STEP reflects MSU’s legacy of enriching community life

Contact: Kristin K. Anderson, University Relations, (517) 353-8819, ander284@msu.edu

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Some 40 years ago a group of Michigan State University students and faculty, inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of service to others, left the comforts of an East Lansing campus to lend support to students of Rust College in Holly Springs, Miss.

Rust College, a small, historically black liberal arts college, at that time was having difficulty with accreditation and there was a lack of college preparation for many of its incoming students. It was the only college for blacks in northern Mississippi at that time, and had a rich history beginning after the Civil War.

MSU volunteers, spearheaded by faculty members John Duley and Robert Green, and energized by student leaders including Laura Leichliter, now an MSU graduate with an undergraduate degree in social work and master’s degree in sociology, put together several programs to help.

The Student Tutorial Education Project (STEP) was the principal program. It was the first all-student administered educational outreach program of its kind in the country.

From 1965 to 1969, MSU sent some120 student, faculty and East Lansing area volunteers to Rust College for five weeks in June and July. The Michigan contingent helped improve the math and language arts skills of incoming freshmen.

Most of the students, including Paul Herron, were from farms and small towns in Mississippi. Herron was among the freshmen entering Rust College in 1966. A year later he transferred to MSU where he received his undergraduate degree in chemistry, and his master’s and doctoral degrees in psychology and neuroscience.

“Many of the MSU students came from small towns in the Midwest, and had never been to the South,” Herron said. “It was the first extended integrated experience for most of the MSU students, and the first positive experience in integration for most of the black students. For the students from both colleges it was an influential journey across racial and cultural boundaries.”

Herron said he liked the sincerity of the volunteers, the eagerness of fellow STEP participants, and the representation it conveyed to MSU, which to him was a distant place that created these special people

“The ways STEP helped academically, and brought people together from across cultural and racial lines were special for the people involved and unique to the civil rights movement,” said Herron, an associate professor of anatomy and neuroscience in the College of Medicine at the University of Tennessee.

Herron has collected the reflections from the MSU volunteers and Rust College alumni during those five summers in the ‘60s.

There will be a public presentation and discussion of his report at 3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 13, at the Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center, as part of MSU’s Martin Luther King Jr. celebratory activities.

“This compilation will provide a very unusual integration of thoughts and perspectives on the successes, failures and life-changing experiences from those who sought to help and those who wanted to be helped,” Herron said. “We also will learn a great deal about volunteering across racial and cultural boundaries.”