Jim Bowers was among the second small cohort of Black students to desegregate the University of South Carolina in the early 1960s, and he would later become the first Black professor in the university's law school. More than 50 years later, Bowers has returned to the school with a substantial gift to improve the institution where he served as a trailblazer.
TRANSCRIPT
Sound of applause
That was the sound of celebration at USC’s Rice School of Law just a few weeks ago when a portrait was unveiled in the law school’s reading room.
The handsome face on the portrait belongs to Jim Bowers, the first Black law professor at USC, who joined the faculty in 1973.
If you’re a long-time listener to Remembering the Days, you get bonus points if Jim Bowers’ name sounds familiar. Two years ago, he was featured in an episode about Black undergraduate students who began attending Carolina in 1964, the year after the university desegregated.
Bowers, a native of Orangeburg, South Carolina, graduated from USC with a degree in political science in 1967, then went on to Harvard for law school before returning to Carolina as a faculty member. An interesting footnote is that he joined USC’s law school faculty exactly 100 years after the university admitted its first-ever Black student, Henry Hayne, in 1873 during Reconstruction.
Remembering the Days co-host Evan Faulkenbury and I chatted with Jim a few months ago about his experiences at USC both as an undergraduate student in the 1960s and as a law professor in the 1970s. We won’t spend much time today talking about his undergraduate experience at Carolina — you can learn more about that by revisiting episode 64 entitled “Early Pioneers” — but Jim emphasized to us that the early days of desegregation were a challenging time for Black students at USC.
Jim Bowers: “The environment was not inclusive. There was no violence and there was no open hostility. But no one went out of their way to invite the Black students to participate. A number of us voluntarily joined certain organizations. I remember my first year joining the staff of the Gamecock newspaper. I also joined or enrolled in the naval ROTC back then. I was the first African-American in that program.
“There were no Blacks in fraternities then. There were no Black athletes on any of the teams. Basketball, football, nothing. As a matter of fact, the Black students on campus were reluctant to go to games for fear of being targeted.”
In spite of those challenges, Bowers built his own sense of community and forged a friendship with Robert Anderson, one of the first three students to desegregate USC in 1963. Anderson introduced Bowers to the music of Bob Dylan, whose song lyrics became a soundtrack for that tumultuous era.
Bowers also built good friendships with several of his political science professors who encouraged him to apply to Harvard for law school after completing his bachelor’s degree. He got into Harvard, then discovered the joy of actually attending law school.
Jim Bowers: “Law school is no picnic. The first thing that comes to mind at Harvard Law School and that is incessant study. You just studied all the time. We had Saturday classes and there was just no break from it. You know, you had one day Sunday, and Sunday was spent preparing for Monday. So the only time off you had was Saturday night.”
While Bowers was toiling away at Harvard, one of his former political science professors at USC, Glenn Abernathy, was extolling Bowers’ virtues to a close friend, Robert Foster, who happened to be dean of USC’s law school.
Coincidently, Walter Reiser, who had been one of Bowers’ law professors at Harvard, was a South Carolina native who had returned to the Palmetto State and joined Carolina’s law school faculty. Reiser encouraged Bowers to apply for a summer teaching position at USC’s School of Law in 1972.
Bowers had been working for the American Bar Association after graduating from Harvard and hadn’t really considered teaching, but he tried it that summer and enjoyed it. So much, in fact, he accepted an offer to join the faculty full time in fall 1973.
It was a different University of South Carolina than the one Bowers had encountered as a sophomore in 1964. Black students were still very much in the minority, but there were now hundreds enrolled, not the handful from a decade earlier.
Jim Bowers: “As I might have expected, there was clearly change then, in other words, the athletic varsity teams were integrated then there were Black players on both basketball, especially, and football. Clearly there were — Blacks had more of a presence on the campus. Just walking through the campus, I would see a lot more faces than the handful that I saw when I was here my three years.”
There were only a handful of Black faculty members on campus, however, and Bowers was the only one in the law school. But that actually factored into his decision to return to USC.
Jim Bowers: “My reasons were twofold. Number one, I wanted to increase the size of the Black enrollment at the school and was able to do some of that because I was appointed to the admissions committee working with others back then. The second mission was to increase my ranks, to try to bring other African American professors to the university to join the faculty.”
Bowers says his presence on the law school faculty had an unexpected though welcome side effect.
Jim Bowers: “One of those positive feedbacks was finding out from white students how appreciative they were to be taught by a Black person. I remember at the end of the first year of my contract law course a white student came up to me and said, 'Professor Bowers, I really thank you for being here because you're the first Black professor in my entire educational experience, and I appreciate you for that.'
I was here to advance Black students, but equally, is to give an exposure to white students who had never had this type of learning experience, to break down some stereotypes that they may have harbored up to that point, to show them that, you know, they can have a positive intellectual relationship with a Black person.”
Bowers enjoyed his time teaching in USC’s law school, but he felt strongly that he needed more experience in the actual practice of law.
Jim Bowers: “After two, about two and a half years of teaching law and getting positive feedback from faculty members, I just felt that I was inadequate as a teacher because I was teaching law from a purely academic standpoint. I hadn't practiced law. Just a smidgen of my life experience was practicing law. And I said, you know, if I'm going to be an effective, better teacher, I need to know how law is actually practiced so I could, you know, transmit that experience as well as the academics to law students.”
He left USC to work for the Securities Exchange Commission, then joined the office of general counsel at Aetna Life and Casualty in New Haven, Connecticut. His career blossomed there, and he eventually became head of antitrust, intellectual property and labor as well as the company’s chief compliance officer.
Bowers kept his hand in teaching as an adjunct law professor at Yale, the University of Connecticut and Boston University. Those teaching experiences over the years helped rekindle his connection with Carolina.
Jim Bowers: “The more and more I got involved in teaching again, my nostalgia grew about my activity here at the university. I started just coming back more often while the law school was still at the law center where I was before it moved to its new location.”
Eventually, Bowers got connected with Bobby Donaldson, a USC history professor and director of the university’s Center for Civil Rights History and Research, and that led to meeting the current dean of USC’s law school, William Hubbard.
William Hubbard: “My first impression of Jim was just how easy it is to have a conversation with Jim Bowers. He came into my office and sat in the chair that you're sitting in now, and I felt like I'd known him my entire life. He's just so warm and friendly, unassuming, for someone who's been such a trailblazer and someone who's been so eminently successful in all of his different career endeavors.”
Hubbard thought when they first chatted that Bowers merely wanted to reminisce about his time at Carolina. But he learned that Bowers had something else in mind.
William Hubbard: “And so we met for a couple of times, and we talked about the law school, and we talked about his career. And I just felt like I was just gaining a new friend. And then at the time that felt right for him, he said he'd like to do something substantial for the law school, and he certainly followed up on that.”
That something substantial is a law school professorship that Bowers has endowed in his name. The James E. Bowers Endowed Professorship of Law will give USC’s law school an opportunity to recruit an outstanding legal scholar. He’s also endowing a lecture series on democracy and the rule of law.
For Bowers, making a substantial gift to USC to endow a law school professorship is a way to pay homage to his family’s long line of educators. His great-grandfather was a former slave who sponsored a school for other ex-slaves at his homestead in the Bennettsville area of South Carolina. His grandfather was a professor at what is now South Carolina State University. Bowers’ mother was a longtime public-school teacher and her brother was a professor at Savannah State College.
If you want to learn more about Bowers’ extraordinary family history, be on the lookout in fall 2026 for his memoir, entitled “Always Looking Forward.” It will be published by the University of South Carolina Press.
Jim Bowers: “Education has been a part of the family, and so it's not surprising, I guess, that I've tilted in that direction and feel really an obligation not only presently, but just in terms of following in the footsteps of my ancestors to come to where I am, where I am now.”
The new portrait on display in the Rice School of Law’s reading room and the law professorship that bears Jim Bowers’ name will be enduring reminders of USC’s first Black law professor, whose symbolic return to Carolina is cause for celebration.
That’s all for this episode, and that’s all for the fall 2025 season of Remembering the Days. Evan and I will be back for the 12th season of the podcast in January with a full slate of stories about USC people and places that comprise the university’s rich and sometimes quirky history. Thanks for listening, come back next month and forever to thee.