Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 20, 1994 TAG: 9401200203
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
If he were entering school now as he did in the 1940s - a working-class black child, not the best-dressed, "maybe belligerent" - he doubts the Roanoke Valley teachers he will address Friday would have seen his potential.
Could they have imagined he was bound for Michigan State, where he graduated magna cum laude, or the University of North Carolina, where he earned a doctorate with honors?
Hackley's black teachers in the segregated schools of Roanoke saw his intellectual potential. "See, Mrs. Gilbert didn't care where I lived," he said of Marie Gilbert, his first-grade teacher at the old Gilmer Elementary School.
A talk by Hackley - chancellor of Fayetteville State University in North Carolina, friend of President Bill Clinton and head of Clinton's national board on historically black colleges and universities - leads off a weekend of learning about local black history and multicultural education for 65 teachers.
His 7:30 p.m. speech in Hollins College's Babcock Auditorium is the only public part of a teacher workshop that's drawn more than twice the number of applicants than could be accommodated.
John Kern, a historian and director of the Roanoke Regional Preservation Office of the state's Department of Historic Resources, hopes to do it all again sometime for other teachers.
On Saturday, two busloads of them will tour three of the valley's prime cultural sites: Gainsboro, the historic black neighborhood just north of the railroad tracks from downtown; Oldfields, the rural black community settled next door to Hollins by slaves and servants of the college; and Mount Moriah Baptist Church on U.S. 460 at the city's edge, a congregation founded by slaves in 1858.
About 140 teachers signed up for the 65 bus seats. Kern said some of those who couldn't get on board may follow the buses in their cars so they still can take in the tours.
Sponsors are the Harrison Museum of African American Culture, Hollins College, Jefferson National Forest, Roanoke and Roanoke County schools, the Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation and the Roanoke Regional Preservation Office.
Hackley, 53, grew up in Northwest and Northeast Roanoke. He used to play in a neighborhood torn down to build the Roanoke Civic Center.
Hackley Avenue in Northwest Roanoke was named for his mother, the late Ernestine Parker Hackley. His father, the late David Walton Hackley, worked at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Salem. Lloyd Hackley's sister, Rose Hackley Hale, is a Roanoke teacher.
"Roanoke did wonderful things for a lot of us," Hackley said of his Roanoke contemporaries. "The more I travel, the prouder I am of having grown up in Roanoke. It was a great place to be a child, even with all the problems people say we had."
He applauded desegregation and the freedom it brought, but, he said, "Somehow in moving from the [black] communities, we gave up some of the power of that culture. Now we are beginning to understand the importance of culture to the development of children and the power and energy of a people."
Katherine Jefferson McCain, his teacher in the second grade, welcomed him into her home after school. "She'd feed me and I'd work around her yard," he said. He entered her spelling bees and wouldn't misbehave, for fear of losing her respect.
Hackley, a retired Air Force major, went on to become a professor at the Air Force Academy, a vice president at the University of North Carolina and chief executive officer at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.
For all his post-graduate degrees, honors, high-profile jobs and political expertise on the Middle East, Africa and the former Soviet Union, Hackley credits his elementary teachers with his success. "Everything after that was merely sharpening up what they had already done," he said.
Hackley met Clinton at the Little Rock airport in 1981, when Clinton was between his two Arkansas governorships and Hackley had just come to the university in Pine Bluff.
"We've sat in his kitchen early in the morning, wrestling with issues," Hackley said.
During Clinton's second term in the governor's mansion, Hackley helped him and Hillary Rodham Clinton develop an educational reform plan for the state. He keeps in touch with them and saw Clinton right before Christmas.
by CNB