Patricia Oates Conway’s first college experience will remain with her always — positive memories of friendships and choir trips mixed with the scars of prejudice and isolation.
She enrolled at then-Campbell College in the fall of 1968 to study music, among the first three black students to desegregate the school in the late 60s (basketball star Cordell Wise was the first, coming to Campbell the previous year). She didn’t finish. After two and a half years, she left Buies Creek for the bright lights of Baltimore in 1970 to, as she put it, find herself and start her life.
Forty-seven years later, Conway is ready to finish what she started. This Saturday, she will walk (run, if she has her way) across the stage at Campbell’s spring commencement ceremony (9 a.m., Pope Convocation Center) to receive her long-awaited degree in communication studies. Her graduation will close an important chapter in Campbell University’s history, providing a happy ending to a story that wasn’t all happy moments.
Her first Campbell memory was in the summer of ’68, sitting outside of President Norman A. Wiggins’ office while her counselor from Sampson High School in Clinton, the Rev. Roger A. White (a Campbell grad) spoke to him about her enrollment. White walked out into the lobby where she sat, looked her in the eyes and said, “You’re a Campbell student.”
“Dr. Wiggins asked Rev. White what I had to offer Campbell, and his response was, ‘What can Campbell do for her?’” Conway recalled. “I knew things would be different at Campbell, but I didn’t come in with any fear or apprehension. My mom and dad didn’t raise us around prejudice — we never felt better than or less than the next person. But my dad was a pioneer … a forger. He had a spirit to tackle life, to take it by the horns when the opportunity arose.”
Conway did have something to offer Campbell — her voice. As a freshman, she joined the travelling choir and built strong friendships in the previously all-white group. Others on campus, however, weren’t as accepting. She recalled the first sting of the n-word from a fellow student as she walked to Marshbanks from her dorm to practice piano one afternoon. There was also the choir trip where she and a male white student were refused service at a restaurant in Raleigh because the waitress thought they were a couple.
“Those experiences … they changed my whole scope of things,” she said. “It happens enough times, it does something to you. I became more militant-minded. I’d see people looking side-eyed at me at church, and I handled it, because I was raised in a home of confidence. But part of me was always deciphering why people were like this.”
The stress and the workload — difficult classes and a busy choir schedule — eventually became too much, and Conway left Campbell midway through her third year to move to Baltimore with her aunt and uncle. Work, marriage, three children and a separation marked her 20 years in the city, and in the late 1980s, she returned to North Carolina to be near family. All three of her kids went to college, and as adults, they began to encourage Conway to return.
But it took a chance meeting with the man who introduced her to Campbell the first time — the Rev. White — to seal the deal.
“I was working at Walmart at the time, and I felt a presence behind me. It was the Rev. Roger White,” she said. “We hadn’t seen each other in years, and not long after we exchanged pleasantries, he came out with, ‘When are you going back to Campbell?’ I answered, ‘Why? Am I supposed to?’ He said I needed to do it. ‘They owe you an education,’ he said.”
Earlier that year, Conway lost her oldest son, Gary, who was 35. Before his death, Gary had also encouraged her to return to school, saying she was going to write a book one day.
“I was standing at the edge of a cliff, looking over it, and there was no bottom,” Conway said. “I knew I had to take the leap, though. So I leapt. Four years later, I’m ready to run.”
— Read more about Patricia Conway’s experiences at Campbell (both old and new) in the summer edition of Campbell Magazine