The big news in academia these days is Princeton's decision to scratch Woodrow Wilson's name from its famed international studies program. There is a similar movement afoot at the University of Arkansas to remove a statue of Senator J. William Fulbright from its place in front of Old Main, and even to change the name of the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.
This debate has national and especially international implications because of the tens of thousands of former Fulbright scholars living in the United States and abroad.
There are in fact two Fulbrights: the 30-year senator who between 1944 and 1974 voted against every major civil rights bill to come before Congress, and the enlightened internationalist who created the Fulbright Exchange Program, crusaded against American neo-imperialism, and played a major role in ending the war in Vietnam.
J. William Fulbright was a son of privilege, born to a journalist mother and well-to-do businessman father. He grew up in northwest Arkansas, then home to only a handful of African Americans. The state's plantations lay far to the south and east. He attended the University of Arkansas, won a Rhodes scholarship with the help of his influential family, and returned to the state to become the University's youngest president.
Ousted by political enemies of his mother, Fulbright ran successfully for a seat in the House of Representatives in 1942. Two years later he became the state's junior senator; he would become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1959 and remain in the Senate until 1974.
To the consternation of his liberal supporters, Fulbright voted against renewal of the Fair Employment Practices Commission in 1946. The junior senator from Arkansas went on to sign the 1956 Southern Manifesto which pledged massive resistance to court-ordered segregation. He voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act and refused to speak out against Governor Orval Faubus during the Little Rock Crisis. Following John F. Kennedy's election as president in 1960, Fulbright was the leading contender to become secretary of state. The NAACP voiced strenuous objections and, he was passed over.
Shortly after the Sept. 15, 1963, church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., which took the lives of four young black girls, JWF phoned Robert Kennedy to express his outrage. Nevertheless, Fulbright proceeded to vote against the 1964 Equal Accommodations Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, even participating in the filibusters against them.
Then there is the other Fulbright, creator of the massive educational exchange program that bears his name, co-author of the 1943 Fulbright-Connally Resolution putting Congress on record favoring the creation of a United Nations, and author of the 1964 "Old Myths and New Realities" speech which demanded a new Cold War foreign policy in which the United States would stop supporting right-wing dictatorships in the name of anti-communism.
By 1967 JWF, like Martin Luther King, was drawing parallels between racial injustice in the United States, the war in Vietnam, and American support for colonialism in general. His speeches and books--"The Arrogance of Power," "The Price of Empire"--were sweeping indictments of the military-industrial complex, of racism in the United States, and of imperialism abroad. His congressional hearings and speeches played a key role in the passage of the War Powers Act and the ending of the war in Vietnam.
Fulbright told me in a series of interviews I conducted with him in the early 1990s that in representing a state like Arkansas as he did, he had to choose between being a liberal/progressive on foreign policy and a crusader for racial justice in America. As he pointed out, correctly, the American South was simultaneously the most racist and anti-communist region of the country. He could not, he insisted, ask his constituents to abandon Jim Crow and at the same time see Vietnam turned over to the forces of international communism.
As president, Lyndon Johnson faced the same dilemma. In 1964 and 1965, as he was pushing his historic civil rights bills through Congress and deciding whether or not to pull out of Vietnam or escalate the war, he told Bill Moyers and others that he could not ask the Southern Democrats and the conservative Republicans allied with them to acquiesce on voting rights, integration and affirmative action, and simultaneously accept the communization of southeast Asia.
Here the parallel with Fulbright ends. Johnson anguished over the war in Vietnam, initially resisting the Joint Chiefs' demands for escalation, and fretting in private once the United States took over the war. In the end, he accepted full responsibility for that horrific conflict. There is no evidence, aside from that single call to Bobby Kennedy, that Bill Fulbright ever anguished over his voting record on civil rights.
So what is to be done? History belongs to the present. Which of the two iconic Fulbrights will prevail, the segregationist or the internationalist? All I can say is that racism in this country is systemic and pervasive. It has been and still is the greatest threat to the American experiment. In the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, the country faces yet another turning point. Icons are important, but not as important as the protection of constitutional rights and sweeping reform to ensure economic and social justice for all.
Randall B. Woods is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas and author of Fulbright: A Biography. The opinions expressed in this article are his and his alone.