By Dr. Betty L. Sullivan
(Editor’s Note: Carolyn Ellis Staton, former provost at the University of Mississippi, was married to William “Bill” Staton for 33 years. She is referred to in this story as “Miss Ellis.”)
In the fall of 1967, my daughter Elizabeth’s father and I met in Miss Carolyn Ellis’ first period advanced English class. It was our class that she led one morning that semester during first period out to the lawn in front of the school for an activity she said was called a “love in.”
My father and his school administrator colleagues shook their heads and could not understand what Miss Ellis thought she was doing, telling freshman kids to sit in circles, hold flowers, wear beads, read poetry and try for all the world to be like the hippies we were hearing about in a faraway place called Haight-Ashbury. My father and his colleagues were not amused.
Miss Carolyn Ellis was very good at challenging us to think and to ask questions about everything we heard or were being told. Encouraging teenagers in Mississippi to question truth in the 1960s, however, took courage. Very little free thinking was going on.
It makes sense, though, I can say with hindsight, that it would be Miss Ellis and ‘The Media’ telling us about free speech and how it might be a good thing to consider being different, or possibly thinking differently about whatever most people around us were saying it was or wasn’t okay to be.
Five decades later, here am I, a few blocks from The Haight during an official citywide celebration of the Summer of Love Anniversary. Here, I am trying to come to grips with how truly to know and understand that Miss Ellis is gone, and equally important, to realize how dear she was and how her life’s work lives on.
Tears come, but won’t stay. It is truly hard to be sad for very long when thinking about the joyous life she lived, her contagious laughter, brilliant insights, and how many lives she touched profoundly over many decades. What’s more, I’m still learning from her.
What does Hillary Clinton have to do with this? There are twists and turns in the story. For one thing, Hillary graduated from Wellesley College, just as did one of my colleagues here at the San Francisco Bay Times who has been watching this story unfold and will be the first to read this account.
On Saturday, May 20, I received a note from my childhood best friend, Mary. She was asking if I’d heard that Miss Ellis had passed away the day before.
Two days later, I heard that former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was in Oxford, Mississippi. I sensed immediately she must be there for a memorial service held on the campus of the University of Mississippi in honor of the life of former provost Dr. Carolyn Ellis Staton. I read what Secretary Clinton had had to say there, and just a few days later, by coincidence, she was at Wellesley College to deliver the commencement address for the Green Class of 2017.
The Back Story
After teaching English at Warren Central High School in Vicksburg during the 1967–68 school year, Miss Carolyn Ellis relocated to New York City where she would earn a graduate degree at Columbia University before going on from there to Yale University Law School.
I had learned in a conversation with Miss Ellis during the 1992 Presidential Election that she was a Clinton supporter and delegate to the Democratic National Convention that year. What I learned recently, however, is that Miss Ellis and Hillary Rodham Clinton were roommates at Yale and had forged a close, lifelong friendship.
In news reports from several newspapers about the memorial service at Ole Miss, I learned Miss Ellis once slept in the Lincoln bedroom at The White House, and that Hillary had accompanied her just a few months ago while she was in New York for medical treatment to see a performance of Hamilton on Broadway.
There are so many chapters to the story of how Miss Ellis has touched my family. Back in the 60s after graduating from Tulane University, she accepted a position as a first-year teacher in the high school English department my mom chaired. At Miss Ellis’ request, my mom wrote a recommendation for her when she applied for admission to Columbia.
And dear to me are the memories of Miss Ellis being there when, more than a decade later, I visited her in 1978 at the Ole Miss Law School. I carried a very young sleeping child in my arms that day. Fearing I might lose custody, I needed help finding the lesbian community and a good divorce lawyer. She took care of that—both of those.
Some twenty years later in the 1990s, when Elizabeth was a student at Ole Miss and needed help with a problem, Miss Ellis, who was then associate provost, took care of that, too. Miss Ellis was also my role model when I decided to leave my southern home and head off to Columbia University in New York just as she had years prior. No small matter.
Hillary’s Eulogy
As reported by the Daily Mississippian and The Oxford Eagle, Hillary Clinton and other Yale alumni traveled to Oxford for the Memorial Service on the Ole Miss campus on Monday, May 22. A tearful Hillary Clinton said to a standing room only gathering, “It is always hard to lose a friend—someone who made you a better person. No matter what else I may have been, to Carolyn, I was always just a friend.”
Clinton remembered she was “a kind of surrogate confessor and godmother” to other students, and recalled also that she was a leader in the Barrister’s Union, and one of the few women who could hold her own in a debate.
“There was a sense of real despair about where our country was and where it was going,” Clinton said. “Carolyn was sympathetic, but she was also very clear that each of us had to prepare to play our part in whatever was coming in the future.
And boy, could she make people laugh. You always wanted her to sit with you at lunch because you knew no matter how bad things were, she would get you to laugh,” Clinton said. “You always got a bit envious when she sat somewhere else and the laughter was emanating over from that table.”
Clinton invoked the lyrics of Carole King’s You’ve Got a Friend to remember Staton:
“In winter, spring, summer or fall, all you have to do is call. That’s the kind of friend Carolyn was to everyone who knew and loved her. Her investment in all of us will live on. Thank you, Carolyn, for who you were and who you remain to all of us. Godspeed, my friend.”
Saying Goodbye
A colleague here suggested that I watch Hillary’s commencement address at Wellesley, so I did. There she was, on a stage decked in academic regalia, challenging young women to make a difference in the lives of others. Hearing her words, I could not but believe she had been thinking of Carolyn when she prepared her remarks.
In the early hours of January 25 this year, Carolyn Ellis Staton’s name popped up on a Facebook birthday alert. She had previously let it be known on her page that she was ill, so I had begun paying attention. Reading what she was sharing during the past few months has been rewarding. For her birthday, I just wanted to wish her a happy day and say, “Thank you.” Then, just a few weeks ago, on my own birthday, she wrote to me. There’s no doubt that she knew it would be the last.
Miss Ellis was indeed a friend, and she was also my teacher, my mentor and my inspiration. To her memory, I will dedicate my participation in the upcoming 2017 San Francisco Pride Parade. Our San Francisco Bay Times contingent, with its “Flower Power” theme, will make its way on the Parade route headed up Market Street toward Civic Center, where the United Nations Charter was signed, and also at the point where a special moment happens, as we will suddenly see a Pink Triangle presented on the top of Twin Peaks in the distance.
Our contingent in the Pride Parade will carry along with it copies of the newspaper in which this story appears, and since we know that even now newspapers record history, Miss Ellis will continue to be with me. She will be with me always.
Dr. Betty L. Sullivan is the Publisher of the “San Francisco Bay Times” and the founder of “Betty’s List.”
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