Part 4: Reunification

Perceiving Need: The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation

IN FOUR YEARS, the Bowman Gray School of Medicine had been a boon to both Baptist Hospital and Winston-Salem. Winston-Salem's dominant families – Hanes; Reynolds; Gray – had admirable track records of perceiving need and meeting it; when R.J. Reynolds first started hiring black workers, for example, he established medical and educational facilities for them. Socially conscious members of the Reynolds family were sensitive to the absence of a substantial middle class and the educational and economic disparities between the upper and lower classes in the city, and they were vigilant for initiatives that could ameliorate the situation.

Gordon Gray's radical idea to reunite the College with its medical school meant pulling up roots that were more than a century old.

In October 1945, Gordon Gray had a radical idea, which he refined with Coy Carpenter. Wouldn't reuniting Wake Forest College with its medical school benefit everyone? He had a source of funds in mind: the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. Founded in 1936 by the three surviving Reynolds children as a memorial to their late brother, its mission was to support "charitable works in the state of North Carolina." But after a decade, its only significant project had been a syphilis eradication program to which it devoted $50,000 a year.

Gray, who would one day assume the presidency of the University of North Carolina, approached William Neal Reynolds, R.J.'s brother and the family patriarch who chaired the foundation's board, with the notion of dedicating the trust's money to relocating Wake Forest College to Winston-Salem. The cost would be huge, he acknowedged to "Old Will," but the potential benefit would be equally so. Reynolds liked the idea, and floated it by R.J.'s daughter and son-in-law, Charles and Mary Reynolds Babcock, who were enthusiastic and spread their zeal among the rest of the family.

The proposal submitted by the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation board to the Wake Forest trustees in March 1946 called for an appropriation of $300,000 annually to the College in perpetuity if it relocated to Winston-Salem. The Babcocks offered to donate 300 acres of rolling wooded property they owned contiguous to Reynolda, the family's estate on the northern fringe of the city, for a campus. There had been some preliminary talk of creating a "Reynolds University" comprised of Wake Forest College and the Bowman Gray School of Medicine, but the family astutely opted to stipulate that there should be no name change. The move itself would be change enough.

It was an offer a cash-strapped college confronting a tenuous future could not refuse. Within a month, the College trustees and the board of the Baptist State Convention voted to accept it. But as spring morphed into summer and then autumn, the exuberance darkened into discontent.

A House Divided

President Kitchin supported the move publicly, but his heart would remain in the town of Wake Forest.

The town, which drew its social and commercial sustenance from the College, split between those who acknowledged the inevitability of its departure, and others who tried to mount a grass-roots campaign to overturn the decision. Although a majority of the faculty – including Ora Bradbury, Old Bill Speas, and Jasper Memory – spoke out in favor of it as a once-in-a-lifetime shot at progress, an influential few – notably, A.C. Reid and E.E. Folk – were vociferously opposed. Kitchin's initial approval had been lukewarm at best, and as time wore on, it was plain to many that his heart simply was not in it. Kitchin disguised his feelings in public, but without his full energy behind it, the fund drive to build the new campus lagged badly. In 1948, the College actually spent more on fundraising than it raised.

Kitchin's health, which had been tenuous for years, declined rapidly after he suffered a sequence of small heart attacks in 1948. Physically and emotionally drained, he submitted his resignation in April 1949, to take effect in July 1950, ending his thirty-three-year tenure at Wake Forest as a physiology instructor, medical school dean, and, since 1930, president. The board of trustees quickly named an eight-member search committee headed by Charlotte minister and trustee Casper C. Warren (BA '20, BLaws '21). Everyone realized that the fate of the move hinged on its recommendation. Not everybody recognized that the very character of the College – its mission, governance, and future direction – also was at stake.

Part 5: The Leadership »

A 10-part series adapted from the September, 2006 edition of Wake Forest Magazine.

By David Fyten

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1951 Groundbreaking  (Requires Quicktime)