Scarred by segregation

One day more than four decades ago, a white boy boarded a bus in Knoxville, Tenn., with his African-American nanny. He sat down near the front of the vehicle, in the "white section," but when his nanny joined him, she was told to exit the bus.

It was the mid-1950s, and segregation was still alive in the South. Witnessing his nanny's banishment from the bus left a permanent scar on the young boy. Internalizing the event, he grew up determined to improve the plight of the impoverished and oppressed.

That boy was Gordon Bonnyman '69. He is the founder of the Tennessee Justice Center, Inc., a nonprofit, public interest law and advocacy firm that attempts to serve the poor. The center helps low-income citizens whose access to healthcare and welfare has been curtailed by state and federal legislation.

Bonnyman said childhood experiences like the one on the bus were a deciding factor in his choice to form the organization. Witnessing the effects of segregation, he said, made a profound impact on his life.

"Race was very important to me because I was a southerner," he said, recalling his youth. "I rode in the front of the bus but was very aware of riding a bus back and forth to school that said, 'This has a colored section.' "

"Of course," he added, "that was a small, tiny window into experiences African Americans had and continue to have every day."

Upon entering the University as an undergraduate in the history department, Bonnyman found himself preoccupied with the political turmoil facing America at the time. Though he remembered the Princeton campus as fairly quiet when it came to the civil rights and antiwar movements, Bonnyman said such issues were profoundly important to him personally.

"Princeton had the reputation of being sort of a country club and a safe conservative bubble," he said. "It was very much an ivory tower."

Despite the sheltered life that many Princetonians seemed to lead, examples of what Bonnyman called the "intellectual ferment" occurring in the country seeped into the "Orange Bubble." That consciousness of national responsibility touched him deeply, he said.

"Being from the South and having a sense of the burden of southern history in contributing to and perpetuating the national problems," Bonnyman said, "it brought home that as a very privileged person, I had been given the gift of a very rich education by Princeton [and] that I had a responsibility."

During this time, Bonnyman said, he was inspired by the example of Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court. Marshall's dedication to civil rights convinced Bonnyman to enter the field of law, he added.

"[The law] can be used to perpetuate cruelty and injustice and to defeat a sense of community, or it can be used [as Marshall used it,] to foster community and to foster justice and a more humane existence for everyone," Bonnyman said. "Part of my job ... is to keep trying to tell the truth to America about what it means to be poor, what it means to be disadvantaged, what it means to be an immigrant [and] what it means to be a minority."

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

After spending 23 years with Legal Services in Nashville, Bonnyman and his colleagues faced what they saw as a legal crisis. The 1996 Republican Congress had established a conservative agenda that sought to curb low-income Americans' reliance on federal funds, a move Bonnyman saw as unacceptable.

"Suddenly we had clients [to whom] we had to say, 'I'm sorry, but we can't represent you anymore,' " Bonnyman said. "A lot of conservative bar leaders as well as colleagues [who came] together said, 'There has to be some sort of institutional response to this.' "

That desire for a response culminated in the founding of the Tennessee Justice Center.

One of the issues the center currently seeks to address is poor Americans' access to healthcare. Tennessee has seen the largest increase in the number of uninsured Americans in history, with more than 200,000 people affected. This problem occurs, Bonnyman said, because the cost of healthcare is inflating faster than the economy as a whole.

"[For] working families ... health care is just priced beyond their means," he said. "It's a huge class issue; it's a huge race issue. And we represent the people who, in effect, find themselves squeezed out of the healthcare system by rising cost."

"We subscribe to certain myths in this country so that those of us who are privileged can sleep at night," Bonnyman added. "We indulge this myth that if you're sick, you can just always go to the emergency room, and they'll always take care of you. The reality is ... that if you're uninsured, you will live sicker and die earlier. And along the way, you'll suffer and your family will suffer needlessly."

As a mentor and participant in Princeton's Class of 1969 Community Service Fund, Bonnyman said he encourages privileged people to help the less fortunate by engaging in public service. He believes he has a moral duty, he said, to publicize the realities that millions of poor Americans face every day.

"Those of us who are fortunate [enough] to enjoy a Princeton education have ... the tools to analyze critically our country and our world and understand the systems and the dynamics that contribute to human suffering," Bonnyman said. "We also have relationships and influence that [go] with that experience. Those two things, I think, create an enormous responsibility. And I think they create wonderful opportunities."