By admin 
Willliam “Bill” Dufford, an activist educator who was a muse to author Pat Conroy and who helped South Carolina transition away from a segregated school system favoring whites, died at his home in the Hollywood-Rose Hill section of Columbia on Sept. 30. He was 99.
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During the days in the 1960s and 1970s, when Black students began to integrate with white public schools, Dufford — as a principal, coach and teacher in various counties — set a standard for peaceful integration through quiet leadership, personal warmth and story-telling abilities, according to those who knew him and his memoirs.
According to his memoir, “My Tour Though the Asylum,” published in 2017 by University of South Carolina Press and written with the help of two journalists, Sally McInerney and AÏda Rogers, Dufford was born into a white family in Newberry and grew up never thinking about the inequities between Black life and white life he experienced every day, inequities such as Black neighborhoods not having sidewalks, curbs or street lights that white residents had.
The title of his memoir comes from a famous quotation by Charleston lawyer James Louis Pettigru, who opposed leaving the Union. In 1860, as South Carolina was on the brink of seceding, Petigru quipped, “South Carolina is too small for a republic, and too large for an insane asylum.”
As he grew into adulthood and became a school principal, Dufford came to grasp the unfairness of segregation, especially in public schools, where he was to spend most of his working life. He resolved to do what he could to make the transition from segregated schools to integrated schools happen in a way that increased understanding and friendships between the races, his memoir says.
Pat Conroy’s muse
“In the summer of 1961, when I was a 15-year-old boy, I was lucky to have the great Bill Dufford walk into my life,” writes the late Pat Conroy in a posthumous 2016 book of essays, “My Writing Life.”
At the time, Conroy was going to be a new student at then all-white Beaufort High School and Dufford was the principal. Dufford gave him a summer job as groundskeeper at the school, planting grass, shrubs and trees and moving wheelbarrows of earth from one place to another.
Every day, Dufford would take him to lunch at Harry’s, an eatery and gathering place in downtown Beaufort where Dufford was well known, Conroy writes.
“I watched him as he greeted the movers and shakers of that beautiful town beside the Beaufort River. He taught me, by example, how a leader conducts himself, how the principal of a high school conducts himself, as he made his way from table to table, calling everyone by their first names. He made friendliness an art form,” writes Conroy.
“I was one of a thousand kids who came under the influence of our magnificent principal Bill Dufford. For him, we all tried to make the world a finer and kinder place to be,” writes Conroy, author of 11 books, most with South Carolina themes such as “Lords of Discipline.”
In one of Conroy’s books that was made into a movie, “The Great Santini,” Dufford appears as a kindly, caring principal, according to a story in The State in 2016 after the writer died.
Federal Judge Richard Gergel, who as a high school student had met Dufford and later Conroy, recalled that after Conroy was fired from a public school teaching job at Daufuskie Island in Beaufort County, Dufford suggested Conroy write a book about his experience.
“Bill said, ‘Why don’t you write a book about your experiences on Daufuskie?’ Pat said, ‘How am I going to do that? How am I going feed myself?’“ recalled Gergel in an interview this week.
“I saw Bill pull out a check and write it. Pat wrote the book. I was standing there when it happened. Pat told me one time he put a Bill Dufford character in every one of his novels,” said Gergel, who became a noted South Carolina lawyer and then a federal judge based in Charleston.
That book, “The Water is Wide,” became a movie and launched Conroy’s career as one of America’s most successful modern novelists.
Alex Sanders, former chief judge of the S.C. Court of Appeals, said this week in an interview, “Pat Conroy told me more than once that he credited Bill Dufford with all of his success as an author.”
Sanders, ex-president of the College of Charleston, was a longtime friend of Conroy’s and delivered the eulogy at Conroy’s funeral.
Carl Epps, 82, a retired Columbia attorney who was a student at Beaufort High School in the 1960s when Dufford was principal, said, “He just had this innate ability to lead people. You really just learned by being around him.”
One thing Dufford did at the Beaufort schools where he was principal was “assemble great teaching staffs,” Epps said. “He was one of the most influential people in my life.”
Epps recalled that Dufford would meet students in the hall and say, “What have you done today that you shouldn’t have done?”
“That sort of a question, done with humor so you weren’t threatened with it, you kept it in mind as you moved through the day. He seemed to know everything that was going on,” said Epps, a lifelong friend.
Epps also played on some athletic teams Dufford coached, teams that could beat other more gifted teams because “he just got the most out of you,” he said. “If he thought you should have gained 10 yards on a carry, but you only got five, he would let you know that.”
Dufford’s awakening
In the late 1960s, Dufford went to the University of Florida to get a PhD. in education and there he learned about what he called “the unfairness of Jim Crow,” he wrote in his memoirs.
Two professors told him about Black people who had left the South during the Depression, but when they came back to visit their families, “they could find no place for lodging, no place for meals, no place to go to the bathroom… These professors would tell stories about the cruelty of segregation and separation, and they would almost be crying, talking about what people had to do just to come back and visit their families,” Dufford wrote.
“What they were talking about were things I had been living through and been blinded by in a Jim Crow society. They really brought it into focus… It was like a bucket of water being thrown on me,” Dufford wrote. “It also kindled a fire in me to change things if I could.”
Once back in South Carolina, Dufford set about implementing change in counties where he was hired to be a principal or superintendent.
In 1970, Gergel, who was student body president at Keenan High School in Columbia, which had just been integrated with Black students from C.A. Johnson and white students from A.C. Flora, sought out Dufford.
“We were a new high school, we were half African-American, half white. The school folks (officials) seemed a little confused about what to do and how to do it and seemed mostly concerned about how to maintain order without derailing the complicated situation we were in,” said Gergel.
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“But a number of student leaders very much saw this as a great opportunity, a great moment. We didn’t want to talk just about order — we wanted to talk about how we make a new South,” recalled Gergel.
Dufford helped Keenan navigate those challenges,” said Gergel. “We did a multi-day program, with parents and kids. It was very helpful.”
Later years
After Dufford retired, he kept engaged in current affairs and numerous people who had met him over the years kept in touch.
In 1989, about 150 old friends came to Columbia for a Bill Dufford Appreciation Night, according to a newspaper story in The State at the time.
“Friends and admirers insist Dufford is one of the most influential educators in South Carolina, a man whose humanistic view of school taught thousands that learning and fun were compatible,” said the story, written by reporter Dave Moniz.
The story quoted Walter McRacken, then a Columbia realtor and former student body president at Sumter’s Edmunds High School, as saying, “He could be talking to a group of welfare mothers or to the U.S. Senate, and Dufford would treat them all in a way they could respond to and relate to.”
At the gathering, attendees recalled one trait Dufford had — in schools of 1,000 students, Dufford was able to remember each student’s name.
“I don’t know how I did it, but I think it is important to kids that they be identified — for my sake and for their sake,” Dufford said in the article.
At Beaufort High School, his students thrived. During a six-year period in the ‘60s, the school averaged 2.5 percent National Merit Scholar finalists a year, five times the national average. At the other end, his school was able to reduce the dropout rate to next to nothing, the story said.
In his later life, Dufford was known as a good conversationalist who love to challenge conservatives on their beliefs.
In 2008, Ron Morris, a sports columnist for The State, wrote an article urging Newberry College to change its mascot from “The Indians” to a mascot that Morris said would be non-racist.
Dufford loved the article.
“Bill called me the next day at the office,” Morris said in an interview this week. “He said, ‘Ron Morris, This is Bill Dufford. You are my new best friend, and you are going to meet me for lunch tomorrow!’ That was so like him. He was demonstrative. He was opinionated and he introduced himself that way. ”
That was the beginning of a longtime friendship, Morris said.
Newberry College changed its mascot in 2010 to the Wolves.
Morris will be a pallbearer at Dufford’s funeral on Saturday, Oct. 10, at 11 a.m. in Newberry at the Whitaker Funeral Home.
Dufford’s life
Dufford was born in Newberry on Oct. 11, 1926.
He continued a family tradition of donating to Newberry College and in 1995, he and his siblings donated their family home to Newberry College for use as its alumni center. The Dufford family also was a major donor to the Newberry Opera House, a striking downtown Victorian building crowned by a French Gothic-style clock tower.
During World War II, Dufford served in the United States Navy as a radar crew member aboard the USS Los Angeles in the Pacific Theater from 1944 to 1945, his obituary said.
After the war, aided by the G.I. Bill, which helped veterans get a college education, he graduated from Newberry College in 1949. At the college, he was student body president and president of his fraternity.
He began his career at Winyah High School in Georgetown, where he taught mathematics and physics and served as a coach. He helped establish Winyah Junior High School and became its principal, his obituary said.
Over his career, he served as high school principal in Georgetown, Beaufort and Sumter, and well as superintendent of schools in York County, and he also taught in Richland County.
“He also worked as an educational consultant to the Boston school system, directed field services for the USC Center for Integrated Education, and served as co-chair of South Carolina Gov. Richard W. Riley’s Task Force on Southern Children,” his obituary said.
Dufford’s obituary said that “his defining public service came during the integration of South Carolina’s schools, with an inclusive approach that honored the perspectives of students, colleagues, and the community.
“In Sumter in 1969, he guided the unification of the formerly segregated Lincoln and Edmunds high schools, insisting that genuine integration required more than placing students in the same building. Through practical, student-centered measures, he worked to create a shared school community founded on dignity, fairness, and mutual respect.
In an interview for a USC Museum of Education exhibit titled “1963–2013: Desegregation-Integration Reflections,” Dufford offered this advice to teachers:
“If you wish to become a teacher, then you really must be a compassionate person who truly likes people. And you must know that if you take the right and courageous stand, there may be some uneasy moments from time to time.
“But if you are standing for the right issues and doing the right thing, there will always be a place for you as a teacher. You may not be able to change the world, but you will have an impact on those with whom you come into contact.”
A letter Conroy wrote to Dufford in 1968 when Conroy was 22 expressed the regard the future famous novelist had for his principal:
“Someday I will exert the same influence over someone, and I want him to tell me. This is immortality. For what I have learned from you I will pass on, and it will be passed on and passed on,” Conroy wrote.
Dufford, who never married, leaves no survivors. His three siblings, including a brother who was a doctor and a sister, a teacher, died before him.
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