IU administrators reflect on experiences, history of campus race relations

January 8, 1966: In the small town of Hattiesburg, Miss., local businessman and civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer announced over the radio he would aid local voters in paying their poll taxes.\nThe next morning, firebombs crashed through the windows of Dahmer's home. Dahmer was able to save his wife and three children, but not himself. He died the next day of severe burns.\nA young FBI agent fresh out of law school, Gerald Bepko, was chosen to help investigate the band of Klu Klux Klan members responsible for Dahmer's murder. Eventually, all the klansmen were placed behind bars.\nNow, 38 years later, with almost two decades of experience as an IU administrator, the incident sticks out in Bepko's memory as one which punctuates a decade of civil unrest. \n"When I went down (to Mississippi) I thought it was going to be interesting," Bepko said. "But I had no idea it would have such great an impact on my life. It was a great privilege to view that era of history."\nOn one of the few vacation days IU enjoys all year, faculty and administrators who witnessed the tumultuous civil rights movement paused to reflect on the life and teachings of its most prominent leader.\n"Martin Luther King combined a number of the best ideas of our culture," Bepko said. "I think that anyone who took the time to study what Dr. Martin Luther King said, and the values he projected would become more idealistic. I think anyone who does that will be a better person."\nFred Eichhorn, president of the IU Board of Trustees, said King's uphill battle for racial equality still has merit today.\n"I think that one thing we should know is that we've not achieved total balance in civil rights," said Eichhorn. "And that teaching of non-violence but persistent pressure is valid even today."\nIU-Bloomington Interim Chancellor Ken Gros-Louis was teaching at IU and had just left class in 1968 when the news of King's assassination reached him.\n"The marvelous work and language that King had used to empower people and to advance the civil rights movement -- it was such a bad thing to happen," he said.\nBepko can still vividly recall the day King was assassinated.\n"It happened in the early evening, as I recall," said Bepko. "We were all stunned. People were numb with shock and grief because this was the decade of political assassination."\nGros-Louis said he remembers a moving speech Sen. Robert Kennedy delivered in Indianapolis.\n"It was a courageous thing for him to do -- the right thing for him to do," Gros-Louis said.\nReflecting on King's work, Gros-Louis recalls the friendship with his black prep-school roommate, who also contributed to his understanding of racial relations.\n"I came from a small town in southern New Hampshire and really had no awareness of racial stereotypes," he said. "In retrospect, it underlines how important it is for places like IU to be as diverse as they can be."\nIn a world where terms such as "WMDs" and "Code Orange" have become household words, some of IU's faculty and administrators remember a day when civil unrest and racial inequality struck American culture with the same pervasiveness.\n"There were huge tectonic plates shifting about social conditions and equality and the right of every human being," said Bepko. "The epicenter for this great shifting was Mississippi, and I was there."\n-- Contact staff writer Mike McElroy at mmcelroy@indiana.edu.