When Race, Religion, and Sport Collide by Smith Darron T.;

Author:Smith, Darron T.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Iron Fist Diplomacy: Wilkinson’s Unyielding Control over University Affairs

The leadership at BYU, unapologetic for their racism, only further enraged the Church’s detractors. Ernest L. Wilkinson, an attorney by trade, served as the seventh president of BYU (1951–1971) during the African American student uprisings against LDS racial bigotry as well as against the university for its complicity in the discrimination of blacks. He was a politically conservative[11] man who questioned the motives of the U.S. government’s expansion of federal spending embodied within the New Deal era and, later, Kennedy’s perceived “socialist” agenda. When President McKay appointed Wilkinson as president of BYU, he charged him to “have [the] vision to understand more than anyone else in education circles the dangers of communism and . . . be a leader in our schools in protecting our people against this ungodlike philosophy.”[12] Many of the members of the board of trustees, which comprised fifteen “general authorities” (high-ranking Mormon leaders) who were appointed by the First Presidency as a church calling, likewise, were thrilled with Wilkinson as the new BYU president. Known to be a vocal critic of Washington and the federal government, he was a self-professed anticommunist during his twenty-year reign as head of the university.

For Wilkinson, however, the world must have seemed to be decaying right before his eyes. Much to his dismay, he witnessed the continuation of factionalism within the Republican Party, which then gave way to the Democratic administrations of the Kennedy and Johnson era. Given his extreme views, he found himself disillusioned at having to contend with not only unpopular racist commentary of the Church and what this negative view of Mormonism meant for BYU but also with some of the nation’s most pressing contemporary issues. Those issues ranged from growing resistance to the Vietnam War and the draft to the perceptual proliferation of communism and support for the civil rights movement, all of which Wilkinson was determined to prevent from entering the campus of BYU.

The counterculture movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which included environmentalism, the rise of feminism, drug experimentation, rock music, and a culture of “free love,” all accented the philosophical and political happenings of the times that spread across many of the nation’s colleges and universities. The dynamics of the counterculture movements both influenced and were reflected by the protests against BYU and its intercollegiate athletic program. This was a clear sign that America, from Wilkinson’s viewpoint, was in serious moral peril because his generation failed the (white) youth by ineffectively teaching young people the proper love of country as enshrined within the Mormon interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, a document considered by the Church to be divinely inspired.[13] This view of Wilkinson’s was his version of Allen Bloom’s popular 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, a book that blames the so-called decline of American universities on antisocial, anti-authoritarian liberals.

Across the country, the perceived impending doom loomed large in the minds of dissatisfied conservatives, particularly the right-wing faction of the party, as they felt the nation was crumbling at their feet into an immoral, Godless morass.

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