Past and present members of the Duke and Durham community came together Tuesday night to honor the legacy of Samuel DuBois Cook, the first black tenured faculty member at the University.
Approximately 500 alumni, students, community members and top brass gathered at the Washington Duke Inn for the Ninth Annual Samuel DuBois Cook Society Awards Dinner, which honors those who follow in the footsteps of individuals who helped to better integrate the University.
Amid controversy surrounding the desegregation of Southern schools and student protests against the war in Vietnam, Cook came to the University in 1966 as a professor of political science.
At the time, black students had only been enrolled at the University for two years, and the only substantial black presence on campus was in the form of the housekeeping staff.
Created in 1997, the Cook Society is currently steered by a committee headed by Benjamin Reese, vice president for institutional equity, and William Reichert, professor of biomedical engineering. The goal of the Cook Society is to preserve the University's legacy of community members who fought for the inclusion of blacks when the institution was largely segregated.
This year's award recipients include Durham Mayor Bill Bell, Associate Dean of the Graduate School Jacqueline Looney, Program Coordinator for Community Affairs Mayme Webb-Bledsoe, Director of Duke University Police Department Robert Dean, Executive Director for Athletes First John Branion, Duke seniors Ripal Shah and Marcia Eisenstein and engineering graduate student Cord Whitaker.
"It's a very inspiring and humbling experience," Cook said about the annual dinner held in his honor. "The symbolism is profound in terms of Duke. It builds on Duke's great tradition of decency and humanity."
Many attendees acknowledged that the event was one of the most important days of the year for the University.
"This is the occasion to celebrate the distinguished past and the obligation to [eliminate] barriers," said President Richard Brodhead, who joked that he was not aware that "Samuel DuBois Cook Day" was a holiday at Duke when he first arrived in 2004.
Cook was also president of Dillard University in New Orleans from 1974 until 1997. Brodhead said Cook provided Duke with a "living connection" to the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe that ravaged the Gulf Coast and forced Dillard to close during fall 2005.
A few of Cook's first students spoke of the lasting effect their former political science professor had on them.
"He was a very animated professor," said Anne Workman, Women's College '69. "Forty years later how many professors do you remember? I remember Dr. Cook. [He] has remained my favorite professor while at Duke."
Workman noted that during her Duke years "a Yankee was pretty exotic" to the almost exclusively Southern, white student body. Nonetheless, Workman said that, to her knowledge, none of her fellow classmates took issue with being taught by a black teacher. "I had certainly never been to school with [blacks] and had never been taught by any. It was liberating to be brought into an integrated world," she said. "Dr. Cook's great attraction was that he showed us an entire world we had never been exposed to."
William Yaeger, Trinity '69, spoke highly of the racial changes that have occurred on campus in the past 40 years and the effect the University and its students have had on those changes. "I live in this community, and it's a reflection of the community as well," he said.
The society will host a colloquium Wednesday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. entitled "The Underrepresented Majority in Math, Science and Engineering" in Griffith Theater.
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