TELL ME ABOUT THAT LETTER WITH UH JIM LAWSON AND HIS ATTEMPTS TO, HE WAS GOING TO UH, RESIGN RATHER THAN LETTING THEM EXPEL HIM.

Well, the pressures had been mounting, of course, for, for days and uh, uh, Jim Lawson, being a, a, considerate and a gentle person basically, agreed to withdraw voluntarily from Vanderbilt University, from the divinity school, uh, called me and asked me to come over to uh, go over the letter he had prepared the night before, he and his wife who had been my secretary, Dorothy Wood, and uh, my position was-no, you don't do that, you don't let them off the hook that uh, you're going to go, you're going to have to leave Jim, but make ‘em kick you out so that they and the world will know what this, where this institution stands and what it's up to, which is what he did then-when he went uh, over to the meeting that had been uh, convened for the purpose of announcing that Mr. Lawson had uh, agreed to withdraw, and uh, for the sake of harmony and peace in the Vanderbilt fellowship here. And when Jim said-I'm not withdrawing, of course, there was a great deal of hostility and the Dean of [unintelligible]asked all outsiders to leave and so the press people started leaving and then he looked at me and said-this is a family matter, and, and so I, being a gentleman, gentleman too, started to leave and Jim and some of the other white students caught my jacket and said, said to the Dean – he is family, which I considered that I was family. I had been very much involved in the entire situation because of the relationship of, of, his wife being my secretary and working with me, and he being a friend also. But had he resigned uh, on his own, I think it would have been a totally different, different picture that the world would have got of what was going on in Nashville, because they would have shrugged it off and said-now everybody's happy, there's no, uh, but, but in reality this, there might have been a little smooth scar healed over, but underneath it was still seething caldron of infection-which had to erupt, had to erupt sometime, and it might as well have been then, and there

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