Chapter 05: A History Major at Harvard and a Desire to Make a Positive Difference
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Description
In this chapter, Dr. Holleman provides background for his desire to study history and possibly enter politics. He explains that he has skills much like his father, whom he admired. He recounts formative experiences with desegregation and political action that shaped his desire to address inequality and suffering and make a positive difference for people. He gives more insight into his family’s progressive values.
Identifier
HollemanWL_01_20170412_C05
Publication Date
4-12-2017
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Warren L. Holleman, PhD, Oral History Interview, April 12, 2017
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Educational Path; Personal Background; Experiences Related to Gender, Race, Ethnicity; Influences from People and Life Experiences; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Professional Values, Ethics, Purpose
Transcript
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Not surprising, yeah. So tell me how that happened, because in fact, you made the choice to get into counseling kind of farther along in your career.
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
Yeah.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So you're at Harvard, and as far as I know from your CV, you were a history major?
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
Yes.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So what was that about? Why that choice at that time?
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
I loved history. It was something I was good at. I was not good at math and science. This is—I was also a very slow reader. I think I had some issues there. So I would have loved to be an English major, but a typical course you read two novels a week.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, it's heavy.
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
I read one novel every two months. I think I enjoy it, I enjoy reading as much as anybody else, but I'm a very slow reader.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So what were you thinking about, as you were in college and kind of visualizing your future? What were you seeing yourself becoming? Or did you not think about that at the time?
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
Well, I think law—my dad was a small-town lawyer, and really law was a small part of what he did. He had a lot of roles in the community and took on kind of leadership, and trying to make things better. I definitely saw myself as having that same skill set as my father. As an 18-year-old, you don't really, at I couldn't see myself working with him, though, because I was just in that stage where I was pushing myself away. Years later, it would have been different. So I couldn’t see myself in that role. The other role that I really seriously considered was politics. I thought of myself as maybe a congressman or something, and I did some summer internships with my congressman, my senator, with that in mind.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
What was that motivation about?
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
I think it was largely a desire to make the world a better place. Being in a community where even a kid could see things that needed to be fixed, and feeling that that's the type of person who can fix them.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Were there specific issues that you were interested in? I mean, like today, kids get interesting in the environment. Was there a focus that you had? Or was it more of a general—
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
Well, I could say a couple of things about that. Without a doubt, the formative experience of my childhood outside my home was the racial desegregation of the schools. That occurred in my sophomore year of high school, 1970. It seems kind of late, considering that Brown versus Board of Education was 1955. And as I said, our community was basically 50 percent black, 50 percent white. I think even the first year we desegregated, there were more blacks than whites in school. And in a way, that really made for an easier desegregation, because there was no minority that was being taken advantage of so easily, at least. And I also think the teachers in our school and the principal did an excellent job of preparing us for that. And I was a part of the committees that prepared for the desegregation; I think it was called the Human Relations Committee. That was just an amazing experience. I remember at that time, there was a lot of uproar in North Carolina about desegregation. Some of the parents who—white parents who were most challenged wound up sending their kids to these private schools, which, ironically, often were called, quote, "Christian schools," which as kids, we could see that was really hypocritical. And so when the Human Relations Committee started meeting, there was an assumption initially that—well, the new school was going to be at the, quote, "white school," and the black school was going to become a middle school. So the assumption was they'd come to our school, and everything would be the same; the school colors, the mascot. And I don't know who had the idea, probably the principal, but they said, "We should throw everything out and start over." I mean, that's kind of obvious. But at the time, the other communities didn't do that. We were the only one that did that. And it made a world of difference. Then it became an exciting thing, where black kids and white kids were talking about, "Oh, what about this color?" Or, "We could be like the Green Bay Packers." We wound up being the Green Bay Packers. We took Kelly green and yellow gold. Bart Starr, you know, was everybody's hero back then. We started over. Took new mascots on officers, we took co-presidents, co-chairs, and things were pretty fair. I mean, there were still problems, but nothing—I think our community handed it well. So while the school desegregation, which was basically run by the kids, went pretty well, the assumption that we kids had, the idealistic ones at least, was that the whole community was going to desegregate now. The churches, the Scout troops, the Lion's Club, Town Council. Well, really, that didn't happen, even though we tried. And so we started a lot of—we were involved in a lot of activities to desegregate our churches, our Scout troops and things. And those were met with a lot more resistance, in some cases pretty dramatic. And we found out what the adult white people were really like, some of them. But my parents were among the parents who were very supportive of desegregation and equality and fairness. So I've always had a lot of respect for them. They even stood up at times when it wasn't easy to stand up. And it would affect my father's business; it wasn't easy to do that. My mother, to this day I'm trying to find a letter to the editor she wrote to the local paper. She really took on some of the town leaders, at one point. And I need to find that.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So I can see how this informed your kind of ideas about perhaps entering politics and becoming involved in that way.
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
And I need to tell you, since you're—this is really gratifying to me. Nobody's asked me these questions before. But one of my earliest experiences that I remember well—remember, and certainly my earliest political experience was in the first week of November, 1960. I would have just turned five years old. And John Kennedy was running for president. And in North Carolina, we had a candidate for governor who was the first sort of openly liberal Democrat, Terry Sanford, who later became a senator and president of Duke University. And so you had—so my father got my brother and me up at, like, 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, the day of the election. Our cousin, who was really more like an uncle functionally, he was much older than me. He was sort of like my dad's little brother, even though technically he's a nephew. He took one side of town, and my dad and my brother and me took the other side of town. And my dad would drive us, and we'd put this little placard on everybody's doorknob, "Vote for Kennedy and Sanford." And they won.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, wow.
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
And we sort of felt like we were a part of that.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Sure! Yeah.
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
Sanford then was by far the most progressive governor North Carolina has ever had.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow.
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
And he did a lot of good things.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just that message to send a child that you can have an impact, so many people don't feel that anymore. You know?
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
Yeah.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
But to get that so early, that's very cool.
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
It was really cool. One of my best memories of my dad.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. Very neat. Very neat. So, what—
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
So that's why I had this—Terry Sanford was a hero. John Kennedy was a hero. Well, I didn't really know much about him. So I wanted to just kind of be like them. So politics seemed like one way to do that. My dad had run for the state House of Representatives, and there was a story there, too. In 1954, I think—no, '55, in there. He, at the time, he was kind of a hero of mine, too. I still have his little card, his "Vote Carl Holleman, North Carolina House of Representatives," blah blah blah.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow, that's cool.
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
He lost. But he lost well. At the time, there was something called the "Southern Manifesto." It was kind of a litmus test to show that you were a segregationist. Everybody was asked to sign it. If you didn't sign it, you basically didn't get elected. My dad refused to sign it. The Southern Manifesto said, I disagree with Brown versus Board of Education, something like that. I'm a segregationist. You know, the Democratic Party, the Southern wing tended to be very segregationist. Then there were a few who were not, like Terry Sanford.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
I didn't realize that.
Warren L. Holleman, PhD:
Yeah. So George Wallace would be a typical of the Dixiecrats. And that was—yeah. But then the Democrats were kind of bipolar; they had the Dixiecrat segregationists, and then they had the very liberal wing that was mostly from the North. But there were a few Southern liberals, too.
Recommended Citation
Holleman, Warren L. PhD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 05: A History Major at Harvard and a Desire to Make a Positive Difference" (2017). Interview Chapters. 1079.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1079
Conditions Governing Access
Open