There were no dancing fools on this campus

100 years of history

In the 1920s, the Wake Forest Town Board regulated the playing of Victrolas on Sundays. If you have Victrolas, you have music, and people, particularly young people, want to dance.

Dancing, not just the Charleston but the Lindy Hop, the two-step and the tango, was the rage. Edward, the Prince of Wales who danced the night away in London, visited the United States in 1924, inspiring the song, “I Danced with a Man who Danced with a Girl who Danced with the Prince of Wales.”

The 600 or 700 young men on the Wake Forest College campus knew what was happening around the country. They had radios; they went to the movies. Wake Forest had two theaters, the Collegiate where Shorty’s is now and the Forest across the street where Fidelity Bank stands.

There had been movies in town for years; in 1915, H.E. Joyner was asking for a discount on his electric rate for his moving picture show. In 1927, with “The Jazz Singer,” the movies were to become the talkies, and those showed lots of dancing. Up in Rochester, George Eastman had just developed Technicolor for movies, but that came later.

And fraternities came to Wake Forest College in 1922, national fraternities that looked upon formal and informal dances as a natural part of the social scene.

They came to a small, Southern campus, a campus owned by the North Carolina Southern Baptist Convention. In the 1920s, partly because of the national uproar over the teaching of evolution and partly because the convention leaders had seen other colleges – Brown, Colgate and Rochester – slip from the control of their founding denominations, the convention tightened the reins of control.

The convention asserted the right to nominate and remove trustees at the state’s Baptist colleges like Wake Forest and Meredith. “The closer Wake Forest and Meredith can stay to the heart of North Carolina Baptists, the better it will be for them,” James Long, a pastor in Dunn, wrote in The Biblical Recorder, the weekly newspaper published by the convention.

Most North Carolina Baptists said that modern dancing was, if not immoral, at least the first step on the road to immorality. And Wake Forest College was a place almost sacred, the training ground for the Baptist ministers and laymen of the future. Baptist parents could safely send their sons to Wake Forest, knowing they would be guided by ministers – every president until Dr. William Poteat had been ordained – and by a faculty almost as well known for its piety as for its intellect.

Chapel services had always been a part of the college life, graduates had set off for mission work around the globe and into pulpits across the state and a large proportion of the students had been fired by zeal to perfect their Christianity and draw others to the same beliefs.

But, as Dr. G.W. Paschal so sadly notes in his history of the college, that zeal was increasingly lost as the 1920s and 1930s progressed. The students’ thoughts and interests were no longer of evangelistic religion. Instead, students were engrossed in the wins and losses of the football, basketball and baseball teams.

Paschal also identifies a difference in religious belief – he calls it a propaganda – that began after the war: a social Christianity seeking to correct discrimination and poverty instead of the traditional, missionary Baptist Christianity.

Finally, there was the difference that the increasing number of students of other denominations brought to the campus, who “can hardly be expected to have much more than a spectator’s interest in such things as the Baptist Students’ Union or a revival in the Wake Forest Baptist Church.”

Which brings us back to dancing. At first, Paschal said, the fraternities were circumspect but still had their dances. Then the faculty and trustees began to hear of “irregularities” at the dances, and in 1932 the trustees said faculty representatives should be at fraternity dances and other social events. The Old Black and Gold, the college newspaper, often reported that a professor and his wife were sponsors of a dance.

The trustees found it necessary to resolve in 1933 that “there should be no dancing at Wake Forest or elsewhere under the sponsorship or with the sanction of the College.” But the ferment to dance on campus continued, and in 1935 students sent up a petition to allow dancing in the new gymnasium with its large, polished floor.

That brought forth a blast from The Biblical Recorder: “Our Baptist people do not want men, whether preachers of laymen, to serve them who have been trained in an institution where dancing is officially approved.” After that editorial, the petition was withdrawn.

The Old Gold and Black editors, though, did not retreat. At the 1936 commencement the president of the student body and the editor presented another petition to the trustees, saying it had almost unanimous support from the students with a majority of the faculty favoring the petition. This time the trustees said yes and agreed there could be dancing at Wake Forest College “under strict supervision of the faculty” for one year.

Paschal says The News & Observer did not report this action, “but it was soon known all over the state.” Once again, The Biblical Recorder was the organ for the convention. Speaking of the many who had supported the school since its inception, “They had on their hearts the fact that the primary purpose of Wake Forest College from the first day until now has been to give our Baptist people an educated ministry for their churches; that all else is secondary. Does anyone imagine that that purpose will be realized as well in an institution that provides for dancing as in one where the emphasis is on the higher things of the spirit?”

That editorial brought forth an avalanche of letters from across the state, most protesting the introduction of dancing at the college. Four of the “oldest and most trusted professors” at the college sent letters defending dancing, Paschal notes. But the issue quickly became one of money: contributions to the Cooperative Program, the way in which North Carolina Baptists supported their colleges, dwindled as disapproval grew.

The college trustees and subsequently the students recognized a whip hand when they felt it. On Sept. 20, the executive committee of the board of trustees received a request from the student body to withdraw their petition for dances at the college. The committee granted that request.

This quiet settlement, however, did not end the controversy. In 1937, the State Convention approved a report that said, in part, that dancing “is demoralizing and that it tends towards immorality.” No Baptist school shall at any time “promote or allow dancing in its buildings or on its premises or elsewhere under its official auspices.”

Students, meanwhile, ignored the ban and freely promoted dances using the college name. In 1938 a dance was held at the high school cafeteria, and in 1939 the W Club sponsored a dance in the cafeteria just south of the campus. An editorial in The Old Gold and Black said, “Despite the objection of some few blue-nosed and narrow-minded powers-that-be, you can’t stop Wake Forest students from dancing.”

Then in 1941, a group of students including some athletes, said they were indeed going to have a dance on the campus itself. President Thurman Kitchin objected, the faculty supported him and students were told they could either abide by the convention’s intent or leave. “The penalty for violation of this regulation is expulsion.”

Paschal’s history ends in 1943 with World War II well underway. By that time, most of the students who had so gaily spun their girls around at the fraternity dances in Raleigh or at the Community House had been drafted. The campus was devoted to the 1,200 men of the Army Finance School, and their only dancing was a military quick step.

(In the fall of 2001, the Baptist State Convention ended almost all ties with Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem and Meredith College.

“The Baptist State Convention of North Carolina (BSC) all but ended its relationship with Wake Forest University (WFU) and Meredith College in an overwhelming vote at the BSC annual meeting. More than 90 percent of messengers voted to amend the BSC Constitution and Bylaws, changing WFU and Meredith from “affiliated” educational institutions to “historical” educational institutions.

WFU and Meredith will continue to get some scholarship funding, but the two schools lose their non-voting seats on the BSC Council on Christian Higher Education. The schools will no longer be promoted by the BSC.

Tim Moore, the chairman of the BSC Constitution and Bylaws Committee, said the move severs “the last direct link” between the schools and the BSC.”)

{(Murray Greason, a Wake Forest native, sent a note this week {2003} giving more insight into church services at Wake Union Church. “I can’t find my copy of an article about Priestley Davis and Episcopal services at Wake Union, but I sent a copy to my 89-year-old aunt, Sarah Greason Callaghan, and she says those services did not stop in 1919.

She is very sharp and she remembers attending services regularly through the ‘20s and ‘30s, led at 2 p.m. on Sundays by an Episcopal priest from Louisburg named Miller, who first had ‘dinner’ (lunch) at my grandfather’s house.”

Greason’s grandfather was George H. Greason, who was hired in 1905 as the second superintendent at Royall Cotton Mill and continued in that capacity up through the 1930s. He was also mayor of the independent town of Royall Cotton Mill and a member of the town board in Wake Forest. He and his family lived on what was then called Faculty Avenue, now North Main Street, in a house provided by the mill. George Greason’s son was Murray Greason, the Wake Forest College basketball coach for many seasons.)

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