Afro-American studies professor Amilcar Shabazz used the quote by W.E.B. Du Bois to best describe Randolph Wilson Bromery and his mission.
“The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, and adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.”
Bromery was the second Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts and the first Black chancellor, serving from 1971 to 1979. After joining the faculty in 1967, he oversaw the founding of the Fine Arts Center and the purchase of the W.E.B. Du Bois Archives for UMass.
Sunday, Jan. 18 marked Bromery’s 100th birthday, and Thursday, Feb. 26 marks 13 years since Bromery’s death.
Dr. Philip Sinitiere, historian and senior research fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Center, has researched Bromery’s efforts to preserve Du Bois’s legacy for the long-term and connect it to the University’s community.
“Bromery felt that the historical record Du Bois left behind was worthy of deep and careful study, not just for conditions in the 1970s when Bromery secured the agreement for the papers to come to UMass, but also for future generations,” Sinitiere said in an email.
Before UMass
Bromery was born on Jan. 18, 1926 in Cumberland, Maryland. According to his son Dennis Bromery, he grew up in a time of racial segregation in schooling.
“The black males, they didn’t bother to teach math to [them], because you didn’t need it,” Dennis Bromery said. “And so luckily he had a grandmother … who hired a tutor to tutor him in math.”
A year after graduating from Carver High School, a segregated school for Black students, Bromery enlisted in the Tuskegee Airmen, the 33rd Fighter Group of the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) in 1943. Predominantly composed of African-American soldiers due to segregation and stationed in Tuskegee, Alabama, they served in Morocco, Tunisia and Italy.
It was there that Bromery’s knowledge in mathematics served him well. Upon enlisting, he was initially told he would not qualify for becoming a pilot because of his lack of high school education in the subject.
“My father said, ‘Well, give me a test and see,’” Dennis Bromery said. “And he passed the test because of the tutoring he got.”
Bromery later obtained his bachelor’s degree in Math at Howard University in 1956.
Although Bromery could not complete his training due to health issues, his tenure as a pilot benefited him when he applied to work as an Airborne Exploration Geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Bromery worked for the Survey from 1948 until moving to Amherst in 1967. Concurrently, he furthered his studies in geology, earning his master’s degree from American University in 1962 and his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1968.
UMass faculty and CCEBS
In 1967, the year before Randolph Bromery completed his Ph.D., the Bromery family relocated to Amherst. There, Randolph Bromery joined the UMass geology department, becoming only one of six Black faculty members on campus.
In the late 1960s, Bromery was involved in the implementation of the Committee for the Collegiate Education of Black Students (CCEBS), which worked towards “recruiting and assisting Black, Spanish-speaking, Asian-American and low-income students.”
He worked alongside four other Black faculty members to push for the University to admit more students of color. When the University only agreed to admit a few, the faculty members threatened to resign in response.
Gradually, the number of students of color admitted to the University increased from around 120 in 1968 to around 500 in 1970. By the end of Bromery’s tenure, more faculty members of color had joined UMass, and the ratio of male to female undergraduate students “shifted from 60:40 to 50:50.”
Jamilla Deria, director of the Fine Arts Center (FAC), said that more than a thousand Black students had been enrolled by the end of Bromery’s tenure in 1979, which was not only a defining moment for the time but also for UMass.
“[Bromery] made this campus the modern university it is today, in that it is a campus that can contribute not only to the vibrancy of Massachusetts, but to the vibrancy of the world,” Deria said. “It reflects the vibrancy of the region, the state, the nation and the world through the people and the cultures that thrive here.”
The Fine Arts Center
Bromery became the UMass Chancellor in 1971 upon the resignation of Oswald Tippo. According to Deria, while Bromery played a key role in the formation of the Fine Arts Center (FAC) itself, his advocacy for the arts in general also increased the scope of performers at the Center.
He invited various artists, many of whom were artists of color, to raise awareness of musical genres, including jazz, on campus. Deria said that by prioritizing diversity in the arts since its inception, the FAC broke cultural barriers in the 1970s.
Along with Frederick Tillis, the Center’s inaugural director, Bromery not only diversified the programming at the FAC but also advocated for diverse music education on campus.
Among the jazz musicians who Bromery brought onto campus were saxophonist Archie Shepp and drummer Max Roach, who taught in the Afro-American department.
“[Bromery] wanted to create some distinction in our music programs,” Deria said. “He wanted to also bring that sort of star power to even our Afro-Am department. And in doing that, it helped to catalyze the movement that was already happening on campus to have jazz music as a degree program on campus.”
In April 2020, it was announced that the FAC was to be renamed the Randolph W. Bromery Center for the Arts; the change was made official in October 2021. Deria acknowledged Bromery’s efforts to permanently change the structure of what genres of music were listened to by promoting cultural diversity in the FAC’s programming.
“We’re known nationally for our jazz and Black music commitment,” Deria said. “We have a long history of presenting works out of the Latinx and Indigenous experience. We have been telling this story that America is this meeting place where diversity ignites innovation. And that, again, wasn’t a mandate from Bromery, but it was a context he created through bringing these artists to campus.”
The W.E.B. Du Bois Archives
Upon becoming Chancellor, Bromery also started working towards purchasing the papers of W.E.B. Du Bois for the University. He met with Du Bois’s widow, Shirley Graham Du Bois, her lawyer Bernard Jaffe and historian Herbert Aptheker in Egypt on several occasions between 1971 and 1973.
According to Caroline White, the interim co-head of the Special Collections and University Archives, the archives cover various aspects of Du Bois’ life and activism from records of his work with the Niagara Movement, the civil rights organization that he created with William Monroe Trotter in 1905, to archives of The Crisis, the official magazine for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) co-founded by Du Bois.
Sinitiere said that Bromery persuaded Shirley by telling her of the significance of preserving Du Bois’s papers at a public university such as UMass.
“[With] UMass being a state university, Bromery understood the importance of [creating] a scenario that would make the Du Bois papers as accessible as possible to scholars and students,” Sinitiere said.
Bromery also told Shirley that he would locate the papers so they would overlook Great Barrington, Du Bois’ birthplace. “I’ll put them on the twenty-fifth floor of the library, and if it weren’t for the curvature of the earth, you could almost see Great Barrington,” Bromery said.
In 1973, the University bought the Du Bois papers for $150,000. They were in poor condition when they were obtained and had to be treated by the New England Documents Conservation Center in Andover. While the papers were being prepared, Shabazz said that the University made available what could be retrieved.
“We started making them available as early as 1973 … in print-bound volume,” Shabazz said. “We got stuff transcribed. We edited it. We annotated it. We put them together and we put out these remarkable reference volumes, mostly with the libraries.”
With the support of institutions including the Afro-American department, UMass Press and Aptheker himself, UMass began editing the papers and preparing them for publication. The process finished in 1979 and the papers were released to the public ceremonially in 1980.
Shabazz said that by acquiring the Du Bois papers and supporting the Archives, Bromery raised a general awareness of the importance of community organizing and social change among the students in general.
“Let’s study people [and] organizations [and] acquire the papers of people who were involved in their life, in their organizing, in whatever way … contributing to social movement,” Shabazz said. “I think that’s where we had, by having his support at that high level, all of these kinds of actions we engaged [in].”
In 2009, the library received a grant from the Verizon Foundation allowing them to digitize the Archives, thus making them widely accessible for research. Although they are available online, White said that people still come to the library to see the Archives in person.
“[People] still come to … feel the materials, use the documents [and] have a different experience in terms of how you find things,” White said. “There’s a little sort of different type of serendipity when you have a box of stuff as opposed to a list of a screen with a whole bunch of digital items. So it’s still our most heavily used collection.”
After UMass
After stepping down as Chancellor in 1979, Bromery became president of Westfield State College in 1988, before serving as president of Springfield College from 1991 to 1997.
According to Shabazz, Bromery remained involved with UMass even after retiring. He helped to obtain the grant from the Verizon Foundation to digitize the Archives; it was around the time UMass received the grant that Shabazz first met Bromery.
“I found Dr. Bromery to be … the real definition of an engaged scholar, administrator [and] activist,” Shabazz said. “I found him a great inspiration to me, personally.”
Even after Bromery’s death on Feb. 26, 2013, his impacts on the University are felt. Deria became director of the FAC in 2019, and she looks to Bromery’s legacy when promoting cultural awareness at the Center.
“It’s one thing to … have an ‘arts-for-all’ kind of posture,” Deria said. “It’s another thing to structurally embed the cultural production of communities of color inside of an academy. … During my time, the programming team … really brought artists to not just perform or bring work … but also [be] in conversation about the pressing issues of our time, along with the campus scholars and researchers, to really think through and develop new approaches, new strategies for how to solve them.”
Dennis Bromery said that as Chancellor, Bromery actively worked with students when they mobilized for change, guiding them in finding solutions to problems.
He added that in recent years, he has encountered people who were enrolled at UMass during the time of the CCEBS program and expressed their gratitude to Bromery.
“Maybe three or four years ago at Stop and Shop, I had somebody come up to me and say, ‘You don’t know me, but I was in the CCEBS program. And your father made it possible for me to get my four-year education when … under any other circumstances, [I] wouldn’t have been able to do that,’” Dennis Bromery said.
Kalana Amarasekara can be reached at [email protected].
