Civil Rights Advocacy
An ardent advocate for civil rights, during his tenure at the University of Alabama in the '50s, McManus frequently travelled down to Tuskegee University from Birmingham to lecture during a time when helping black academia was a sometimes precarious undertaking. He was also responsible for the hiring and training of the first black medical lab technicians at the Birmingham Hospital.During his tenure as Dean at the University of South Carolina McManus also established a minority admission program and hired an old friend, Dr. Middleton Lambright, as the Dean of Minority Students. Here is an excerpt from a tribute to Dr. Lambright from the Congressional Record.
“He believed in taking chances and seeking new opportunities. In 1971, he was offered and accepted a position as Assistant Dean and Associate Professor of Surgery in the College of Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina. He was quoted as saying: ‘My father would have been extremely pleased to know that his son had been invited to join the staff and faculty of an institution he could not have hoped to enter in any capacity.’ He was speaking to the racial segregation in the State of South Carolina.”
Read more about this topic: J. F. A. Mc Manus
Famous quotes containing the words civil rights, civil and/or rights:
“... one of the blind spots of most Negroes is their failure to realize that small overtures from whites have a large significance ... I now realize that this feeling inevitably takes possession of one in the bitter struggle for equality. Indeed, I share it. Yet I wonder how we can expect total acceptance to step full grown from the womb of prejudice, with no embryo or infancy or childhood stages.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962)
“I’ve never been afraid to step out and to reach out and to move out in order to make things happen.”
—Victoria Gray, African American civil rights activist. As quoted in This Little Light of Mine, ch. 3, by Hay Mills (1993)
“The freedom to share one’s insights and judgments verbally or in writing is, just like the freedom to think, a holy and inalienable right of humanity that, as a universal human right, is above all the rights of princes.”
—Carl Friedrich Bahrdt (1740–1792)