Accomplished alumna gives a sizable gift

It’s not everybody’s favorite spot on the USC campus, but to Verna B. Dauterive the basement of Doheny Memorial Library remains a beloved landmark where her life changed.

There, in 1947, she was doing homework for her master’s degree in education when another student struck up a conversation. He was Peter W. Dauterive, a former soldier who was getting his business degree on a GI Bill and one of the few fellow African American students at USC in those days. Both were recent arrivals from segregated Louisiana looking for better opportunities in Los Angeles.

“It was good chemistry, and that started everything,” recalled Verna Dauterive, 85, who retired just three years ago after a long career as a Los Angeles school administrator.

That “everything” included a long marriage to a man who became a prominent banker and their shared devotion to the campus where they met. Now, Verna Dauterive is giving $25 million to USC in the memory of her husband, who died in 2002.

“ ‘SC has a great light on this earth and that light has been very bright on our pathways and our careers,” she said. “It was very meaningful to both my husband and me because it had the greatest influence on our careers and life in general.”

USC officials say the gift appears to be the largest single donation from an African American to a U.S. college or university, although Bill and Camille Cosby’s $20 million donation in 1987 to Spelman College in Atlanta may have been worth more when adjusted for inflation. The Dauterive donation is in the top dozen for USC; the biggest was a $175-million gift from George Lucas and his Lucasfilm foundation to the cinema school.

University President Steven B. Sample will formally announce the gift tonight at a USC Black Alumni Assn. dinner.

A portion of the Dauterive donation will fund scholarships, and the rest is under negotiation.

“It’s going to allow more students to attend ‘SC, perhaps provide more diversity at ‘SC, and I’m hoping it will encourage African American alumni who have profited from their degrees at ‘SC and are doing well in life but have not contributed what they can afford to contribute,” she said.

Dauterive (pronounced Doe-TREEVE) is a slim, elegant woman who looks much younger than she is. Smartly dressed in a coral-colored suit with a pearl necklace and a USC lapel pin, she sat for an interview on USC’s campus and spoke softly but with the precision and authority of a veteran educator.

Her husband was founding president and chief executive of Founders Savings and Loan Assn., a Crenshaw district institution that sought to fill the mortgage gap after other lenders fled communities scarred by the 1965 Watts riots. A Republican Party activist and a board member of many civic organizations, including the Los Angeles Zoo, Peter Dauterive also was a savvy investor in apartment buildings, stocks and oil drilling projects. The Dauterives, who had no children, quietly built up an impressive nest egg.

“We lived comfortably but we didn’t particularly splurge or make it that showy,” she recalled of their home in the View Park neighborhood. One of the few signs of her affluence is the red 2000 Mercedes-Benz roadster, a birthday gift from her husband which she still drives, although not at night anymore.

According to her $25-million pledge, assets will be transferred to USC over the next few years and after her death. She intends to distribute much of her remaining wealth to other charities, including Howard University, the traditionally African American institution in Washington, D.C., where her brother, Los Angeles dentist Dr. Edward A. Johnson, attended dental school.

Dauterive estimated that she and her husband previously gave about $2 million to USC, including a scholarship for minority students pursuing a doctorate in education.

For decades, some African Americans who lived around the campus viewed USC with suspicion. Dauterive acknowledges that difficult history, even saying that her brother did not get into USC’s dental school because of an unspoken racial quota.

But although she and her husband were among the few blacks at USC in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, they felt comfortable. “There was a friendliness there. . . . We made a point to be involved and we were welcomed there,” she said.

Today, about 5% of USC’s 33,400 students are black.

Sample praised Dauterive, who earned both her master’s and doctorate in education at USC. “We are tremendously grateful to Dr. Verna Dauterive -- an alumna who personifies excellence in her professional and civic life -- for honoring her alma mater in this way,” he said.

Dauterive grew up in Shreveport, La. Her mother was principal of a blacks-only school and her father was a Pullman train porter.

After earning her bachelor’s at Wiley College in Texas, she landed a teaching job in Los Angeles. Her doctoral dissertation focused on public school integration, a topic that would consume part of her career.

She became a top administrator in Los Angeles’ program to voluntarily bus minority students to schools in white areas, a controversial plan she recalls with mixed feelings. It raised some students’ aspirations, but “didn’t seem to make a big difference academically by sitting in a different environment or next to a white student,” said Dauterive. She also chaired the state’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing and the Commission on the Status of Women.

For 23 years, she was principal of Franklin Avenue Elementary School in Los Feliz. Parents and faculty warmly remember her as an astute leader, someone who ran a tight yet friendly ship. Asked what advice she’d give to young people, Dauterive urged them to study hard, be good observers and set goals for five and 10 years ahead.

And the plans she and her husband set?

“Our long-range goal was to be at a point where we knew we would be secure and comfortable in our own lives and to be able to share with others to help them to be secure and comfortable too.”

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larry.gordon@latimes.com