Gooding assembled a small working group that included Steele and Marcellis Perkins ’21 MEd, now a doctoral student in the College of Education. Greensword, a French-born cultural anthropologist, was hired by Gooding and Steele to spearhead the gathering of oral histories and supervise archival research. Amy Ceniceros ’21 (MEd ’22), a graduate student in the College of Education, joined as a research assistant.
A crucial resource for the fledgling initiative was the Universities Studying Slavery consortium. TCU administrators decided to join the group of about 90 schools in the United States and around the world that were undertaking similar work.
“In the first year, we met with scores of leaders on campuses across the country, but also in Canada, in Ireland and England,” Steele said. “It gave us great ideas. It allowed us to do some quiet course-correcting right from the start and really helped us to refine our process.”
First and foremost, the Race & Reconciliation Initiative had to be an academically based history project. Initiative leaders decided to explore the past in three manageable chunks of time. Initial research would focus on the early decades of the school, to be followed by a study of the years up to and including integration, and finally contemporary history.
The initiative also began to gather oral histories from people who could shed light on TCU’s race history, including Boschini. In a probing interview, Greensword asked the longtime chancellor to assess the current state of race relations on campus.
“What I would say is that we have made great accomplishments, at least in the 18 years that I’ve seen it, but we have a way farther to go,” Boschini told her. “I always say it like this: It’s like world peace. You may never reach it, but you better damn well be working toward it every day of your life.”
One of the most important moments for the Race & Reconciliation Initiative came at a meeting of the Board of Trustees, Gooding said. That day in spring 2021, he, alongside Perkins and Paige Shiring ’21, then president of TCU’s Student Government Association, detailed seven recommendations for the Trustees to consider, including establishing benchmarks for student and faculty diversity and the hiring of more minority contractors.
The final recommendation was to extend the initiative for four more years.
“We have a large number, like 50 Trustees,” Gooding said. “At the front of the room were Chancellor Boschini and Mark Johnson, who was the chair of the board. The provost was up near the front. I saw it as an opportunity to make the case. I was trying to close the deal.
“I was a little concerned about how it might be very temporal,” Gooding said. “It was hot for the moment. But once we move on from the George Floyd news cycle, the paint fades from the end racism murals, and we just move on.”
In a phone call that afternoon, Holly Ellman, TCU’s associate director of communications, informed Gooding that the Trustees had unanimously adopted all seven recommendations. “We were kind of blown away,” Perkins said. “It told us that they understood what we were trying to do and also trusted what we’re trying to do. And they saw it from a macro level, the importance of having these very tough conversations.”
Dahlberg said she was not surprised. “I felt from the beginning that this was not performative, that it was a sincere effort,” she said. “I wouldn’t have come to TCU if I didn’t think TCU was on a serious and committed path to racial justice and social justice within our community. I saw TCU as a huge opportunity to make a difference, because here was a university that needed to change, had the people who wanted to change and that was committed to change.”
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