"Yale ... made me see the South through eyes other than my own. In a very real sense, it gave me the South."
These words, written by University of Virginia professor Edward Ayers 1980 Ph.D., are included in the exhibit "Elms and Magnolias: Old Blue in a Coat of Gray," now on view at the Sterling Memorial Library. The display explores the University's historic links to Dixieland, as well as the contributions of Yale's sons and daughters of the South.
"Elms and Magnolias" was prepared by Garry Reeder Jr. '97, a history major from North Carolina, with guidance from Yale history professors Robin Winks and Howard Lamar. "Creating this exhibit was a way for me to understand a part of Yale that is not well known, to confront assumptions and stereotypes, and to explore all kinds of concepts about the South and what it means to be a Southerner," says Mr. Reeder.
Coming to Yale raises questions of identity and perception for the transplanted, contends the undergraduate. "How do I see myself as a Southerner? How do other people see me? New Haven and Yale have caused all Southerners to think about themselves in a new way," he says.
"Elms and Magnolias" reflects Mr. Reeder's sense of "the many Souths that exist within the past and the present." In the exhibit, he illustrates parallel changes in the South and on campus, and celebrates the importance to the University and to the country of its Southern constituency, as well as the impact Yale graduates have had on the South.
The display includes photos, letters, newspaper articles, books and other memorabilia from Yale's collections. It covers several centuries -- beginning in the 1700s with Thomas Jefferson's 1793 note to Eli Whitney Class of 1792 regarding patenting the cotton gin, through the 1990s, with profiles of such modern-day Southerners as President Bill Clinton 1973, Law of Arkansas. The exhibit also features archival materials from the South that have no special Yale connection, such as signed visiting cards from Confederate soldiers and correspondence from Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
Mr. Reeder's emphasis is on notable alumni and faculty who came from the South, like John C. Calhoun, Class of 1804, vice president of the United States, or who made a significant contribution to the region, like Connecticut-born Abraham Baldwin, Class of 1772, who established the University of Georgia in 1784.
Among the faculty members Mr. Reeder singles out is Howard R. Lamar, born in Tuskegee, Alabama, who earned his Ph.D. at Yale in 1951 and went on to become a professor of history, dean of Yale College and president of the University. Other sons of the South featured in the display include Yale teachers and scholars Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and C. Vann Woodward.
A section exploring the Civil War and its impact on the University, includes a newspaper clipping describing an incident that occurred one winter's day in 1861, when Yale's Southern students raised a flag of secession on Old Campus and its Northern students stormed the building where the flag flew and tore the banner down. Mr. Reeder notes that when the war began, more than a quarter of the students at Yale put down their books to take up arms -- 199 for the Union, 41 for the South -- altogether, 836 Yale students and alumni served in the Union Army, 80 in the Confederate. After the war, he says, the number of students from the South dropped precipitously, with only two enrolled in 1869.
One of Mr. Reeder's goals is to dispel the myth of Southern homogeneity. "The South has a variety of voices," he notes. Yale's highest ranking Confederate official -- Judah P. Benjamin Class of 1828, attorney general and secretary of war -- is featured along with outspoken Southern abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay Class of 1832. The last case in the exhibit celebrates the diversity that now characterizes the University and features profiles of two distinguished Yale women and two African-Americans: Yale Secretary and Vice President Linda Koch Lorimer of Virginia 1977 Law; Mary Wright, historian and the first woman tenured in the arts and sciences at Yale in 1959; John Blassingame 1971 Ph.D., editor of the Frederick Douglass papers; and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Class of 1973, director of Harvard's African American Studies Program.
"Elms and Magnolias" is on view through August in the main hall of the Sterling Memorial Library, 120 High St.