Yes. So when I came here I had two hours with every faculty member and
Albert took me to see the building. Then we went to his house and had
some port or sherry or something. The right hand door of his car would
not open, so I had to get in the driver's seat door and go in
the back and climb around on to the front seat. He said, "That
damn door. I'll have to get it fixed one day. I told my
wife." And he was oblivious of that sort of thing. He had his
eye on big things. So that was Albert. Henry Brandis was the dean when I
came here and he was an undergraduate here and then went to Columbia Law
School and worked for a big New York law firm and did tax work. Then
Albert Coates hired him to come back to be in charge of teaching tax
related people how to be better tax things. Then he also had a job at
the state Internal Revenue Service or bureau, whatever, being a reviewer
or the brains, the think-tank. Then he was hired
here in 1937 or thereabouts. He was the first one hired since Dalzell
came here in the late 1920's.
Then nobody else was hired except Bill Aycock and then me. But when I
came here, Henry Brandis took me out for dinner. He was then the head of
the World Federalists which is what it's name implies, one
world. He had gone when Frank Graham had been at the U.N. He had been
sent to Indonesia which had just won its independence from Holland and
there were a lot of tribal disputes and there were disputes with Holland
still. So Frank Graham went there to mediate the dispute between
Indonesia and Holland. He asked Henry to go with him as his assistant.
So Henry went there and that hadn't been too much earlier.
And then he was Executive Director of the World Federalists which almost
stopped him from being the dean because some trustees didn't
like a World Federalist being the dean, but he survived it and was the
dean. And when I came, he was about to run for the school board. I asked
him, "That's pretty low," you know, I
thought, to run for the local school board. And he said they were going
to start integrating the schools here and he wanted to make sure it was
done the way it was supposed to be done. So that was very, very nice.
John Dalzell, whom I mentioned, came here in the very late twenties from
Minnesota and he too was a one worlder. When he died he left his
property, his house here, to the Union now with Great Britain, which had
been very active in the thirties. His interest was international law and
the United Nations. He was in charge of the debate and stuff. He also
taught at N.C. Central. And the story there is
that there is a Supreme Court decision around 1938 which said
that…. Up to that time when blacks had applied in the
Southern states for colleges or graduate schools, the state had paid
their tuition to go to the great ten. Then the Supreme Court said,
"No, you can't do that any more." It was a
graduate school. If you have a graduate school, you can't
send the blacks out of state. You have to let them in or you can start
their own graduate school, whereupon North Carolina decided to start a
law school for blacks so they wouldn't come to this one. They
put it at N.C. Central at Durham. Van Hecke was the first dean. They
asked him to do it. The first faculty were our people and Duke
people.