After years of FAMU bashing, St. Petersburg Times columnist Bill Maxwell is now trying to claim that he benefited from the late Marching 100 Director William Patrick Foster’s example of leadership. Too bad Maxwell is too blind to see the man Foster really was.Maxwell’s recent “tribute” to Foster talks about how he admired the Marching 100 as a boy and used to imitate the band’s halftime show moves.
So how did Maxwell thank Foster once he became a member of the St. Petersburg Times’ editorial board? He did so by supporting an interim administration that nearly demolished the Marching 100 and the university it represented.
Maxwell was one of the biggest cheerleaders for former Interim President Castell Bryant. Back in 2005, Castell choked the lifeblood of the 100 by tearing apart the recruitment program that had brought Foster talented students for decades. He also praised her while she was mishandling the payroll system that paid Foster's protégées on the music faculty and while she was holding up the acceptance process for the 100’s invitations to Super Bowl XLI and the 2006 Grammy Awards.
About two months after Rattlers finally ran Castell off, Maxwell helped her take even more shots at FAMU’s students. In an interview with Maxwell, Castell said she would rank FAMU students 2s on a 4-point scale.
Maxwell and his buddies on the Times editorial board also used lots of ink to bash FAMU’s students, especially those at the law school. In 2003, Maxwell declared that FAMU’s law school would “become a virtual ghetto.” The Times editorial board also printed outright misleading information about FAMU law's bar passage rate. In a May 2008 editorial, the board said that FAMU law students “tend to do abysmally on the bar exam.” The editorial ignored data in an American Bar Association report that showed that the overwhelming majority of FAMU students were passing the bar exam (June 2005, 70.6%; February 2006, 71.4%; July 2006, 70.3%; February 2007, 70.9%; and July 2007, 81.3%).
Maxwell does not know the real William Patrick Foster because he doesn’t understand how much Foster believed in the quality of FAMU’s students. Foster talked all the time about the vision he developed for the Marching 100 right after he became FAMU’s band director.
“I wanted to see 100 bandsmen: proud, uniformed, marching like drum majors or a crack drill team and playing to the highest musical standard anywhere,” Foster said in a 1986 interview with the Afro American.
Read that again. Foster believed that FAMU students were capable of “playing to the highest musical standard anywhere.” He thought FAMU students were smart enough to perform tough classical pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven and also dance to James Brown.
Foster founded the Marching 100 to showcase the high academic quality of FAMU’s students. The 100 remains the best known symbol of FAMU’s academically gifted student body despite all Maxwell and Castell have done to badmouth the students enrolled at A&M.