When Professor of Medicine John Sergent looks around, he sees a different Vanderbilt than the one he graduated from in 1963.

According to Sergent, Vanderbilt during the 60s was not only apathetic but also "incredibly homogeneous."

"It wasn't just that it was apathetic; it was that everybody pretty much had similar backgrounds and similar ideas about everything," he said. "You may feel it's apathetic now, but you had a Muslim president of the student body a few years ago. Vanderbilt, of the top 30 universities in the country, has the fourth highest percentage of blacks in the freshman class. I promise you. It's a very different Vanderbilt."

He said that Vanderbilt owes its active student body to the increased diversity of today's university, for which Sergent laid the foundation in his time on campus.

When Sergent arrived at Vanderbilt "there were probably three black students on campus," but by the time he left, the board had voted to desegregate the university.

As a student government senator during the 1961-62 academic year, then-sophomore Sergent spearheaded the successful student-led effort to bring black undergraduates to Vanderbilt.

At that time, Vanderbilt would only admit black students if a comparable program did not exist for them in Nashville. Thus, all undergraduate schools and the medical school were entirely off-limits to black students.

The university expelled civil rights activist James Lawson, a student in the Divinity School, during Sergent's first year on campus, and despite his better instincts, the freshman did nothing.

"I knew what was good and what was right, and the divinity students were protesting and were marching around Kirkland Hall, but I was a first-semester freshman in college, I had joined a fraternity, I had a girlfriend - life was great and I didn't want to hear about it," he said.

Sergent said that although it is hard to imagine today how much courage it took for students to join the civil rights movement, he does not know why he waited as long as he did.

"I think the answer to that is simply inertia," he said. "Everything was going so well. I think you tend to compartmentalize things because you couldn't live with it if you didn't. You either make the decision that you're going to become completely radical and work every day, every minute to change the system, or you compromise and you compartmentalize and you take that part of your life and you do what you can."

The long road to desegregation

Sergent began to do what he could the following year, becoming the first student body representative to introduce an anti-segregation resolution to student government.

"The typical things we dealt with were things like whether the alley behind the TriDelt house ought to be one way or two way," he said. "So one day, in the middle of debating the alley behind the TriDelt house, I proposed a bill that we should ‘recommend to the Board of Trust that Vanderbilt admit qualified Negro applicants.'"

The resolution failed by one vote, but Sergent and his followers proposed that a student body referendum be held a month later.

Battling a student apathy that "would be hard to describe," Sergent and other supporters such as former Hustler editors Lamar Alexander and Roy Blount Jr., sought to educate the student body in almost every way possible - from public debate to newspaper editorials to group meetings.

"That was a very interesting month," he said. "I just made myself available. I would go to talk to anybody - sororities, dorms, whatever. It was the most interesting experience."

Sergent said that moststudents he spoke with did not have the experience with desegregation that he did. Halfway through his high school career, Sergent's high school in Frankfort, Ky. underwent a peaceful, relatively uneventful integration.

According to Sergent, Vanderbilt in those days was an intensely Southern school, with about 85 to 90 percent of the student body coming from Tennessee and its border states.

"I found myself frequently being the only person in a large group or in the dorm that actually not only favored desegregation, but had been through it and thought it was no big deal," he said. "I was really probably the only person I knew, of my good friends, that had ever gone to school with a single black person."

In speaking with students, Sergent discovered that many did not really understand what desegregation would entail.

For instance, one sorority woman was surprised to hear that white and black students would live in the same dorms once black students were allowed to attend the university.

Still other students could not fathom the possibility of a desegregated campus - or country - Sergent said.

"I can remember a lot of friends who said it will never happen," he said. "Arkansas or Alabama or wherever they were from will never desegregate, and they really believed it. It was such an ingrained part of the life they grew up with. People today don't realize it was as rigid here as South Africa."

The referendum lost byjust over200 votes, but Sergent saidthe failure may have been a blessing in disguise, as the board voted to desegregate the university in its next meeting.

"My thinking is that (Chancellor Harvie) Branscomb wanted it to lose because if it had passed, the board members were so reactionary, that they probably would have just said, ‘We're not going to do it. We're not going to let the students push us around,' and it might not have happened," he said.

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