January 29th marked 59 years since Joseph Vaughn’s admission to Furman as its first Black student brought an end to the university’s formal policy of racial exclusion. Furman highlighted the historic occasion with its fourth annual Joseph Vaughn Day celebration, featuring student, faculty, and alumni remarks. 

While the animating principles behind Joseph Vaughn Day are fundamentally good, the way our university chooses to remember Vaughn does a disservice to his legacy by obscuring an unfortunate truth: Furman doesn’t want its students to follow in Joseph Vaughn’s footsteps, no matter how many statues, plazas, awards, and days of remembrance it dedicates in an attempt to claim otherwise.

Breaking the racial barrier at Furman was not the only way Vaughn challenged the status quo. He was also a dynamic political force in his time here. As discussed in “It Even Happened Here: Student Activism at Furman University, 1967-1970,” he was a founding member and Vice President of Furman’s chapter of the Southern Student Organizing Committee, a national student organization that fought for civil rights and an end to the US invasion of Vietnam. 

In remembering Vaughn’s life, Furman has thus far been unwilling to grapple with this aspect of it. It appears as little more than a footnote on the university website, and wherever it is given more serious consideration, such as in Abijah Leamon’s remarks this year or Brian Neumann’s essay “This is ‘Him’”, its significance is still understated, its political character downplayed, and its implications for today left unexplored.

It should figure prominently in our remembrance of Vaughn that he took on such an active role in an organization that went out of its way to disturb business-as-usual. The SSOC endorsed “direct action” to struggle for a semi-socialistic “true democracy” that would abolish poverty and provide universal housing, healthcare, and education. The Furman chapter Vaughn founded and helped lead called for students to resist unjust university policies by intentionally violating them, and faced university repression for inviting outspoken revolutionaries like Black power advocate George Ware to campus.

Of course, it would be wrong to say Joseph Vaughn’s life was entirely defined by his organizing with the SSOC. He was many things besides a political rebel. But we cannot understand who he was without understanding that he dedicated years of his life to overturning not just the racist obstacles to his personal aspirations, but also the systems of white supremacy, imperialism, and anti-democracy that the Furman administration represents as much in 2024 as it did in 1965 or 1826. Any attempt to honor him that shies away from this fact is a false one, and an administration that uses his memory as a symbol of “progress” while structurally discouraging students from following his lead is abusing it.

We can plainly see that Furman is uninterested in cultivating students who follow in the tradition of Joseph Vaughn, a tradition of militant, grassroots, collective political action. Regardless of the good intentions of those who participate, the depoliticized institutional channels that Furman would rather we direct our desire for change towards—“Dins Dialogue,” “Justice Month,” the “Shared Equity Leadership Team”—fit better in the tradition of the “Thursday Forums” the administration established in 1968 in a cynical ploy to diffuse the energy Vaughn and his SSOC comrades brought to campus while actively suppressing their freedom to organize.

Furman’s methods of keeping its student body cowed and apolitical are not as brazen today as they were when Vaughn was enrolled, but they are just as real. Perhaps the most egregious example: on this campus, our freedom of assembly is less than free. Furman’s use-of-space policies forbid students from gathering for political purposes without express permission from the administration, and the price of that permission is that the campus police unilaterally dictate where, when, and under what conditions the gathering may take place. Deviation from the plan dictated by the administration is a serious breach of the student code of conduct. In addition, a needlessly strict set of regulations hampers students’ ability to freely circulate flyers, contest SGA elections, and run print publications independent of The Paladin—in other words, our ability to develop the collective political life Joseph Vaughn’s SSOC fought for and saw as the path to truly universal democracy and human freedom.

The SSOC’s charter identified “discouragement of participation by university administration policies” as one of the key obstacles to the creation of a “new, just, democratic order.” Those of us who agree that the world today is in dire need of such an order should honor Joseph Vaughn’s memory by taking inspiration from the organization he helped build and constructively defying those university policies which stand between us and a more just campus and world.