THE REV. DR. Keith Daniel was excited. This was exactly what he had been waiting for.
In 2020, with a pandemic and social upheaval happening simultaneously, the Duke provost’s office issued a call for projects under the theme of Reckoning With Race and Racism in the American South. For years, Daniel and a friend had been kicking around the idea of interviewing Black alumni from Duke, Davidson College, Furman University, and Johnson C. Smith University – the four schools supported by The Duke Endowment. Now was the perfect opportunity.
Daniel was also the right person to lead the project. He’s a Duke lifer with three degrees (’90, M.Div.’05, D.Min.’16, P’25) and a 35-year career working at the university – the Career Center, human resources, Fuqua School of Business, the Divinity School, Duke Chapel, and various special projects. And as an ordained minister, he understands both the power of storytelling and the significance of who gets to tell whose stories.
Daniel’s Black alumni legacy oral history project would be a wonderful follow-up to the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the first Black undergraduates at Duke in 2013. He was the program manager for the celebration at the same time he was serving as the interim director of the Office of Black Church Studies at the Divinity School. Daniel learned a lot from the surviving members of the First Five (Gene Kendall B.S.E.'67, Wilhelmina Reuben-Cooke '67 and Nathaniel White '67), including how their story prefigured and paralleled his. Telling the stories of the students for whom the First Five cleared a path seemed like a sure winner.
But not at first.
The project did not win a grant. Frustrated, Daniel mentioned it to Luke Powery, the dean of Duke Chapel. “‘We’d like to support that,’” Daniel recalled Powery saying. 'That’s exactly what we're about: education and religion – bridging faith and learning.’”
Counting joy
Off and running, Daniel began to interview Black alumni from the four schools. Not quite half were Duke grads. The priority was legacies: parents and children, or siblings, who were fellow alums. It didn’t take long before a theme began to emerge. Everyone shared anecdotes about their struggles, some that felt existential at the time and some that were simply everyday college woes. The connective tissue was that almost all Duke alumni looked back on their experiences with gratitude and a palpable sense of joy.
For many of the interviewees, having developed close bonds with other Black students – bonds that persisted over years and decades – heightened their joy. Alumni from the three historically white schools talked about how those connections were critical in dealing with their struggles. But even the painful realities of marginalization and discrimination in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s took a backseat to their appreciation for how university life matured them and prepared them for outstanding careers and personal lives.
Now the project needed an official name. Years earlier, the entire idea was inspired by a Bible verse often associated with the Black experience in America. James 1:2-4 reads: “My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.”
The project became known as “Counting It All Joy: Black Alumni Legacy Stories From the Four Duke Endowment Institutions.”
Maturing through struggle
At his high school in Youngstown, Ohio, Derek Penn ’79, M.B.A.’84, P’18 was a hotshot and a polymath. A big-time linebacker with a stellar academic record, dozens of schools recruited him to play football. His final three were Duke, Stanford, and Yale. Penn became a four-year starter in football, but he received a harsh wake-up call when academics turned out to be another matter. He unhappily rode the bench, so to speak, for a couple of years, struggling for C’s.
Fortunately, Penn had a superb support system that he could access daily over lunch at the Cambridge Inn in what was then West Union. He remembers a time when his father drove down to bring him home for the holiday break and was chagrined to see his son seated with a table of Black students.
“He goes, ‘I didn’t send you down here to segregate yourself,’” Penn recalled. “I said, ‘Dad, you don’t understand. This is about survival. These are people that I can lean on and count on.’ And he just didn’t get it. I understood, as I looked back on it, what he was addressing, but I said, ‘It’s not like I don’t have white friends, but when we sit down and have lunch, we’re talking about ‘I got toasted in this exam,’ or ‘I can help you do this.’ It was a support group for us.”
Penn eventually double-majored in English and chemistry, earned an M.B.A. from Fuqua, and had an extraordinary career on Wall Street. And even though Penn published a book about his career in finance in 2021, he welcomed the additional opportunity to tell Daniel and the Duke community his story.
“I was glad that somebody was interested in hearing about my time at Duke and what my feelings were at the time,” he said. “I had a wonderful experience at Duke in many regards and a tough experience at Duke in other regards.”
Daniel believes that Penn’s story represents the push and pull between assimilation and self-segregation; between identity and conformity; between belonging and marginalization.
“At every school, you want to have a sense of pride and belonging,” Daniel said. “The HBCUs … they were built for us, so there is a whole different sense of belonging there. You’re choosing a place explicitly for you and your culture versus a place that’s still trying to [figure out] ‘What does it mean to have Black students here? What do we need to create to support them?’ We have the Mary Lou Williams Center, and that was important while we were here. We had the Black Bench, a place where we all gathered and everybody knew that that was the spot that the Black students hung out. But you have to live with the tensions of, that’s still segregation to have a place solely dedicated to us.”
Family ties
Tamara McGlockton-Hill ’86 can’t imagine standing alone at Duke. Her experience at the university is so uncommon that it might be unique – no one is really sure.
McGlockton-Hill was the youngest of four siblings from a military family who attended Duke consecutively from 1976 through 1988. Her family was living in Germany while her father was stationed there, and her brother Bill McGlockton ’80 was accepted to Duke. He initially had no intention of attending Duke because he saw no Black people in any photos of the university. But Col. William McGlockton accepted a position leading the ROTC program at St. Augustine’s University in Raleigh, and soon the whole family was living a half-hour from Durham.
Bill chose to stay close to his family, and his siblings chose to follow him. Tamara said it just made sense in a family that moved many times to count on family first for support. Michael B.S.E.’81 matriculated soon after Bill, Tarshia ’84, M.B.A.’88 was next, and Tamara completed the quartet. Each McGlockton sacrificed to enable their sisters and brothers to attend: Bill graduated in three years, Michael received an ROTC scholarship, Tarshia received financial aid and bore the bulk of the student loans, and Tamara also received aid.
Their father was so proud of his children’s accomplishments, he requested that his funeral to be held in Duke Chapel. When Daniel met with McGlockton-Hill and her sister for the interview, their father had died almost exactly one year earlier and his Chapel funeral was on their minds.
“What it has done for me and for us and for our family is make me realize how connected I am,” McGlockton-Hill said about sharing her family’s story. “I’ve sat on a number of boards. I have donated, with my husband (Johnny Hill ’85), a decent amount of money. And I’m still connected, which tells me that there’s a deep importance and story for my family and especially me.”
Daniel said that McGlockton-Hill’s deep connection with Duke resonated with him and reflected many of the stories of Black alumni. He considers it a privilege to bring their experiences to light and preserve them. “It was joyful all the way through,” Daniel said. “Life is a pilgrimage. To watch people glow about getting through college, the peers, the experiences, I can’t really put it all in words.”