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TI: When you returned back to Los Angeles, how did you and the others share your experiences of what happened?

RD: Well, there was a huge meeting at which we all spoke. Got a lot of publicity in the newspapers. My mentor Saloutos happened to be department chairman at that time, and he'd, first of all, made no objection to us leaving, and everybody just cancelled classes. Classes were going on, we were missing work. Teaching assistants took over mine. One outraged taxpayer called him up to complain, and Saloutos reported that he told him, the guy said, "What are those history professors doing down there anyway? They should be teaching." And Saloutos said that he responded, "Our professors not only teach history, they make history. That's what they were doing." So there was support, and later, I think one of the funniest conversations I've ever had in my life, Dr. King came to campus, and we had to get permission, they still had a speech code then, it was hard to get permission. Then we had to get permission to raise money. And I'm dealing with a very, very nice man, the vice chancellor, political scientist, I forget his name at the moment, who actually asked me, "I can approve this, but won't it embarrass Dr. King for you to people to be asking for money?" My jaw just dropped. I said, "If you think you can embarrass a Baptist preacher by asking for money, you don't understand what Baptist preachers are like." [Laughs] Of course he wants money. And they made a nice contribution, they passed the hat, and there was a fancy luncheon for Dr. King. And one of the students who was in charge, who'd been in charge, who'd been down in Macon and was in charge of collecting money showed up. I arrived for dessert, and with cash. [Laughs] So there was generally a good feeling, although I'm sure there were faculty who thought that that was not what people ought to do. But there was no significant objection in the history department. And, in fact, we were subsidized, not by departmental funds, but by the individual donations, into a pot to pay for the tickets.

Now, I continued to teach. I seemed to be well on the road to getting tenure, my tenure was approved by the department, and then I was informed that the administration had denied my tenure, which was a shock.

TI: Now, was that a very unusual move by the administration?

RD: Yes, highly so. Highly so. And I was shocked, I had published a well-received book, which was the standard, I had glowing reports of my teaching, I had been invited to join the only university social organization I've ever been associated with, the Golden Bruin, which was a student-faculty association, and I was much sought-after to talk at various student affairs. I had plenty of university service, etcetera. I cannot definitively say what happened. Many of my colleagues were furious, three senior American historians formally protested. I was advised by many people to fight it, I said, "I have no intention of fighting it. I'm going to teach history somewhere, I'm going to write history, and I'm not going to spend my time trying to overturn a decision." And I had great support from my senior colleagues. I had a year, but I didn't want the year; I wanted to get out of there.

TI: But going back to your decision not to fight it, here Los Angeles was so convenient for you. You had a house, this was where Judith was from, and you had done really all the things that would be needed to get tenure, and you're denied in a very unusual way. Why didn't you fight it?

RD: Because I didn't think it was worth it. I knew it would take a great deal of energy. In addition, I was having some serious health problems in Los Angeles. It was not a healthy place to live, but that wasn't the big thing, although I'd had a couple of really serious episodes. I remember getting very violently ill at an outdoor wedding ceremony, and Judith got me in the car, and we drove, went straight to the beach where the air is clearer. But as I say, I had the next year. I could have spent the next year there, but I didn't want to do that and I made that clear. And those days, the old boys ran the world. And without my applying, John Caughey had made some phone calls, and the University of Wyoming chairman called me and asked me if I would be willing to be interviewed for an appointment there, at the OAH meeting, and I said, yes, I'd be happy to be interviewed. And I'd been assured by Caughey that they were going to hire me, "unless you do something very stupid." So we had a good interview and they hired me. They hired me as an associate professor with tenure, and the next year I was made a full professor, and that was that. Oh, Wyoming was a great place, we can talk about that later. I would have loved to have stayed there, would have been happy to stay there my whole life, except that the public schools were horrible. The elementary schools were okay. Most of the teachers in the elementary schools, there had once been a university lab school, but there was now no longer. But the public schools were good, and most of the teachers were faculty wives. But not in the junior high school and the high school. They were all mostly UW graduates, extremely racist. I met the vice principal of the junior high school, who, knowing that I had a young son, said, "We got too many" -- he didn't say Mexicans, he used another word -- "but we get rid of them pretty quick. You don't need to worry about that." So there was no way that we were going to let our kids into those. So it was indicated that we ought to leave, but I'd done nothing about it because the decision was several years away, but I was afraid to stay there. I was already acting head of the department. But I had a job opportunity in my third year, and I took it.

TI: And this was at SUNY?

RD: To go to SUNY. And the only real problem -- we loved Wyoming, but the salary wasn't very good. Even if we decided to send them away to school, which we didn't want to do, it would have to be down in Denver or Boulder or someplace like that. The salary wasn't very good, and the SUNY salary was much, much better.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.