Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 24, 1993 TAG: 9305240041
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAY TAYLOR CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: LEXINGTON LENGTH: Long
Ted DeLaney has come to know the South of his youth, a land of black and white, and many shades of gray.
Born in Lexington in 1943, DeLaney grew up using segregated public restrooms and riding in the back of the bus. He would play in the family's yard in the shadow of three Washington and Lee University fraternity houses, within shouting distance of a segregated institution.
Almost 50 years later, DeLaney is preparing to leave his hometown to pursue opportunity hundreds of miles away, writing yet another chapter in his already poignant life story.
"His really is a Horatio Alger sort of story," said Holt Merchant, a W&L American history professor and DeLaney's undergraduate academic adviser. "He's about as close to being a self-made man as one can be these days."
From the beginning, when DeLaney took a job as a janitor at W&L in 1963, professors noticed something shining inside the young laborer. DeLaney quickly earned a raise and a promotion. Before long, he was running the biology labs, preparing lecture materials and stocking the biology library.
By the late 1970s, DeLaney began partaking of a perk offered W&L employees - free classes. He graduated with a degree in history in 1985, and today he is closing in on a doctoral degree in American history from the College of William and Mary. Since 1991 he has taught part time at W&L.
DeLaney, 49, has endured a minefield of setbacks and ironies that might have hopelessly embittered most people.
In 1961, he graduated from the local black kindergarten-12th grade school, one of the few who made it through, and got into Morehouse College in Atlanta on a scholarship. But the civil rights movement, of all things, did him in.
"My mother's stance was, `You're not going down there to have me worry about you sitting at a lunch counter,' " he said.
A religious young man, DeLaney packed up instead for the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement in Garrison, N.Y., home of the Graymoor Monks. His parents supported this, though they'd once tried to dissuade him from the ministry.
"It was one of the few things my mother and father could come together on," DeLaney said wryly. But he found that the rigid environment of the monastery "was not what I was being called to do."
He returned to Lexington, to a dishwashing job and, soon after, to janitorial work at the university.
While working at W&L, far from being jealous of the privileged white students, DeLaney "enjoyed the students incredibly." The students at W&L "are the envy of anybody in the teaching profession."
As Delaney became a man and a scholar, his admirers say, he learned from the bottom up of the good and evil of the South, and of Washington and Lee itself. "I have a love-hate relationship with this place," he said. "Mostly love."
His criticisms: Much of what students learn is what they teach each other, and at W&L, the student body is "too homogeneous." Two-thirds are males, many of the same socioeconomic strata, and are too infused with ideology, he said.
"I remember the day I read something hilarious about Ronald Reagan and nobody laughed." It was Reagan's infamous statement that trees polluted more than humans. A couple of students snickered - the rest stayed mute.
"We have students who just don't want to participate in an exchange that is counter to what they believe in. Any educated man or woman," he said, "ought to be able to know his opponent's arguments better than the opponent knows them."
At the end of June, DeLaney will move to Geneseo, N.Y., not far from Rochester, where he will become a professor of history at the State University of New York campus there.
"He is just an excellent historian," said W&L historian and ancient-history teacher Taylor Sanders. "He has had a lot of experiences, and all that has helped in his research."
Indeed, Sanders admires DeLaney for overcoming experiences that might have brought down others, or clouded his childhood with bitterness. "That is the Christian side of him," he said. Bitterness "is just so foreign to him."
No doubt it was personal experience and pangs of anger that drove DeLaney to write an honors piece in his senior year on the 1965 desegregation of Lexington's schools.
"It's not a paper we can release," said Merchant, "because some . . . of the villains are still alive. I promised him that we would not let it go out into the general circulation until all the characters are dead and gone," Merchant said.
"It's going to be very useful, once we can use it publicly," he said. "In a lot of ways it's an inspiring story because of the cooperation across racial lines."
And so it is with DeLaney's view of the Deep South. Of its ghosts, he concludes: "Not all of them are humane. Not all of them are brutal."
He has studied Southerners who were repulsed by abolition and Southerners who freed their slaves decades before the Civil War. He's peered through history at slave owners who enjoyed meting out a good beating, at black slave owners and at white owners who fathered children of women slaves.
All are just large eddies in the broad river of DeLaney's Southern studies, and this shows in his teaching, his students say.
"It was interesting for me to see other points of view and to see how slavery functioned and developed in central Latin America and the Caribbean islands," said Catherine Verlander, a rising junior from New Orleans who took DeLaney's course on the history of slavery.
"He really has done more for us than we have done for him. He has provided us with a black presence on the faculty that we desperately needed," Merchant said of DeLaney. "He is a gifted teacher because he is so patient. He really loves people. I know I'm making him sound like St. Francis, but it's the truth."
Though he is an easygoing man, DeLaney cannot accept easy labels for complexities like the South or simple descriptions of historical figures. As a teacher, he struggles to pull back for his students the glib categories and unfold the rich meanings.
He'll be doing that now, not at W&L - which had no openings in the history department to offer DeLaney - but at a campus in upstate New York's Finger Lakes region. He has left before, studying in Williamsburg after teaching in Asheville, N.C., but has always returned to the university and to the town that helped mold him.
by CNB