Mark Lee
He sat at the countertop in his kitchen, telling stories and laughing with his daughter. It was a typical scene from everyday life, but by many standards, Irwin Holmes’ life has been anything but normal — Holmes is a little piece of N.C. State history.
In fall 1956, four black undergraduate students enrolled at the University for the first time, and four years later, in spring 1960, Holmes was the first black man to graduate from the University with a bachelor’s degree.
To many people, that would be a big deal. But to Holmes, it was just what every other student did.
“You graduated from high school. How did that feel? It was all right,” he said. “That’s all I felt for me. It was all right. It was everybody else that was hung up on it.”
Holmes said he was in a score of magazines and newspapers across the country, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and even Sports Illustrated, because he had been a tennis co-captain his senior year.
His daughter, Sherri, said she was shocked at his indifference.”You didn’t? Really?” she said. “You didn’t have a moment of, ‘Oh wow, look what I’ve done for everyone who comes behind me?'”
“Of course it was a big deal; it was a big deal for me. But not like you would think,” Holmes said.
Keara Barrett, a freshman in First Year College, said she appreciates the milestones made by people like Holmes.
“I think it’s a big deal,” Barrett said. “The roads they paved for us are something that should be known and talked about so we can know where we came from, as minorities and as students in general.”
A freshman in biological sciences, Sonya Simpson said she agreed with Barrett, and said she felt like many students “don’t understand the magnitude” of milestones reached.
Holmes graduated with a degree in electrical engineering, and as if that wasn’t a big enough success, he said he was the first black student to graduate from any previously segregated southern institution.
At the University, he was one of a very small minority.
“We got as many as 12 [black students] during the time I was there,” Holmes said.
By the time he graduated, he said the number of black students was back down to about eight.Holmes said he and Walter Holmes, a friend from Durham and a fellow black student, lived off campus during their first semester at school.
“We could always get out of town fast if we needed to,” he said. “We didn’t know how we were going to be accepted.”
By their second semester, however, they were living on campus in Watauga Hall.
“Living on campus was much more convenient. Plus, you could get more of a college life on campus,” Holmes said. “By that time, it was clear they weren’t going to run us off.”
As far as acceptance went, Holmes said he felt relatively comfortable on campus, and said he thought the University did a good job of keeping things settled.
“It was as good as anybody could expect; better than most people expected. Total acceptance from the student body, as far as we knew,” he said. “You know, obviously white people would see us going in class and think, ‘What is he doing here?’ But, you know, they didn’t bother to say it.”
Holmes said there were a few incidents though, one of which he didn’t even know about for more than a year after it occurred.
During his freshman year, he and one of his fellow black students were in a math class together. He said the first class they went to was normal and there were no problems.
When they went back the following week, however, the class had been moved to another room, and someone else had replaced their female professor. Holmes said he didn’t think anything of it at the time.
However, during his sophomore year he said he was walking through the YMCA and overheard a meeting about school integration taking place.
He said it caught his attention, and as he stopped to listen, they began to talk about whether or not integration on the University’s campus had been successful so far. Most present at the meeting agreed it had been, with the exception of one incident — one of the female math teachers had asked to be removed from teaching a math class with black students in it.
“They didn’t even know that I happened to be standing there listening, so they weren’t telling it for me,” Holmes said. “They were telling it to each other. Otherwise I never would have known that incident happened.”
He said he thought this showed the University’s ability to keep things calm, even when tensions did arise, so there wasn’t a lot of publicity about it.
Another instance came about during intramural football season.
Holmes said Watauga was one of the smallest dorms on campus, and because of that they always participated in intramural sports with another dorm’s team.
He said his roommate that year was a star football player back in high school, and because he wanted to play football, Holmes went out with him.
Their dorm’s captain was unable to make the first game, and the other dorm’s captain called all the shots throughout the game. It was nine-man football, and by the end, 10 of 12 players had played — all but Holmes and his roommate, the two black men.
After the game, they told their dorm’s captain what had happened.
“Our dorm’s captain went off the roof, said excuse me, and left. By 10 o’clock that night, the intramural program had redone the whole program to allow our dorm to have a separate team, which it had never had before,” Holmes said. “We were second [place] in all the dorms on campus that year, and we were the smallest dorm.”
He said he thought this again showed the campus’s ability to handle discrimination in an orderly, appropriate manner when it did arise.
Holmes said his white peers even got violent on his behalf.
During an intramural football game, Holmes said a member of the opposite team had been unnecessarily rough with him, knocking the “heck” out of him.
“So I go back and tell my team. I said, ‘Did you see that?’ They said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll handle it,'” he said. “We run another play, whistle blows, they stop playing. They go over and they take the kid who had done that to me off the field. [My teammate] had broken his leg.”
He said he also had teachers put extra effort into helping him make good grades, and one of them even helped him get a good job after he graduated.
Overall, Holmes said he thought being at the University was a great experience.
“The big thing is we were all brainwashed — all of America. We were brainwashed that white people were better. Our parents told us, ‘Don’t believe that baloney. You can do anything they can do,'” Holmes said. “So it was good to go to college and get in a classroom; it was interesting to sit there and see the reality of things.”
First Year College freshman Brittany Allison said she thinks many students do not realize the possibilities that men like Holmes made available to them.
“Students in general take advantage of being here because all of the hard work was done before us,” she said. “College wasn’t an option in my household; you had to go. For other people, that wasn’t the case at all.”
Barrett said she agreed.
“A lot of students take for granted the fact that other people accomplished major achievements for us to be students at NCSU,” she said. “There has to be more knowledge on the foundation of the college.”
For now, Holmes said he is content spending time with his family; helping run their staffing business and playing with his latest toy — a recently refurbished 1988 Mercedes Benz 560SL.
“All I did was the same thing you did. I just went to class, took the tests and passed most of them; and passed enough of them to get out,” Holmes said.