Following in the Footsteps of Legends
By Add Seymour Jr.
Stepping down after 12 years at the helm of Morehouse College, Dr. Walter Massey has carved out his own legacy at an institution known for producing Black leaders.
ATLANTA
Walter Massey and Morehouse College seem to have been destined for each other. His enrollment to the college in the 1950s was more a matter of fate than anything else. When his mother drove a group of boys from his hometown of Hattiesburg, Miss., up to the college to take an early admission test, a 16-year-old Massey went along for the ride.
Nearly 40 years later, with Massey poised to become head of the massive University of California system, he found himself instead back at Morehouse.
Now, after 12 years at the helm of the nation’s largest all-male liberal arts institution, Massey says he’s ready to retire. But during his half-century-long association with Morehouse, he’s cemented his legacy at an institution known as much for its tight family structure as for producing Black leaders. Some at the school say Massey’s name could be mentioned in the same breath as two other legendary Black educators and former Morehouse presidents: Benjamin Mays and John Sales.
“He has been a blessing to the college and an asset to the city of Atlanta,” says Fulton County Commissioner Jim Maddox, a 1956 Morehouse graduate.
Atlanta was a long way from Hattiesburg, literally and figuratively, Massey remembers.
Segregation and racism were an ever-present part of life in the Deep South, he says. “But I had a very happy childhood, if you can separate segregation from our lives.”
His father worked in a chemical factory and his mother was a school principal. She was the one he says instilled education as a foundation very early in his life.
“At that point, I thought I might go into music, but I always liked mathematics,” says Massey, who as a teen played saxophone in a band called The Blue Gardenias. “I didn’t want to be a high school teacher because everybody did that.”
