Steady and Measured: Benner C. Turner, A Black College President in the Jim Crow South

By Travis D. Boyce

Reassesses the career of Benner C. Turner, the polarizing African American president at South Carolina State during the civil rights era

Travis D. Boyce considers the full sweep of Benner C. Turner's life and career in the context of the contrary pressures of white and Black authority. Borrowing an expression from Michelle Obama's remarks to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Boyce casts Turner, long-serving president of South Carolina State University, as a steady and measured leader who preserved the limited resources his historically Black institution possessed in the face of often hostile social, political, and economic power structures.

Previous accounts of Turner and his SC State presidency portray him as unwilling to criticize the state's white power structure and unable to contend with their open resistance to civil rights. Boyce argues that the modern view of Turner flattens a complex terrain, often relying selectively on hostile sources, underplaying the political constraints on presidents of publicly funded HBCUs in the South. Considering Turner in a richer context, with a deep awareness of Turner's early life formative influences, Boyce provides a more complete critical examination of his leadership in trying times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781643364452

Book preview

STEADY AND MEASURED

STEADY AND MEASURED

BENNER C. TURNER

A Black College President in the Jim Crow South

TRAVIS D. BOYCE

© 2023 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208

uscpress.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

ISBN 978-1-64336-443-8 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-64336-444-5 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64336-445-2 (ebook)

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

… A Man of Dignity, a Man of Integrity, and a Man of Courage

chapter one

An Outsider Within

Formative Years and Early Education

chapter two

Completing His Father’s Work

Turner’s Early Law Career

chapter three

Pessimistic Pragmatist

Turner’s Presidency in the Wake of

Brown v. Board of Education

chapter four

Academic Leadership during Campus Turmoil

chapter five

Leaving and Not Looking Back

Life and Legacy after South Carolina State College

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Benner Turner and the wrestling team

Benner Turner’s senior yearbook photo

Dean Benner Turner with law school faculty and students (ca. 1947 or 1948)

Benner Turner in effigy (March 1956)

Expulsion of Fred Moore (April 25, 1956)

Public comments by acting President Maceo Nance following the Orangeburg Massacre (1968)

The First Family, South Carolina State College

Easter Address with Dr. Benjamin E. Mays (ca. early 1950s)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The life and career of South Carolina State University president Benner Creswill Turner is a subject that has long interested me since my undergraduate days at Claflin University. What began as a seminar paper during my master’s program at Ohio University blossomed into what became my PhD dissertation. Then in 2016, First Lady Michelle Obama’s words steady and measured at the Democratic National Convention in support of Hillary Clinton—words that also seemed to apply to Benner Turner—provided the spark for me to revisit my material and write this book.

As historian William Hine mentions in the acknowledgments of his book, South Carolina State University: A Black Land Grant College in Jim Crow America, Historians do not work alone. They depend on archivists, librarians, and colleagues as they research about the past (2018, xi). Indeed, I am extremely grateful for the many people who directly supported or whose work inspired me through this process. This list includes archivists Paige Roberts of the Archives and Special Collections at Phillips Andover Academy and Avery Daniels of the South Carolina State Historical Collections and Archives, as well as the staff at the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC). I would be remiss not to acknowledge William Hine for his lifelong work and commitment to documenting the history of South Carolina State University and photographer Cecil Williams whose body of work captured the civil rights movement in Orangeburg and throughout the state of South Carolina.

I also express my deepest gratitude to the entire staff at the University of South Carolina (USC) Press. They are all true professionals, an absolute joy to work with, and made the publication process seamless from start to finish. This endeavor, in particular, would not have been possible without the support from USC Press acquisitions editor Ehren Foley. His overall management of my initial submission of the manuscript, as well as the review and revision process, was outstanding.

Also, special thanks to fellow USC Press authors William Gravely and Claudia Smith Brinson as well as my dear friend Winsome Chunnu for checking on me regularly and encouraging me to finish this book.

I am deeply indebted to Andrew Escobedo for his careful attention and suggestions as well as to the anonymous reviewers who provided critical feedback that greatly improved this manuscript.

Last, I am grateful for the love and support from my family: my father Dorie Sr., my mother Elaine, my brother Abram, as well as my partner Angela.

Introduction

… A Man of Dignity, a Man of Integrity, and a Man of Courage

The 1957–58 edition of The Bulldog, the yearbook of South Carolina State College, begins with a dedication from the student editors to the college’s president, Benner Creswill Turner. Turner was the fourth president of SC State, a historically Black college in the town of Orangeburg, having started the position in 1950 following three years as dean of the college’s law school. Praising the president’s success in adding new buildings to the campus and enhancing the quality of the faculty, the student yearbook editors explain that they honor Turner with this dedication because you are a man of dignity, a man of integrity, and a man of courage; because you have given yourself unselfishly and untiringly to your work. In addition to these compliments, the editors make special notice of Turner’s determination in the face of adversity: Your path has not been easy: your goals have not always been readily obtained. But undismayed and undeterred, you have moved forward with your face toward the sun.¹ This dedication, made eight years into Turner’s tenure at South Carolina State College, would seem to touch on everything a college president could hope to hear about himself: personal virtue, administrative success, and unflagging resolve.

What a contrast this picture of Turner’s presidency makes with that of two years earlier, when the students were protesting the college’s continued patronage of local white businesses that practiced racial discrimination. In the spring of 1956, the Black citizens of Orangeburg waged an economic boycott of these businesses. President Turner publicly insisted that the college should not get involved in local politics, especially politics of such a controversial nature. The students were furious that he would not allow the college to join the boycott. That spring they refused to attend classes for almost a week, organized a no-confidence vote of Turner’s leadership, erected a sign near his residence that read this way to Uncle Tom’s cabin, and hung the president in effigy on the campus green. Turner responded by suspending, or outright expelling in some cases, fifteen students who had been involved in the campus protests, further enraging his critics. As the yearbook dedication indicated two years later, Turner’s path had not been easy. Nor would it become easy. Student dissatisfaction and campus turmoil would recur periodically through the next decade, reaching such intensity that in 1967 Turner would be forced to resign.

How is it that some students could have an image of Turner devoting himself unselfishly and untiringly to his college, while others wanted him fired from his job? How is it that a president who secured millions of dollars’ worth of physical plant improvements for his campus, raised the salaries of his faculty, and secured crucial accreditations for his institution came to be called an Uncle Tom and a tyrant by his students and faculty and even accused of trying to pass for white? The answers to these questions are complicated, and they broach issues of midcentury civil rights activism, anti-segregation politics, Black academic leadership, and the history of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The divergent student responses also hint at the contours of Turner’s complex, even paradoxical personality. He was an authoritarian leader who, while growing up, comported himself cautiously, even meekly. He flourished in elite white institutions of learning, but never believed that white colleges would welcome Black students. His family’s middle-class standing insulated him against many forms of racism, but a fear of white violence became a dominating preoccupation in his life.

But whatever the causes of his students’ conflicting responses to him, it is fair to say that a negative picture has defined Turner’s legacy since his resignation more than half of a century ago. The views that modern historians have preserved come from the students and faculty who most disliked him. In their telling, he was a dictator who knew nothing of compassion.² Historian William Hine, in his recent, and definitive, history of South Carolina State College, offers this summary assessment: As President Turner was rigid and inflexible and tolerated little dissent from students and faculty. He could be abrupt and impatient.³ Likewise, journalist Richard Reid, in a 2008 profile of the college president, asserts that Turner was an introvert by nature and … remained aloof and difficult to reach.⁴ In addition to noting these personal failings, commentators suggest that Turner’s cautious attitude toward civil rights activism put him on the wrong side of history, making his resignation in 1967 inevitable. Hine proposes that as Black Carolinians gained greater political influence through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Turner’s days were numbered. Reid opines, With the civil rights locomotive picking up speed, it became obvious that his time was running out.⁵ Such comments imply that Benner Turner was opposed to civil rights and racial desegregation.

Steady and Measured seeks to reassess Turner’s legacy. It does not deny that Turner had flaws as an academic leader, nor does it claim that all the criticism leveled against him is wrong. But it does argue that the modern view of Turner flattens a complex terrain, often relying selectively on hostile sources, underplaying the political constraints on public HBCU presidents in the South, and lacking an awareness of the formative influences in his early life. My book demonstrates that Turner acted not from support of segregation or a subservience to white authority, but rather from a genuine desire to protect SC State, whose continued existence depended on funding from the South Carolina state legislature. Evidence shows that his authoritarian leadership style derived in part from a fear of white racism, inspired by episodes from his youth. The picture of Benner Turner that emerges from my study is not a glamorous or risk-taking figure, but instead a steady and measured leader (I borrow this phrase from Michelle Obama) who sought to husband the limited resources his institution possessed for the sake of his students.⁶

Steady and measured is arguably not a rubric prized by the political left (or right) in America today. Nor was it necessarily prized in the racial politics of the 1950s and 1960s. The most popular and celebrated HBCU presidents of this period tend to be leaders such as Charles S. Johnson of Fisk University and Benjamin Mays of Morehouse College. Charismatic and talented speakers, they openly endorsed student agitation against segregation; Mays even instructed his students in effective forms of public protest. Turner, by contrast, believed that a cautious approach to political controversy was the path most likely to help the students of SC State, compared to students at private Black colleges. For him, as we will see, a college education was not a means to political liberation but rather an instrument to inculcate a work ethic and achieve financial security, which would protect African Americans from white racism. Whatever the shortcomings of this view, it reflected his own schooling in white institutions and his assessment of the funding power that the white board of trustees and the state legislature had over his college. At least some people at the time agreed with him, which is why the editors of the 1958 Bulldog yearbook saw fit to call Turner a man of dignity, integrity, and courage. We should care about Benner Turner because he potentially expands our understanding of what counts as plausible educational leadership during the civil rights movement.

Yet in addition to investigating what type of education model Turner’s presidency may represent, I also seek to illuminate the nature of a personality that showed such solicitousness for his institution, on the one hand, and arguably overreacted when confronted with disorder, on the other. It has been said that conservative personalities harbor a fear of chaos, and Turner was not an exception to this saying. Through much of his life he carried a kind of dread of white hostility, and it impacted his behavior through many stages of his career—from his student days at Phillips Academy and Harvard, to his postcollege efforts to enter the legal profession in Georgia, to his leadership positions at SC State. Despite his own professional success, he developed a deeply pessimistic view of the prospects of America in general and of African Americans in particular. While many people saw student protests and campus turmoil as vitalizing energy for change, he saw chaos—in one letter he calls it a Frankenstein—and chaos had to be resisted at all costs.⁷ The best chance for success of a Black educator, then, was to maintain as steady and measured a course as one could. I thus propose in this study that we see his disciplinary overreactions, such as they occurred, not as contemptible products of a vindictive character but rather as the tragic mismatch between a personality that valued order and a historical moment in which disorder was unavoidable.

Turner’s Background

It is this question of the personal—the formation of Turner’s personality through his early years—that has especially been absent in scholarly treatments of the man. Many of these details about Turner’s early life were gleaned from exclusive interviews I was able to arrange with Turner’s son and daughter. We will see, for example, that he was born into a degree of privilege, the son of a physician who was able to send him to Phillips Academy and Harvard University, institutions in which he excelled. Yet these educational privileges were not without ambivalence. Growing up, Turner had chafed at the limited resources that Black public schools offered, but once at elite white institutions he could not shake the impression that he was an outsider, someone permitted through the gates but not completely welcome. His teachers and advisors during this period refer to his fine work ethic but also to his cautious, tentative personality. As a result of this ambivalence, Turner came to think of his education not so much as an occasion to break down racial barriers but as a means to maintain the financial security that his father had worked so hard to procure for his family.

It is difficult to overstate the influence of Benner Turner’s father on the formation of his personality and sense of mission. The son of a single mother, E. J. Turner grew up in profound poverty and, by dint of hard work and talent, put himself through college and medical school. He worked as a physician and surgeon in Columbus, Georgia, where Turner was born in 1905. E. J. devoted himself to Black advancement, offering free medical services to impoverished African Americans and helping to arrange the construction of a Black wing of the local whites-only hospital. Importantly, as we will discuss, E. J. Turner’s sense of racial mission did not involve desegregation, but instead relied on the ways in which Black people in Columbus could develop resources to protect themselves against white prejudice. He often warned his young son about the danger this prejudice posed to Black people and as much as possible involved him in his efforts to help. Indeed, so deeply did E. J. want his son to appreciate the danger that he took him, when about eight years old, on an expedition to prevent a lynching, during which Turner witnessed the murder of a Black teenager. This event, along with his father’s commitment to Black advancement, profoundly influenced Turner’s later sense of his mission as an educator.

An examination of Turner’s life immediately after college reveals further events that intensified his pessimism about race relations. Turner did not in fact turn to education after college as his first career choice. Instead he turned to law, working for some time in the Philadelphia law firm of Raymond Pace Alexander, a prominent Black lawyer known for his advocacy of civil rights and racial justice. That Turner chose this type of work for his first job raises strong doubts about the accusations of his critics that he was fundamentally uninterested in civil rights. But upon returning to Georgia, he found that state officials had rigged the bar exam so that African American applicants were never allowed to pass. This episode hardened Turner’s sense that the white powers that be could not be trusted to help Black Americans, especially in the South. He entered his career in education through the side door, as it were: A friend at North Carolina Central College of Law encouraged Turner to join the faculty there, and five years later, in 1947, Turner was invited to apply for the deanship of the law school at South Carolina State College, where he eventually became president.

The foregoing paragraphs serve merely to introduce readers to the outline of Benner Turner’s life before becoming president of SC State. The details will emerge in the chapters that follow. However this outline already suggests several themes that will guide us throughout this book. One is that the experiences of Turner’s early life predisposed him to regard education as a safety net or shield against white aggression, rather than as a tool for reforming American race relations. Despite his success at Phillips Academy and Harvard, he had reason to be skeptical that white America would welcome its Black citizens as equals. Another theme from his early life is that Southern segregationist politics, although despised by Turner, provided him with professional opportunities that would otherwise have been absent. NC Central College and SC State, where he found employment, were both public HBCUs funded by southern state governments trying to avoid integration. Did Turner think such opportunities amounted to a genuinely fair, racially just society? No. But he had come to believe that the prospects of achieving such a society were exceedingly slim.

HBCUs and Their Presidents

The fact that Turner found employment at two Black colleges, after he could not find work as a Harvard-educated lawyer, is itself part of the history of HBCUs and of their status in the midcentury South. The private Black colleges and universities established after the Civil War, often by philanthropic foundations and missionary programs, tended to offer remedial education to former slaves as well as teaching credentials for future African American teachers.⁸ These institutions were centers of Black advancement and racial tolerance within hostile communities where racial segregation was the law.⁹ Yet after the passage of the Second Morrill Land Grant of 1890, which essentially required