Johnson: My chat with man who stoked the anti-DEI flames in Alabama

[aubiefifty 16,791]

al.com

 

Johnson: My chat with man who stoked the anti-DEI flames in Alabama

Updated: Mar. 28, 2024, 10:25 a.m.|Published: Mar. 28, 2024, 6:30 a.m.

17–22 minutes

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This is an opinion column.

I listened. I listened because Earl H. Tilford, from what I discerned in our first few moments of conversation, is a learned, thoughtful man. And he had stories.

I listened because he’s 10 years my senior and that’s how I was raised to treat elders. “We’re almost the same generation,” he shared.

Indeed, I listened because much of our respective journeys are shared. We each recall segregation, though him, being an Alabamian, much more vividly than I. He remembers when it began to crack in the state, at the University of Alabama (where he earned two degrees).

“Segregation ended in Alabama when white people decided it was profitable to do that,” he said. “The University of Alabama knew it was inevitable. They got behind desegregation mainly because it couldn’t get students or professors to come here to teach.”

He spoke of Gov. George Wallace’s infamous stand and the schoolhouse door in 1963—even wrote a book about its reverberations: Turning the Tide—the University of Alabama in the 1960s. “The stand … is a big symbol,” he said, “especially for Alabamians who perhaps feel some guilt, liberal guilt, white guilt about those days.”

Tilford, who is white, in case you’ve not already discerned, was a high-school senior in Leighton, Alabama on September 15, 1963, the day the Ku Klux Klan bombed 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four little girls and two young boys in the hateful aftermath. His father was a Presbyterian minister who had played football at the University of Georgia, where, Tilford said, he experienced a “complete worldview change.”

That afternoon, the father said to the son: “If this is what defending the Southern way of life is all about, it’s not worth defending.”

“His next sermon was, ‘If God is our Father, all men are brothers.’ That didn’t go over too well in rural Alabama,” Tilford said. “[A year later], while he was at a Presbyterian meeting in Huntsville, the Klan visited our house, terrorized my mother, shot my dog, and burned a cross on my lawn. Dad moved to a church in Miami, but I stayed in Alabama. So, I grew up with this. I didn’t like George Wallace.”

So, I listened, and he had stories—like the day Robert “Bobby” Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, joined Tilford and his girlfriend, whom Shelton knew, while they were having lunch on Greensboro Avenue in Tuscaloosa.

“I wasn’t too happy about that,” Tilford recalled. “I always refer to him as the Inferior Lizard. He asked me what I was majoring in. I said history and he said, ‘The Klan Bureau of Investigation, the KBI, now knows that 50 percent of that history department is card-carrying communists.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m sure of that, yes sir.’”

Fascinating stories. I was intrigued that our perspectives were in many ways aligned, yet so vastly disparate on this one thing: DEI.

Still, I listened—and tried to understand. Tried.

Tilford, who earned a Ph.D. from George Washington University, is partly responsible for where we are. For the death of diversity, equity and inclusion at state institutions.

Before the 2024 legislative session, Tilford says he sent copies of “Going Woke in Dixie: The Progress of DEI at the University of Alabama and Auburn University” to every Republican legislator, Gov. Kay Ivey, members of the Commission on Higher Education, and “important politicos around the state, he said. The 36-page report published by the conservative Claremont Institute utilizing much of Tilford’s research into DEI at UA states: “DEI proponents generally pursue radical policies under cover of seemingly inviting aspirations. The real DEI policies are grave and gathering dangers that undermine the advancement of knowledge, the diversity of ideas, meritocracy, societal and campus unity, and the achievement of the common good.”

Tilford did not send the report to Democrats. “The Black Democrats were going to oppose it anyway,” he said. “I know the Republicans have a supermajority. So, all I needed was the Republican vote.

“[An anti-DEI bill] got passed in the House in 2023 but was not brought to the floor of the Senate for a vote,” Tilford added. “I told that to Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth and he said, ‘I can get it to a vote.’ So, it happened this year.”

In early March, the House passed an amended version of SB129, which the Senate approved on March 19. The following day, Gov. Kay Ivey signed it into law; it goes into effect on Oct. 1.

Beyond pulling the plug on DEI programs—exactly what that means for colleges and state agencies, no one has yet a clue—the bill bans any program that “advocates for a divisive concept.”

“I don’t like the term ‘divisive issues’ or whatever it is,” he shared. “That’s not a good term. But I hope we get a return to excellence in higher education—and excellence is blind to your color, it’s blind to all these other things.

“I’m sorry for all the things that happened in the past, but 60 years since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of ‘65, it’s time to perform and affirmative action has to go.”

I listened.

Tilford used all the buzzwords and phrases and narrow definitions of DEI parroted by Republican legislators as they bullied the bill through, despite a dearth of provable facts and passionate pushback not just from “Black Democrats” but from students from schools across the state for whom DEI has helped create a safe community.

“We need to be looking at merit or someday someone’s gonna come along and say, a certain group keeps underperforming. Maybe they are a different group, and that would be deadly,” Tilford said. “You’re putting people in groups by color, by class, by sexual orientation. You’re not considering them as individuals. And that’s how they have to be considered in a meritocracy.”

DEI wasn’t yet on Tilford’s radar when he retired from teaching history at Grove City College, a conservative institution in Pennsylvania more than 20 years ago and returned to Tuscaloosa; higher education was in the crosshairs.

One day he and “one of my best friends … he’s also Hispanic,” Tilford shared. “He has a Ph.D. in Latin American studies from Tulane … we sat around and mused about the decline of higher education and how far left it seemed to be going throughout the country.”

Tilford cited the Port Huron statement, a 1962 manifesto by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), mostly authored by social and political activist Tom Hayden, who later became a fiery California state legislator.

“It says if you take over higher education and can take over the culture and you can take over the country,” Tilford noted, “because it’s out of higher education that you get your leaders in industry, in business, in politics, in the military, in the press, the media and so on. So, you take over higher education, you can radicalize America.

“In 2000, we decided to heck with all this meeting for lunch and fussing. Let’s do something.”

They formed Alabamians for Academic Excellence and Integrity, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. It was relatively dormant until recent years when emotions were stirred in the wake of the movement to remove Confederate memorials from public spaces.

“We got a lot of inquiries right after [UA] started removing monuments, like the monument to the Confederate alumni who were killed in the Civil War,” he said. “Many of them were students at the time and—and changing building names.”

In the summer of 2022, Tilford taught a course at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute—”old people living at Capstone Village on campus,” he said. It was called “Higher Education in America since 1960.” Lecture topics included critiques of critical race theory (“I tried to keep it to just what it is, as ideologically pure as I could.”) and The New York Times’ widely acclaimed and scrutinized 1619 Project.

“What it is and going into [author Nikole Hannah-Jones] calling plantations slave labor camps, and saying they literally worked slaves to death. I said that’s ridiculous. A slave was a valuable investment. You don’t work a slave to death, and you also have responsibilities for those slaves if they’re sick or retired.”

I listened.

“I also said some of her essays in there were quite good—on her life which is quite moving, growing up in Mississippi and Iowa, but then it comes down to what we need reparations, that is the bottom line.”

That summer, Tilford met Dr. Clifford Humphrey, who was joining Troy University as director of its Institute for Leadership Development.

Another narrow definition of DEI attributes its primary reason for existence to recruiting more students of color—for DEI critics that’s code for Black students.

“Troy is the only university in Alabama that does not have a DEI office or program and 35% of their student population is Black, unlike Alabama, where it’s 11.2% and Auburn weighs about 4.8%,” Tilford cited. “So I went down and talked to the people in Troy and said, I advise you not to have a DEI office but to establish a classical college and recruit like you recruit football players: Go to good schools in the north and find African American scholars and say, ' come to Troy and get a classical education in a comfortable place in the cradle of the Confederacy and the civil rights movement.’

“One of the deans said, ‘We don’t have a DEI department and we were graduating African Americans before Alabama desegregated because we had Troy overseas and had African Americans involved in the military taking courses and getting Troy degrees.’”

That’s how, for Republican legislators, Troy became proof DEI “doesn’t work.”

It was Humphrey who introduced Tilford to Scott Yenor, a political science professor at Boise State and Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute, where he is a key provocateur of the anti-DEI movement nationwide. Ultimately, he authored “Going Woke in Dixie” with the aid of Tilford.

“He had done [DEI] studies at Texas A&M, and someplace in New England, and a couple of other states and published studies and had already collected a lot of material about DEI at the University of Alabama by just simply going online and getting their Path Forward plan,” Tilford said. “They wanted $10,000 [membership fee]; they gave us a $1,500 discount because I turned all my research over to them.”

I reached out to Yenor. “Claremont works with people on the ground in many states to try to preserve the American way of life,” he said in an email. “We are very proud to have had influential and intelligent allies in Alabama who spread the word about our DEI report.”

He named Tilford, calling him a “patriot.”

After “Going Woke” was published, membership in Tilford’s organization grew dramatically.

Now, you know I didn’t just listen. Didn’t just allow hazy claims to go unchallenged.

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Tilford cited a UA professor who promised anonymity and that “his job would not be affected” if he spoke.

“This professor told of a student in the English department who came to him and said she was taking this course on Colonial writers and [William] Bradford wasn’t covered, [John] Winthrop wasn’t covered, and [Nathanial] Hawthorne wasn’t covered,” Tilford said. “It was all about slave peoples and Native Americans and how awful America was. On the last day of the lesson, [the professor] says, ‘OK anyone in here who’s still proud to be an American, raise your hand’ and no one did. Now that’s intimidation.”

That’s also a solitary secondhand account from an unnamed source who was not in the classroom. I asked: “Did you obtain a syllabus for the course?”

“I didn’t,” Tilford responded. “It didn’t come to me; but we do have syllabi for most courses.”

Just not the one cited.

Tilford pivoted, another tactic when one does not have a salient counter. He cited another example—one regularly mentioned by Republican legislators—of why DEI deserved to die.

“A young woman who was a doctoral student in nursing wrote to President Bell demanding her money back and she was talking about a professor who’s on the DEI board on the Faculty Senate. And she had said that something like in 80% of police killings, policemen killed handicapped or disabled people. [The young woman] said that’s just wrong. And not only is it wrong, my husband’s a police officer. If you go around creating myths like that, police officers get shot.”

I found it hard to believe a professor uttered that statement. “Now if you consider being in jail three, four, or five times a handicap, maybe that’s so,” Tilford said. I couldn’t unhear that. (I later discovered a study by the Ruderman Family Foundation, which found that almost half of people killed in police shootings have some sort of disability.)

I asked if the professor’s statement was verified. “No,” Tilford said. “[The student] said she said it, and the professor refused to change. There’s an atmosphere there.”

Tilford said it was difficult to get faculty or students to come to Montgomery and speak in favor of the bill. “The only student we got was a graduate alumnus and was a law student at Faulkner. Another young woman I talked to said you can speak to me, you just cannot let my name out. [There’s the] strongest sort of an atmosphere there.”

I listened.

Tilford also charged that “DEI things” were affecting tenure decisions. “If you look in the wording of some of these DEI things about tenure promotion, you’ve got to toe the line.

“I read from the report word for word to the Legislature,” he said. “This is what they say it says: essentially in the tenure process, you should not overlook social activism as a key element. I’m not a pro-tenure kind of guy, but in tenure, you consider pedagogy, which I think is most important, research, publication within your field, and service to the university.

“But when you put in a political dimension and you say, ‘service in previously underserved communities should not be overlooked’—what if you get up for tenure and you say well, I organized a group of students to go to January’s March for Life in Washington DC because I think unborn children are an underserved community?”

I challenged that as a hypothetical, which wouldn’t carry an ounce of merit in any tenure process.

“A real conversation I had with a professor—well, I didn’t have it, my friend who goes [to Montgomery] with me did. He handed him a pencil with two baby feet on it [symbolizing anti-choice] and the other assistant professor said, ‘I couldn’t accept that because if anyone ever saw me with it, I wouldn’t be advanced here.’”

Rep. Ed Oliver (Alexander City), Sen. Will Barfoot (Pike Road), and Ainsworth pushed the bill through the Legislature. He traveled to Montgomery on five occasions to testify before committees. “Earl was really helpful,” Oliver told me.

Barfoot said he did not “personally know” Tilford, nor “ever spoken to him.”

“Mr. Tilford and his colleagues were very helpful with their testimony and I appreciated their willingness to share their thoughts and experiences.”

Tilford recalled one particular day of testimony:

“Four guys who were trans came in, two guys in drag and a fellow with a beard, a heavyset fella from Huntsville wearing heavy makeup, a shirt and tie and a skirt and purple hose and red high heels,” he said. “One of the leaders in Southern Poverty Law Center, well dressed well spoken, was there to be an opponent. An African American minister was there as an opponent and a couple of very nice African American women spoke.”

I listened.

“But these people, they don’t realize the seven-to-three mix up there [on the committee] is seven white guys who are lawyers, businessmen, farmers, one of them a deputy sheriff. They are, as I call them: country, Bible-reading, whiskey-drinking, woman-loving Americans. That turned them off.”

Listened best I could.

“When an African American showed up with a BLM T-shirt and a Hamas shawl, that don’t fly in Moulton, Alabama. I just sort of said, ‘Thank you, Lord,’ and continued on because I know how the vote’s gonna go.”

I tried. Really.

“If you focused on race, or sex or gender, that makes you a racist or sexist or genderist,” he continued. “I am a ‘[color-]blind’ kind of guy. I know that’s out of style now but I really do believe it should be content and character not the color of your skin.” Here, as I drew a long, deep breath, Tilford informed me, “Believe it or not I gave a Martin Luther King talk at a predominantly Black school in Philadelphia a few years ago.”

Yes, my mind went right to “Abbott Elementary.” I so needed that.

“I said if you keep this up, after 60 years of struggling, people are going to wonder why the struggle still continues. You need to get out there and show people, ‘We can be better than you because we can be smart like you.’ There was a club at the school that agreed with me.”

After listening, after hearing that DEI died in Alabama, essentially, due to a litany of unsubstantiated anecdotes, hypotheticals, and unfounded fears, I asked: Why not address the individual incidents—questionable as they were—rather than flush all of DEI, including the good it does to impart empathy, understanding, and growth for so many?

“It’s so terribly embedded that you have to do it,” he said. “It’s like a cancer. If you have cancer, you gotta get the tumor out. You can’t say well so let some of this cancer stay. No, you got to get the tumor out.”

I listened and wondered—even if it turns out the surgeon was sick, not the patient.

I’m a member of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary. My column appears on AL.com, as well as the Lede. Tell me what you think at rjohnson@al.com, and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj

[homersapien 11,373]

You should have included the author's name up front: Roy S. Johnson.

An excellent piece, which speaks for itself.   Tilford comes across as a jerk and hardly has the objectivity of a true academic, best illustrated by this quote:

I asked: Why not address the individual incidents—questionable as they were—rather than flush all of DEI, including the good it does to impart empathy, understanding, and growth for so many?

“It’s so terribly embedded that you have to do it,” he said. “It’s like a cancer. If you have cancer, you gotta get the tumor out. You can’t say well so let some of this cancer stay. No, you got to get the tumor out.”

This is a man who is clearly agenda-driven.

Sweet Home Alabama.

Edited March 28 by homersapien