A Martin Luther King Jr. Day Guest TigerBlog

TigerBlog has a standing offer to anyone who wants the floor here. 

Very few people have taken him up on the offer. One such person who has is Tad La Fountain of the Class of 1972, and he is back today with some Martin Luther King Jr. Day thoughts.

April 4, 1968 didn’t start off as an unusual day.  I was wrapping up my senior year at Westtown School (decades before Westtown became known for hoopsters such as Mo Bamba – now of the Orlando Magic – or Cam Reddish of the Atlanta Hawks) and was waiting to hear about college.  That evening a group of us involved in preparing for the School’s upcoming Mock Convention was meeting right after dinner when another student came in with the news that Dr. King had been shot; an hour later, we got the news that he had died.

A few weeks later, Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.  As recounted last year by writer David Margolick in an article in the New Yorker, it had been just prior to heading to California that Senator Kennedy had sought out some campaign workers for Senator Eugene McCarthy in order to understand why his competitor’s supporters were so superior to his own.  Finding a couple of young McCarthy workers in the Indianapolis Airport late in the evening of the Indiana primary, Kennedy offered to buy them breakfast; as reported at the time by the late Jimmy Breslin, the senator in return subjected himself to an articulate and forceful confrontation from the young woman as the young man basically sat by.  According to the Margolick article, Kennedy was so impressed by the young people that he spoke about them several times over his remaining time in California. 

So he should have been – Patsy Sylvester had graduated from Westtown only the previous June, where she had been Girls’ Student Body President her senior year, and had dropped out of college to get involved in what she hoped would be a transformative election.  In some regards, it was such an election – though not to Patsy’s liking.  She didn’t return to UMass, but finished at McGill, married briefly, had a daughter and then succumbed to cancer thirty years ago.

Had he also been allowed to lead a full life, Senator Kennedy would have lived long enough to see the young man that he encountered, a UNC student named Taylor Branch, go on to write the definitive series on the civil rights movement: a trilogy entitled “America in the King Years.”  The first volume, “Parting the Waters,” earned Branch the Pulitzer Prize.  In that work, Branch repetitively writes of the physical and moral courage shown by those who pursued the expansion of what should have been guaranteed universally available to all Americans nearly two centuries earlier; in nearly all cases, those front-line activists were young, substituting energy and clarity of purpose for the power that often accrues to those older and more well-positioned in society.

How does this relate to Princeton athletics?  We could make a direct connection to a former Tiger hoopster and Woodrow Wilson Prize winner – John Doar ’44 – who joined the Justice Department in the Eisenhower administration and worked closely with then-Attorney General Kennedy and future AG Nicholas Katzenbach ’43 throughout the South during the early 1960s. John Doar literally was a hero, interposing himself between confronting groups to deter bloodshed.  Along with Katzenbach, Doar walked young civil rights pioneers to the schoolhouse door, helping to ensure that segregationist barriers to education would be overcome.  These Tigers demonstrated that one can come from strata that would seem resistant to change and still contribute mightily to the process - Achieve/Serve/Lead.

But let’s take a somewhat more circuitous route.

There does appear to be a dynamic across a lot of nature that favors the emergence of change from the small or the marginal.  Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School received widespread attention years ago for his work “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.”  He cited several cases (he’s from HBS, after all) where disruptive technologies – generally arising from smaller versions of existing products and often dismissed as irrelevant – were able to evolve faster than their entrenched competitors and grow into formidable usurpers.  Two years ago, music historian Ted Gioia published “Music: A Subversive History.”  His thesis is well documented: for centuries, revolution in music has emerged from the social fringes, only to be repetitively assimilated by the entrenched classes – who then proceed to write their own version of history celebrating their accomplishments and ignoring the contributions of those who actually fomented the change.  Gioia’s first chapter is a dead giveaway: “The Origin of Music as a Force of Creative Destruction” (which is an eerie echo of economist Joseph Schumpeter’s use of the exact same term to describe “the process of industrial mutation”).

These changes tend to be abrupt, and mirror what Steve Stanley ’61 and others have described as “punctuated equilibrium” – a refutation of evolutionary gradualism.  Often it’s their very abruptness that causes severe dislocation, when in retrospect there often appears to be an undeniable inevitability to them.

With a tinge of regret, we need to begin our circuitous Princeton example with a couple of Yalies.  Andrew Dickson White and Daniel Coit Gilman were classmates, members of Skull and Bones and lifetime friends.  They both became educators: White was the co-founder and first president of Cornell, while Gilman followed an unhappy stint as the president of the University of California by becoming the first president of Johns Hopkins (Penn may refer to themselves as the Quakers, and Princeton’s upper campus was donated by Nathaniel FitzRandolph, a member of Princeton Monthly Meeting, but Ezra Cornell was born Quaker and continued as a member until he was “read out of Meeting” for marrying a Methodist, and Johns Hopkins – named after the two Quaker families of his lineage – was a devout Friend his entire life [when Dwight Eisenhower’s brother Milton was given an honor and introduced by the mayor of the Steel City as the president of “John Hopkins”, he responded by thanking the mayor and said what a delight it was to be here “in Pittburgh” – so this Ravens/Steelers thing apparently has some history]).  It is doubtful that White and Gilman realized that they were founding two collegiate lacrosse powerhouses. 

In addition to bringing a German research university focus to his new school, Gilman was also creating the modern graduate education.  Along the way, he started a secondary institution – the Country Day School.  Several years later, it became Gilman Country Day and then Gilman School.  In 1923, Edward W. Brown, who had graduated from Princeton that June, joined the Gilman faculty as a teacher and coach (football and lacrosse).  Ed Brown of Elizabeth, NJ was one of five children; he and his two brothers all attended Princeton, while both sisters married Princetonians (at one point, I counted 31 Browns and in-law Tigers).  He spent 17 years at Gilman before becoming the head of the Calvert School for the remaining 25 years of his career but made a lasting impression on Gilman – the football stadium bears his name. 

One of the innumerable Gilman boys to continue their education at Princeton returned after graduation to join the faculty and coach.  Like Ed Brown, Redmond Conyngham Stewart Finney ’51 had Orange and Black running through his veins; his grandfather was the legendary John M. T. Finney 1884 (for whom Finney Field as named [read TigerBlog’s write-up eleven years ago here]), and the alumni rolls are full of Dr. Finney’s descendants.  Reddy Finney was first-team All-America in both football and lacrosse and was captain of the wrestling team; he went on, like his grandfather, to serve the University as trustee.

Reddy Finney became an institution at Gilman, eventually serving as headmaster.  His connection to Gilman was no doubt aided by marriage – his wife Jean(nette) was Ed Brown’s daughter.  They made a formidable couple.  When Reddy died in 2019, his memorial at Gilman that September was held in the football stadium named after his father-in-law; the crowd was too large for any campus building.  Speakers reminisced about a multitude of ways in which Reddy contributed to the school (and also described the peril of sitting next to him at a wrestling match as he subconsciously contorted his body in exactly the ways he would have moved had he been on the mat!). 

One of the most moving speakers was a current member of the school administration who had personally benefited from Reddy’s initiative to racially integrate this bastion of Baltimore society.  The city was both physically and culturally south of the Mason-Dixon line, and to expand its availability to groups historically left outside its walls was no insignificant development.  There was, as one would expect, a great deal of deep-seated resistance and the move required tremendous adroitness.  Reddy Finney was up to the task.

Maryland Public Television chronicled this development here: “A Path to Follow: The Reddy Finney Story.”  On this celebration of Martin Luther King, it is well worth taking an hour to witness how someone who had every reason to further the status quo responded instead to a higher calling.  Change tends to arise from below, so we should celebrate those who foment from a position of privilege.  Give that Tiger a well-deserved locomotive.