Oral history interview with Sampson Buie, Jr., 1991 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Sampson Buie, Jr.
INTERVIEWER: Cheryl Junk
DATE: February 22, 1991
[Begin Side A]
CJ: And Dr. Buie, I think if we could begin by your telling us the years that you were at UNCG
[The University of North Carolina at Greensboro], the course of study you pursued and the
reason that you choose UNCG.
SB: Well, I returned to UNCG as an adult, and so really I didn't enter UNCG until about 19—I
received my master's in 1973 from UNCG. I continued my education at UNCG to go on and
get a doctorate from UNCG, but I began to work part time after I had enrolled here at [North
Carolina] A&T [Agricultural & Technical] State University in 1970 and then continued to
work—I began working immediately on a master's degree part time. After finishing the
master's degree, that's when I went on to work on the doctorate.
CJ: What did you get your doctorate in?
SB: At that time, I had a degree that they called educational administration. It required the
traditional courses in educational administration with an additional semester at the Center for
Creative Leadership, so that you would have a firm foundation in leadership as well as a
degree in educational administration.
CJ: So you were there—your tenure was about 1969 through 1973 for the master's?
SB: Well, 1970 to 1973. It was on a part-time basis, you know. You take a course this semester, a
course next semester, a course during the summer. It was not one of those things where you
go, you spend the year and you, you know, get a master's. The same thing happened with the
doctorate, with the exception of the one year that we had residency requirements.
CJ: Tell me about that. What was the residency requirement?
SB: Well, you had to take nine hours per semester for at least two semesters consecutively, you
know, to satisfy that requirement.
CJ: It didn't mean you had to live on campus?
SB: Well, no. You didn't have to. [laughs] But you had to—they considered it full time. You had
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to carry a full time load.
CJ: Okay. Entering as an adult less than ten years after they started to admit men, you were
definitely a non-traditional student. How many were there like you that had just come as
adults and were non-traditional not living on campus?
SB: Well, there were quite a few. In fact, many of the gradate students—they considered this an
opportunity that they had not had before, to be able to get a master's in this particular
concentration—to get a master's and a doctorate in this concentration—so close to home. So
it provided an opportunity that had not been available before, so people took advantage of it.
And so you had many people from the public schools and the community colleges and from
institutions like Guilford College, A&T, Bennett [College] and other colleges taking
advantage of this opportunity because it was—it was a very unique opportunity, and it
provided an opportunity for them to get better training [unclear] excellent education. And in
the meantime—and at the same time, not have to give up their jobs, not have to relocate—
any of those kinds of things.
CJ: So it was the program in educational administration, the master's and PhD, was roughly how
old when you entered? Do you know?
SB: I'm not certain how old it was. But it was a very good program, and it was staffed by some
excellent instructors. People like Dr. Roland Nelson [Jr., former president of Marshall
University] and others who had lots of experience in the area, and they were very thorough
instructors. And so it proved to be a very beneficial program. I came to the program from the
Boy Scouts of America. Prior to coming to A&T, I'd worked with the Boy Scouts of
America as a professional boy scout leader, and I left the university to come to A&T. I had a
bachelor's degree. I was serving as a community relations director, which did not require at
that time a master's or a doctorate. But in order to move up in the university, then I realized
that I would need a master's and then I would need a doctorate. Education is something the
more you get, the more you want. [laughs] That's the way it goes.
CJ: What contact did you have with the undergrad life of the campus?
SB: Well, I guess I was fortunate when I was there because I had a daughter that was also a
student at UNCG at the same time, and she was in the area of political science. And so our
plans were—she was supposed to graduate—well, receive her undergraduate degree—at the
same time that I received the master's, so we kind of worked together. And so I had several
opportunities to meet the undergraduate students, to participate in some of the father-daughter
things and to be with her, you know, when she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.
Many other things that, you know, that parents have an opportunity to do with the students.
CJ: What a unique opportunity to be students together. Wow. [laughs] Oh, that's wonderful.
What was your sense from your perspective as a graduate student—what was your sense of
how it felt to be a man on the campus?
SB: Well, I really never thought about it really because I was in school. And most of the courses
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that we had were in the evening. UNCG was one of the premier institutions in developing a
graduate program where most of the courses were offered after working hours. So we were
arriving on campus when many other students were either leaving the campus or they were
going back to the dormitories. And so really it didn't—so you were around—all the students
that you were socializing with—and they were students about your same age who were all in
the same boat. So you really didn't [laughs]—you really didn't think about it. Being a man,
being male, female. Because in most classes, you had just about as many men as you had
women.
CJ: Very different from the undergraduate population.
SB: Very different from the undergraduate.
CJ: So your peer group was each other, and you were really separated by time and by
educational experience from the undergrads?
SB: That's correct. All of the graduate students had similar experiences. They may have been—
all were not working on a college campus, but they were working at a public high school or
they were working for an essential administrative capacity—with a public school system or
they were supervisors or they were at least, aspiring supervisors. So all had basically the
same kinds of goals and the same kinds of interests, so you really had no—you didn't have a
mixture.
CJ: Quite homogeneous group. Did you get what you came to get at UNCG?
SB: Really I think I got probably more than I was expecting at UNCG. I was expecting to get an
education, to get a degree. I did not expect to have, you know, the kind of—that the faculty
members would really take the—give personal interest in students that they seemed to take
and would try to assist you first of all, in defining your goals because no one in your
undergraduate school—you know—you think you know what it is you want to do, but then
they have to kind of define your goals and help you really see—maybe this may be what you
want, but have you ever thought about taking this course or participating in this seminar? So
that you have more options once you get your degree. That's the kind of thing I'm talking
about. And you had faculty members who could do that.
CJ: Was the mentor system alive and well?
SB: Very much so, yes. It's alive, it's well. We had some faculty people who seemed to enjoy
talking to students and working with them—the interested students—in fact, the absent
members of the faculty that are still considered my mentors [unclear] [laughs].
CJ: Can you talk about them a little bit? Can you tell me about them?
SB: Yes. There were two that were especially helpful. I mentioned one—Dr. Roland Nelson.
CJ: Dr. Roland Nelson.
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SB: Roland Nelson. He has his own creative leadership systems program now. And then there
was another, Dr. Himes.
CJ: Oh, Joseph Himes. I know Joseph.
SB: Joseph Himes. Sociologist. Older gentleman, but had a lot of experience. He took a lot of
time and seemed to really enjoy helping students to find themselves and go forward. Even if
they were not in the discipline that he was associated with. He was associated with
sociology. Of course, all of us had to get [unclear] in personal skills, so I took at least a
couple of courses in sociology so that I would gain those skills. And he was most helpful, but
not only helpful, but he also served, not as a role model, but as a mentor—a person who
would take time with you and help you and kind of guide you to references and the books
that you should read and that would help you really to gain more than you thought you might
be interested in. They wouldn't let you just satisfy the memory of a surface. They wanted you
to have facts. They wanted you to have the kind of experiences—they wanted you to have
much more than you would ever use.
CJ: A body of knowledge. A body of knowledge.
SB: [laughs] That's right. A body of knowledge.
CJ: That sounds like the Joseph that I've known for twenty years. He's a wonderful person.
SB: He is. And he was and he still is.
CJ: I knew him through the American Friends Service Committee. We were on that together for
ten years.
SB: You've known a great man.
CJ: Yes, I have. I feel honored.
SB: He added a lot to UNCG, and I think he added a lot to the graduate program at UNCG.
CJ: What sorts of courses did you take? If you can remember? [laughs]
SB: Well, in administration you were always expected to take those courses in finance, public
relations, fiscal—management of physical facilities, the theoretical underpinnings of
education, so that you knew history and philosophy of education, so you understood the
philosophy of public education—that you knew something about its history so that you were
always reinventing the wheel. But you would always know that someone did something
before you. That someone laid the foundations on which to build and that you also realized
some of the hurdles and obstacles that early educators had to overcome in order to bring
education to where it is now. So those were the basic areas. Now within those areas, of
course, you had humanities; you had the basic problems that people encountered. You
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would discuss those kinds of things called contemporary problems. But you also had to
know those basic facts or the principles—the basic principles of education and so forth,
which you'd have some—a frame to put the other things to put the other things on that you
would be learning or you would be practicing or that you would be experiencing. You also
had to have an internship in the area that you were working, so that you could work directly
with a mentor and kind of follow that mentor around and see how they do things. It was kind
of a practical degree from that standpoint.
CJ: So theory and practice?
SB: Theory and practice. You [unclear] combine both of them.
CJ: They still do that.
SB: And you had an opportunity to do what they call independent study projects where you could
actually, you know, go out and kind of design a project and do the research and so forth, and
follow that project to the end, so that you were certain to be getting some experience in an
area of your interest in addition to the things that were required.
CJ: Do you remember the independent study projects you did? What were they like?
SB: Yes. My independent study project involved training a group of people that are seldom
thought of as leaders, and those were resident council leaders in public housing projects.
What we did was to design a summer workshop for volunteers who lived in public
housing—who are leaders of what they call resident council, you know. It was within the
housing projects. And teach those people how to apply those leadership skills, to do things
for themselves within the public housing community. One of the things that I remember very
distinctly about that independent study project—my advisor at that time in leadership was
Dr. Nelson, and he insisted that I, in designing the program, to also build into the program
my expectations so far as back-home applications, you know. How the people are going to
acquire this once you—once they leave the course. And how will you follow up to make
certain that they've benefitted from it?
CJ: What do you do with it?
SB: That's correct. Not just bring people together and have a workshop or a seminar, but to see
how they were, you know, how— I asked them to call back [unclear] [laughs]
CJ: Okay. And how did it work out?
SB: It worked out fine. They continued it after that for several years, and now that's become an
ongoing part of the Greensboro Housing Authority.
CJ: So they—the Greensboro Housing Authority trains the resident council?
SB: Just a minute.
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CJ: Sure. We'll stop it a minute.
[recording paused]
CJ: We were talking about the efficacy of your project after you left, and you were saying that
the Greensboro Housing Authority now trains resident—are they called counselors?
SB: Resident council leaders. In other words, each housing project has what they call a council.
And those are people who have input into decisions that affect them, you know, within the
projects where they live. And when something is going to happen in that project, when
they're trying to get recreational programs, health programs, other kind of programs for the
benefit of tenants—some call them tenant councils. But what they do is, they coordinate this
with these councils. It increases participation; it increases the working relationship between
the housing authority itself and the residents or tenants. We call them residents because we
just didn't like to refer to people as tenants. We tried to give them a more sophisticated name.
And that name has been adopted now for most of them.
CJ: Did they like that, too?
SB: Oh, yeah.
CJ: It sounds like it gave them power they did not have before.
SB: Right. And so you hear of youth programs, you hear of—they were able to [unclear]
organize a boy scout troop or a girl scout troop. If they wanted to come in to set up some
other kind of program, wanted to have a tutoring program or whatnot. They cleared it with
the resident council. So the resident leaders were able then to help them gain access to the
buildings, to integrate what they were doing with what the external forces wanted to be able
to do. And it made for a very wholesome relationship.
CJ: So you left quite a legacy?
SB: No. I wouldn't say that. But, you know, it's one of those things. Well, not only that, but it was
an idea whose time had come also. Some things you just happen—we learned that a lot of
your ability to be a leader—to emerge as a leader—has to do with timing, and there are some
things that happen just because you happen to be in the right place at the right time.
CJ: You also have to have the imagination to kick it along a little bit and to see if it really is the
right place and the right time by trying it. And you did that.
SB: Well, that's true. What you also learn—we also learned that people vote you as a leader.
People make you a leader by accepting your ideas. You can have excellent ideas, but if
people don't perceive that you're the person who maybe will help lead them towards their
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goals and will follow you, you still are not a leader. [laughs] You ask Joseph Himes, and he
says there must be a relationship between the leader and the led—some kind of relationship.
And they must see you—at least you must be perceived as being able to lead people towards
those. UNCG seemed to have been one of the few institutions that worked directly with the
Center for Creative Leadership to help bring out that creativity in their graduate students,
especially those in the School of Education.
CJ: What was the Center for Creative Leadership? Who sponsored that?
SB: Well, the Center for Creative Leadership is a center here in Greensboro—you need to find
out about it. You need to take a trip out there. It's out Battleground Avenue. It's a center that
was organized by the Smith-Richardson Foundation. They call it the Center for Creative
Leadership, where they bring in outstanding leaders from all over the world—government,
political and so forth, industry, industrial leaders. And they take them through what they call
a series of leadership for management workshops, sharpening their leadership styles so that
they can go back to wherever they come from and become more effective in their leadership.
They work with you on your style, your leadership—management style, so that—it's a full-time
operation. Now they have branches, and there's one in Colorado and other parts of the
country. You need to go out and see that. Your education will be incomplete unless you have
an opportunity to go out and just visit the Center for Creative Leadership. You just drive
through and see what it looks like and talk with some of the people, and then you can begin
to better understand what it is that we're talking about.
CJ: And so all of you in the program there at UNCG had to spend how much time at that?
SB: One semester.
CJ: One semester. All right. And you went out there and took part—
SB: Daily, yes [unclear]. And we had—they had a series of leadership skills development
programs that they took you through during that semester. And you have an opportunity to
test your own skills, to role play, to simulate, to do simulation studies and so on, to be
critiqued by other members of the class and so forth to see how you would do.
CJ: So leadership was a skill that the university felt could be developed.
SB: That's right.
CJ: And did develop it.
SB: They felt as though, contrary to what many people say, that leaders are born—that there are
certain—if a person had certain basic, initial leadership of [unclear] leanings then they could
develop those. You could be trained to be an effective leader or, at least, to change your
style—at least, to modify your style so that you could be more effective. They believed in
getting things done to influence, rather than the hierarchical kind of leadership.
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CJ: More consensus-type—
SB: That's correct.
CJ: That's great. Did you always aspire to be a leader? Or when did that develop in you?
SB: I don't know. I don't know if you aspire to be a leader or you find yourself always being
voted by people into leadership roles. In other words, it's not something that you aspire for.
You may have a goal to be the very best person you can and to do the best you can, but in
doing that, somebody may decide that this person has potential to do other things, and they
vote you in as their leader. You look up, you see a committee of people coming, you know,
asking you if you will consider doing this or that. And normally leaders are people who are
doing things in other areas of the community other than their jobs. For example, you talked
about the American Friends Service Committee, so in addition to whatever else you were
doing in public schools and so forth, people saw you in other leadership roles. And of course,
when it's time to find leaders—well, if people think that you can be a leader in one thing, that
there's a good chance that you can be a leader in another. And that's the way [unclear].
CJ: Let me go back to the dynamics on the campus at the time you were there. You said that
being a man was not particularly noteworthy. Was being a minority the same way, since you
were with older people, and it wasn't a big deal? How was it to be a minority on the
campus?
SB: No, I never really—you were a student on the campus of UNCG. All of the students were
struggling. If you had something you could offer to the group, they were willing to accept
that. If they had something that they could offer, they were willing to share that. You have a
unique breed of people who are—especially older people—who are striving with one goal in
mind and that's to get an education to get a degree and to get out and [unclear]. You made
friends, friends that kind of lasted, you know, over the years. And if they could help you
even now, they would do that. I think that there's a—most of the friction about what would
happen—[unclear] was talking about external friction—people perceiving something. It's not
when you get on the campus. You get on campus and start talking to people, you find they're
just like you. You sit down, you talk, you're all in the same boat. [laughs] Your instructors
made no difference, you know, and you felt free to respond. Leadership makes a difference.
The leadership of the campus and the tone that is set by the leadership of that department.
CJ: And that's what I was trying to get a feel for. I had talked to other alums from the same
period. One who was a minority undergrad male, who said the same thing—that he was
actually surprised that being a minority was not an issue. But it was—for him—being a male
was the bigger issue because he was an undergrad, he was living on campus and he was, you
know, outnumbered and trying to cut into the all-girl network. But that wouldn't have applied
to you. But he said the same. He said the campus atmosphere was—people didn't care what
you looked like as long as you were there to learn, and I was very gratified to find that true. I
was hoping that would be true.
SB: That was true. In fact, if anything, they went out of their way to make certain that you were
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not, you know, not shortchanged—to make sure that they didn't—no one wanted to appear to
be the person to [they laugh] to be the Scrooge of the campus.
CJ: They kind of bent over backwards the other way, you mean?
SB: They wanted to make certain that you felt a part of what was going on—that you were
accepted into groups. In fact, they were just nice, you know, they were nice people.
Education seems to be, in many instances, especially in higher education, post-baccalaureate
education, simply to be kind of an equalizer with people. Once you reached your level of
maturity, my level of maturity, many of those things kind of faded into the background.
You're very concerned about people, you're concerned about your future, you're concerned
about your own skill development and whatever it takes to help you get that. You want to
pay the price, you want to get it and you want to move on. And that's the way it was with us.
I was there for—I wasn't there to [unclear] I wasn't there to socialize, I wasn't there—I was
there to get a degree and come back to work and spend my time studying. That was what I
was there for.
CJ: Very goal oriented. Very focused.
SB: Right. Focused.
CJ: What have you done since? If you could just briefly sketch your life since the degrees at
UNCG. What have you—what pursuits have you gone for?
SB: Well, I've continued to develop my career. In fact, I was community relations specialist for a
time. Now I work with the alumni, with alumni—
CJ: Here at A&T?
SB: That's my job—director of alumni affairs. We have alumni all over the world, for the most
part. Especially all over the free world. Africa, Germany and all over—about twenty-five
thousand graduates. My job is to coordinate the efforts of these twenty-five thousand
graduates around the country. So I travel a lot, and that's the reason it's hard to catch me any
day except this one. But I travel. We raise money for—I raise money for the university. We
ask alumni to give—those kinds of things. I work with community work like the United Way
and the Industries for the Blind. We still—you're still required to provide leadership in the
community where you live and work, but also to develop leadership—leaders for our
chapters. We have—we're organized in regions and chapters around the country. And we
have to develop and train leaders for—to be volunteer alumni leaders. So I'm still in the
business of leadership development, but on the other end—the training leaders are trying to
gain additional leadership skills. But even leadership skills, styles of management, they
change. So you have to—there's no such thing as ever completing your training or your
leadership development. You're always developing, you're always changing. Your styles
change. You change. I worked with—I work with civic [unclear] like Rotary and other civic
kinds of things in order to keep abreast of things that are going on.
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CJ: Okay. As you look back on your career at UNCG, do you have any outstanding memories?
Any things that stand out?
SB: Well, I guess the only thing that would really stand out would be being able to walk across
the stage. I'd like to walk across the stage again. [they laugh]
CJ: Oh, yeah. Get the sheepskin.
SB: But you know what it's like if you're in a dorm [unclear]. If you have children, you're trying
to—I have other children. My daughter that was there was one who was religiously going to
law school and wanted to get out and start making money, so you could help them to go
forward and do other things. You still have a family, a life, you know, which you have to live
and [unclear] developing every year. So those things are [unclear]. The most interesting
thing that stood out about UNCG was their willingness to help you to succeed. That was the
thing that stood out. They didn't believe—if they perceived you as having what it takes, then
they seemed to go out of their way to help you to be successful and to keep you from
becoming discouraged and dropping out. They would always call you and remind you,
"Haven't seen you in a while." Because, you know, by the time you get to the stage where
you're writing a dissertation or what not, you know sometimes you get—you begin to get
discouraged and say, "I'll never finish this thing." Then the telephone would ring, and
somebody would say, you know, "By the way, haven't seen you. When are you coming
back?" Or they would send word with someone else, "Tell them to drop by to see me."
CJ: Really? They would reach out to you like that?
SB: Reach out to you.
CJ: Wow.
SB: And that's the kind of thing that—there were people like Lois Edinger [professor of
education] who would always reach out. You know, very personable people. They were not
standoffish. They didn't, you know—they didn't feel as though you were—they were not
afraid to reach out or to pat you on the shoulder, “You’re going to get this thing.”
CJ: How nice.
SB: So you can't—how can you hate people like that?
CJ: Of course not. [They laugh] Of course not. That's a question I needed to ask though because I
wanted to find out how it felt because it was only—well, let's see. [Nineteen] sixty-four and
that's ten. Sixteen years after Brown v. Board [of Education of Topeka, (1954), landmark
decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate
public schools for black and white students unconstitutional] so I was interested in how
that was going on the campus at the time. And it seems to have been going very well.
SB: In many instances, it might have been going better then than it is now. You know, when you
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stop to think about it, because you had—the focus of the nation at that time was trying to
move people who had been left behind. A lot of government help—there were a lot of other
things that were taking place to help to assure people it's time now that we do something
about—and don't get us in trouble by driving these people away. [laughs] There was a
conscientious effort on the part of the institution. We were doing the same thing here. We
were reaching out to bring in whites to A&T, you know, and offer them things that other,
you know, that other schools were not offering, you know, some kind of tuition assistance or
so forth to get into—to come to school. This was a university policy. For the most part, they
were operating under a consent decree, and they were going to have their way to do this.
They had the backing from the top.
CJ: Great.
SB: From the top down.
CJ: It was like a social mandate.
SB: A social mandate. Many of those things now have expired, but they've become so
ingrained—they've become so internalized now, until—they’re really continuing, you know.
CJ: It's something that we mustn't take for granted though. I think UNCG administration has
been a bit blind in the last few years and they've been caught short, and I hope that they've
been aware of it.
SB: I don't think that UNCG—it's kind of a reflection of society. I think all of the institutions
now from county commissioners to UNCG—a kind of reflection of society. There's been
kind of a conservative swing in all directions—back to being a little more conservative—and
public schools or institutional higher education, they simply reflect the larger society. And so
people are afraid to step too far out of line unless they be perceived as being, you know, too
far on one side or too far on the other side, so that's the way it goes.
CJ: I guess the last election proved that, didn't it?
SB: But it was an interesting thing. My daughter, she enjoyed it, so she went to Duke
[University] when she finished taking her master's and then went on to Washington
University Law School.
CJ: She did get her law degree?
SB: Yes.
CJ: That's great.
SB: She's practicing law and married one of her classmates. A man also of the opposite group.
[laughs] So I really had to be liberal.
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CJ: Oh, you mean she married a white man?
SB: [indicates the affirmative]
CJ: Okay. [they laugh] Yeah, you did.
SB: Another lawyer. I heard it was going well.
CJ: That's great.
SB: So, what I'm saying is, many of the things that people talk about—really we didn't—I hate to
say this—probably went in the other direction more than—you understand what I'm saying?
CJ: Yes, I do. The other fellow I talked with said that people were almost overly solicitous. And
a couple of times he would be kind of asked to be sort of a resident expert in a class on
something that he didn't know anything about just because he happened to be a minority.
So—
SB: Well, you contribute a lot to the kind of feelings that people have about you. If you have
charisma and if you are genuine, nobody wants to be, you know—nobody wants to be
associated with people that they feel as though, you know are just not going anywhere. No
one, you know. But, by the same token, if it looked like you're serious, you're genuinely,
you're really trying to go to develop yourself, you really have some goals, then people—if
they also have those, if you have the same interests, they're going to—they're going to rally.
CJ: Well, the bottom line is humans—is people—we're all children of God, and we all matter,
you know.
SB: You don't have time—I'm certain you wouldn't have time to spend too much time with
people who are just not, you know, not interested in history; they're not in school for very
serious purposes. You're there, you're spending gasoline, you're spending time, you're paying
your own tuition. You don't really have a lot of time. There are some of them there— when
their parents are paying their fees, they're paying for their food, they're paying for
everything. You know, they can operate one way, but you have to operate another way.
CJ: That's right. I know what you're talking about because sometimes kids will come into an
exam and say, "I studied for four hours for this exam. I ought to do fine." And I'm thinking
to myself, "I studied for forty." [laughs] You know.
SB: That's the difference.
CJ: I keep my mouth shut.
SB: And then one day, you know [unclear].
CJ: Yeah. Yeah.
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SB: [unclear]
CJ: And then, you know, they find out that you're forty years old or whatever, and they go,
"Ugh." But yeah, you do get out what you put in.
SB: But now when you're in a class where all of the—most of the students, some of the students
are the same age, you know, are older or not much younger than the professor.
CJ: That must be wonderful.
SB: Well, you'll have a chance to experience because I'm certain you're going on to—
CJ: Yeah, I'll be in the master's program, but that must be great. Well, is there anything you'd
like to say before we end, then? Any message you'd like to leave for posterity? [laughs]
SB: No. No. I think that you've asked the right questions, and I've tried to explain it as best as I
can remember it. It's been a long, you know, a long time and it's very difficult to go back and
remember all of your experiences, but all of my experiences were very pleasant experiences.
And I certainly would not have had a chance to get a master's, especially a doctorate, if I'd
had to just, you know, picked up everything enough for three years because [unclear] so I'm
grateful that I had the opportunity to do this. I'm grateful that things opened up. See, when I
graduated from college back years ago, you couldn't have done that. So it's a kind of an
answer to somebody's prayers that things did open up in time for me to—
CJ: Well, I want to wish A&T a very happy birthday. This is your centennial year, is it not?
SB: And a busy one. People are expecting the impossible from us.
CJ: Oh, dear. I think our alumni office is beginning to feel a little of the same. Ours is next year.
And—well, thank you, Dr. Buie. This has been a pleasure.
SB: You’re welcome. I'm glad to help you.
[End of Interview]