would remember the name Ritter. I have no recollection of it and no memory of it. But I'm sure there were isolated incidents like that.

I'd like to make one other point about that. As far as the official policy of the university is concerned, before Matthews retired, the attitudes of the faculty were not with college authority on policy. We had no forum in the policy-making rooms at the university. There was no Faculty Senate. They had something they called a senate, but it wasn't representative of the faculty at all. It was a kind of Deans Council. There was no place for the faculty attitudes about segregation to get into the decision-making channels. I just wanted to say that. Later on, of course, that changed, but by the time the Faculty Senate became an institution with some power, segregation was a thing of the past.

Price:
Why do you think that the desegregation process at North Texas, considering that Denton was a rather segregated place, also, went so smoothly, especially as compared to other places?

Kamp:
I'm sure there were a number of reasons. We talked about one -- the very effective, intentionally passive attitude of the administration, who were simply uncooperative with anyone that wanted to raise a ruckus. There was gradualness about it -- the graduate student first and then one or two undergraduate students -- so it wasn't something that happened overnight. You've mentioned the popularity of football players, and certainly not very long after that, basketball players. I'm sure that helped to some extent. The absence of any strident group from the public demonstrating or provoking incidents undoubtedly helped. We were very fortunate in that respect. I don't know who that might have been. We didn't have a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Denton County, that I knew anything about I don't think it existed, so they were not on the scene. I suspect the attitude of most of the faculty members was very, very helpful. By that time, it would be my judgment that most faculty members wanted their home university to do away with racial prejudice. There were probably other elements there.

Price:
What about the students? Do you think they kind of took their lead from the faculty and the administration?

Kamp:
Oh, maybe, perhaps to some extent. I think your inference there is well-taken. The students who were not in a racial minority should be given a great deal of credit. Now then, you've opened up a whole field. How did that happen to come about? Obviously, it came from what they had learned in their lives before they came on campus. Education was changing, and the attitudes were changing back home before they ever got here. That wasn't 100 percent then, and it is still not 100 percent. Don't misunderstand me. But I'm sure that if it hadn't been acceptable with the student body, it wasn't going to work. But it was acceptable, for the most part.

Price:
I believe that covers everything that I've got. Is there anything else that you'd like to add?

Kamp:
I can't think of it right now.

Price:
Well, thank you very, very much. I do appreciate this. Thank you.

Kamp:
I enjoyed it.

Copyright © 1995 The Board of Regents of the University of North Texas in the City of Denton

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