Dr. David Padgett, an associate professor of Geography at Tennessee State University, earned his PhD at the University of Florida where he was a major player in the civil rights movement. In this interview excerpt, Padgett [P] was interviewed by Justin Dunnavant [D]on April 10, 2012; transcript edited by Beth Grobman. Read the entire interview at tinyurl.com/Iguana2301.
D: What was the environment like in 1989 [when you came to UF]?
P: It was a pretty volatile time for the Black students. There was a lot of the remnant Reagan-era attitude from the 1980s. You know, Clinton was just starting to get cranked up, so there was a bit of a change in attitude nationally, but still you had a lot of white students who still had that old Reagan, anti-affirmative action type mentality.
When I first came here, Dr. Imani and I, one of the first things we encountered was that the student government was essentially trying to zero-fund the Black student union. And so our first kind of involvement with anything that I can remember at UF was trying to pretty much advise undergraduates in how not to get zero-funded …
And pretty much every year after, the student government would try to zero-fund the Black student union. And that seemed to be the theme every year. There was this whole feeling that, you know, the Black students were where they are because of affirmative action and that they really didn’t belong there. We had white administrators who had no clue about racism or race relations.
D: I know from there it kind of escalated a little bit. They became adamant about not funding the BSU.
P: Yeah, every year was, “We’re not going to fund the Black Student Union, we’re not going to fund Black History Month, we’re not going to fund the African American Cultural Center.”
In fact, while we were there the African American Cultural Center was vandalized by skinheads. At one point they spray-painted all kinds of, you know, I can’t remember exactly what, but you know, “Go Back to Africa” that kind of thing. N-word on the Black Student Union.
The skinheads actually set up shop across the street from campus. And we paid them a visit and that turned out to be kind of confrontational … there were some shots fired at one point, I wasn’t there when the shots were fired. I don’t know who fired the shots but it got kind of ugly because the skinheads actually went about attacking African American students. They attacked maybe four or five and it seemed as if neither the Gainesville Police nor the UF Police were willing to follow up on it …
Back then we believed that African Americans would be politically, econom-
ically, and socially extinct by 1999 unless significant action was undertaken.
D: So when you came here, it was a pretty volatile situation.
P: We were involved in whatever was happening in the African American community. There was a store there called Food for Less, I think. It was a grocery store and they were in the practice of physically assaulting African American shoppers if they suspected a shoplifting. And so we moved in, in support of the relatives in the community and confronted the store personnel. And basically the employees didn’t know that they were not supposed to be used as security. And so we just asked them in open forum, “Well if this gentleman here went out and tried to accost a so-called shoplifter and sustained an injury, would he be covered under workman’s compensation?” And corporate people were like, “Well, no.”
And so that pretty much put a stop to that, because once the employees realized that they were being used as lackeys for their bosses who were too cheap to pay for real security, that shut that whole thing down.
And then there was another case where Gainesville Police Department was not, they weren’t enforcing—well there was this feud between the Gainesville Police and the UF Police regarding who should enforce the law basically.
Whose turf was whose? So, this was around the time that the skinheads were attacking students and so what was happening was that the skinheads were attacking Black students and the students would actually call UF Police. And the police would say, “Where are you?” and these attacks would often take place off-campus like right across the street near Burger King or somewhere over there in the student ghetto as we used to call it. So the UF Police would be like, “Well we aren’t coming,” and the Gainesville Police would be like, “Well we aren’t coming either.”
So we exposed that there was this kind of no-man’s land of enforcement, supposedly, in and around UF campus. And so after we exposed that, they changed the rule giving UF Police the right to respond to UF students’ issues within a one-mile radius of the campus …
There was a situation where one of the Black fraternities had a party at a White fraternity house and I don’t know what happened, but a fight broke out. And pretty much according to the frat guys, they had broken up the fight but some of the white fraternity guys were still in the house and they called the police. By the time the police got there the fight had broken up. Of course, Gainesville Police being Gainesville Police, decided they were going to rough up some Black folks just for the heck of it …
We had some white students create a White Student Union on account of the Black Student Union. We said that you guys are obviously connected to the Klan and they said, “No, no, no, no, no we are not connected to the Klan.” They said, “As a matter of fact, if you prove that we are connected to the Klan, then we will shut down.” And so the short story is, through surveillance—we had a state-wide network, really—and one of our operatives at the University of Central Florida in Orlando actually tipped us off. And we got a copy of a document that proved, without a shadow of doubt, that they were connected to the KKK.
So I told the president, I said, “You got forty-eight hours to shut down or I’m sending this document to the newspaper.” And he thought I was bluffing so we sent the document to the paper and they just got exposed to being a direct arm in the KKK and they shut them up—and, well, I mean the advisor quit after that and that was the end of the White Student Union …
A big, one of the biggest, neo-Nazi White supremacist camps in the country was just outside of Gainesville. And they had all kinds of nuts out there with, you know, weapons and tactics training. But after 9/11 I doubt that anything like that can exist. But yeah, they marched on—they had a couple marches with swastikas, and the whole nine yards. I mean it was crazy. We tried to shut it down but they got a permit.
The White Student Union, they were all mixed up with them and for a while they actually had a Vietnamese statistician. And I tried to talk to this guy. He was being used because he was good at math. And he would do all these calculations with the average SAT scores of Black students and, you know, it was just garbage. But I finally convinced him to look up what the Klan did to the Vietnamese fisherman in Texas. And after he looked that up he was gone, he quit. He saw that obviously if these people were down with anything to have to do with White supremacy then they weren’t his friend …
And then we had the whole Black Awareness Movement. And that was where once again, the student government tried to zero-fund Black History Month. And then at some point the student union was taken over and the demands were that Black History Month be funded in perpetuity. We had to institutionalize as part of the SGA Fund like several other things that it’s funded every year. And so we wanted Black History Month to be amongst those things. And so we, you know, our demands were met, Black History Month became institutionalized.
So there was no more begging every year for money after that. But it was very controversial. There was a bully takeover, and you know we were accused of assault, theft, vandalism, and none of that took place. Kidnapping. None of that took place. And they put us on trial to try to kick us out of the school. We were completely exonerated. I mean it was a circus.
D: Okay, I was wondering, though, how was it for you going through your program, your academic program?
P: Oh, that was completely separate. I mean I was able to separate everything. Really it’s interesting though. A lot of the faculty were pretty much oblivious to what students were doing. You know it’s like two different worlds. Now that I am a faculty member, I don’t know what the students are doing. You know? I look at when they really make big moves. I mean just, you know, and like I said, a lot of the stuff that we did, we used covert tactics so if something went down people wouldn’t even know who did it, what happened. Like when we took down the White Student Union, nobody really knew what had happened. There was no big show. They just disappeared. I know why they disappeared. Nobody could prove who was behind it. Because nobody saw us take over the building. We used guerilla tactics. We were invisible. So it was a very well-planned operation.
D: Yeah. Did you all have some type of organization that you all tried to model yourselves after? Or that you gained inspiration from?
P: Well I mean obviously the Black Panthers, you know, SNCC, and the ideology of Malcolm X, King. I listened to a lot and read a lot of stuff. I mean Huey Newton, I listened to a lot of speeches, all kinds of African leaders, Haile Selassie. Any independent pro-Black leader. Kwame Nkruma, a lot of his philosophy. I have a book of the Mau Mau’s military tactics. Nelson Mandela’s books, anybody like that. Anybody with relations to black people that none of us knew about.
D: Did your political consciousness really develop here or was it something that had been carried over from undergrad and from even growing up?
P: I was always conscious. Always. I grew up in a house where I was taught to be conscious of White supremacy from day one. I had no confusion over who to trust and who not to trust. And I grew up on that, so I knew that eventually I wasn’t going to spend my career at some place like UF or FSU or UGA or the University of Tennessee. I taught at Indiana University. You know, Vanderbilt University, Oberlin College. I’ve done my time, but I knew at the end of the day I was going to be at a Black college which is where I am and where I’ve been for twelve years now. I’m not going anywhere and if I go somewhere it will be to another Black college. But yeah, that’s always been my mission. I don’t have anything against people. We need people everywhere. We need people at Harvard, Yale, MIT, we need people everywhere. We should have Black faculty researchers everywhere. Everywhere that you fit in, wherever you fit in, as long as you remain conscious of the mission. Like don’t start building enemies, building up the enemies, but other than that. I didn’t always have that stance. I used to think that all of us should be at Black colleges. But I softened up on that after a while. That is not realistic, you know.
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