In the midst of the civil rights movement of the '60s, Dean - son of a Wall Street securities broker with a home on Park Avenue - saw an opportunity to broaden his horizons and requested a black roommate.
He was placed in a four-person suite, with two of his roommates being African-American, one of them Ralph Dawson of Charleston, S.C., now a New York labor lawyer who, like Roman, has become active in the Dean campaign.
Roman grew up in Memphis, raised by a single mother who died when he was 12. The boy moved in with his grandmother, an entrepreneur who owned rental property and operated a Chinese restaurant.
He attended a segregated public high school.
Before entering Yale, Roman and Dawson spent a year together in New Haven, Conn., at an experimental preparatory program to qualify minority students to attend top colleges.
Roman learned only recently of Dean's request for a black roommate. Knowing that during their freshman year "would have been the kiss of death," said Roman, not wanting to be "some white liberal's" social experiment.
"It would have created all kinds of suspicions," Roman said. "The relationship we developed would have been impossible." As it was, he said, "we had a normal college friendship."
"We came together at a very serious time both personally and for the country," he recalled. "We were all trying to find ourselves and our way in the world."
Not that everything was smooth, especially in the beginning.
"We had a hell of a lot of learning to do," Dean has said.
Roman and Dean agreed on important issues, but differed in their opinions of how to instigate change.
Dean disapproved of apartheid in South Africa but was shocked that Roman and Dawson, leaders in the campus black students' organization, planned to disrupt an off-campus presentation by South Africa tourism officials in protest. When his roommates were arrested and taken to jail, Dean was appalled and told them, "You guys must be crazy!"
Dean was genuinely concerned that his friends were jeopardizing their physical welfare and their status as students, Roman said. The future politician expressed similar concerns when Dawson and Roman demonstrated against the Vietnam War - which Dean also opposed.
"The whole notion of civil disobedience was new to him," Roman said.
| There's more to Gayle White's Cox News Service (via Bennington Banner) article "Dean's roommate at Yale defends him on race issue"
In the mid-sixties, Yale, like other élite universities, had begun to commit itself to progressive admissions policies based upon merit and a quest for ethnic diversity rather than Wasp hegemony. This was a shift that Dean, the son and grandson of Yale alumni, figured he might as well make the most of. Obliging an explicit request from Dean, the housing-placement office assigned him two African-American roommates. One was Ralph Dawson, a sheet-metal worker’s son who is today a labor lawyer in New York City.
“Unless you operated from a stereotypic understanding of the Yale white boy as rich, you wouldn’t know that about Howard,” Dawson, who graduated from an all-black public high school in Charleston, South Carolina, told me. “When it came to race—and I don’t know whether this was a function of intent or just came naturally—Howard was not patronizing in any way. He was willing to confront in discussion what a lot of white students weren’t. He would hold his ground. He would respect that I knew forty-two million times more about being black than he did. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t hold a view on something relating to civil rights that would be as valid as mine. There were lots of well-meaning people at Yale who wanted you to understand that they understood your plight; you’d get into a conversation and they would yield too soon, so we didn’t get the full benefit of the exchange. Howard very much thought he was capable of working an issue through. He was inquisitive. And when he came to a conclusion he would be as strong as anybody else. I don’t think he’s stubborn. He’s a guy who’s always been comfortable in his own skin. That’s something you still see in him today, and it gets him into some degree of controversy.”
| Update, 1/25/04: Cleaning out some stored links, this bit caught our eye in Mark Singer's New Yorker article "Running on Instinct"
posted in articles on January 15, 2004 7:57 AM | t (1)
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