Abstract
This chapter discusses the experiences of black students at southern historically black and predominantly white institutions in the middle of the twentieth century. Williamson-Lott focuses on a subset of student activists and the organizations they created to force change at their institutions and in society. Whether in student government associations, multiracial organizations, or black-oriented groups, black student activists and their white allies demanded that their institutions participate in ameliorating America’s social, political, and economic ills. By doing so, they helped narrow the distance between ebony and ivory towers and society, and forever changed the role of higher education in societal reform.
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Notes
- 1.
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), xiii–xvi.
- 2.
In a forthcoming book, Jim Crow Campus: Higher Education and the Struggle for a New Southern Social Order (Teachers College Press), I investigate southern black and white student organizing and the differences between different types of institutions (i.e. private and public, black and white) in greater depth, and provide a regional analysis of institutional change.
- 3.
Some of the best examples include Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
- 4.
Much of this section is taken from Joy Ann Williamson, Radicalizing the Ebony Tower: Black Colleges and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi, 1965–1975 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2008).
- 5.
Williamson, Radicalizing the Ebony Tower, Introduction.
- 6.
Aldon Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984).
- 7.
James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
- 8.
Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South.
- 9.
Exceptions include Jeffrey Turner, Sitting In and Speaking Out: Student Movements in the American South, 1960–1970 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Ibram Kendi, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Williamson, Radicalizing the Ebony Tower.
- 10.
Urban Research Corporation, Student Protests 1969: Summary (Chicago: Urban Research Corporation, 1969).
- 11.
Alexander W. Astin, Helen S. Astin, Alan E. Bayer, and Ann S. Bisconti, “Overview of the Unrest Era,” in The History of Higher Education, 2nd ed., eds. Lester F. Goodchild and Harold S. Wechsler (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997); Philip Altbach, Student Politics in America: A Historical Analysis (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976); Horowitz, Campus Life. Doug McAdam examines the catalytic importance of the Free Speech Movement but highlights how white students were influenced by the black southern freedom struggle in Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
- 12.
Thomas Jefferson, “Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Fix the Site of the University of Virginia” (Richmond: Virginia Senate, 1818), quotation on 12.
- 13.
V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation, 2nd ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 130. See also Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). For a lengthy discussion of how the legislature interfered at a private institution see Williamson, Radicalizing the Ebony Tower, chapter 5.
- 14.
Clennon King, “NAACP Claimed Closing Doors of Opportunity to Negroes,” State Times, March 3, 1957; “Adam Powell Called ‘Dupe’ to Northern Race Trickery,” State Times, March 4, 1957, 14; and “Real Uncle Toms May Come from North, Be College Bred,” State Times, March 6, 1957; Jerry Proctor, “King Tries to Stop Student Walk-Outs,” State Times, March 8, 1957.
- 15.
“Alcorn A&M College, March 1957,” Newsfilm Collection, Reel D03, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi (hereafter MDAH). The number of students arrested varies in different sources, but all cite the overwhelming participation of students in the boycott.
- 16.
Board of Trustees, minutes, March 9, 1957, MDAH (first quotation); “The End of Uncle Tom Teachers,” [Ebony, 1957], and “Integration Feud Rocks Alcorn,” Chicago Defender, March 16, 1957 (second quotation); Strikes and Protest Movements File, Alcorn State University Archives, Lorman, Mississippi (hereafter ASUA).
- 17.
Trezzvant Anderson, “More Charges Against Boyd Hurled at Alcorn,” Pittsburgh Courier, September 10, 1960, Student Strikes and Protest Movements File, ASUA; J. D. Boyd to J. A. Morris, et al., May 1, 1959 (quotation), enclosure in Corrine Craddock Carpenter to E. R. Jobe, June 26, 1960, American Association of University Professors Papers, Box 4, Folder Corrine Carpenter, George Washington University Archives, Washington D.C. (hereafter AAUPP); The Special Grievance Committee to Administration of Alcorn College, October 29, 1959, and Student Body of Alcorn A&M College to President’s Advisory Committee , J. D. Boyd, and Alumni Association, [March or April] 1960, enclosure in Carpenter to Jobe; “More Charges Against Boyd Hurled at Alcorn.”
- 18.
Student Body of Alcorn to President’s Advisory Committee; Faculty of Alcorn A&M College to J. D. Boyd, March 24, 1960, enclosure in Carpenter to Jobe; “Hundreds Sent Home,” The Free Press, May 9, 1964 (first quotation); and “Alcorn Education Tragedy Gets Press Cover-Up,” The Free Press, May 9, 1964 (second quotation), AAUPP, Box 4, Folder Frank Purnell.
- 19.
Frank and Rosentene Purnell to Bertram Davis, May 11, 1964, AAUPP, Box 4, Folder A. D. Sumberg.
- 20.
Turner, Sitting In and Speaking Out, 179, 191, 176–77.
- 21.
New York Times, October 21 1962, cited in Charles Eagles, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), quotation on 15; Paul K. Conkin, Gone with the Ivy: A Biography of Vanderbilt University (Knoxville, Vanderbilt University Press, 1985), 614. See also Erica Whittington, “‘Human Relations’ and the Freedom Movement: The NSA Southern Student Human Relations Project, 1958–1968,” in Rebellion in Black and White: The Southern Student Movement in Perspective, eds. Robert Cohen and David Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 83–105; Horowitz, Campus Life, 144. For another example of close ties between Greeks and Student Government Associations see Clarence L. Mohr and Joseph E. Gordon, Tulane: the Emergence of a Modern University, 1945–1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 312–15. Also, Greek organizations were found to be the most conservative nationwide, not just in the South (Horowitz, Campus Life).
- 22.
Mohr and Gordon, Tulane, 294–95, 240–41, 216–23; Gregg Michel, Struggle for a Better South: The Southern Student Organizing Committee, 1964–1969 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 2004), 22; Whittington, “‘Human Relations,’” quotation on 84.
- 23.
Alan Gartner and Christopher Ferreira, “A State of Action,” New York Law Review 59 (2014/2015): 95–109; Lombard v. Louisiana, 373 U.S. 267 (1963); Sara Evans and Harry Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Michel, Struggle for a Better South, 41, 5.
- 24.
A. Stephen Stephan, “Desegregation of Higher Education in Arkansas,” Journal of Negro Education 27, no. 3 (Summer 1958): 243–52.
- 25.
“Southern State College (Arkansas),” AAUP Bulletin (Spring 1971): 40–49; James F. Willis, Southern Arkansas University: The Mulerider School’s Centennial History, 1909–2009 (Magnolia: Southern Arkansas University Foundation, 2009). The institution is now called Southern Arkansas University.
- 26.
“Southern State College,” 48; Willis, Southern Arkansas University, 260–65. There were no black faculty members employed on campus.
- 27.
“Southern State College,” 48; Willis, Southern Arkansas University, 260–65; Pickings v. Bruce, 430 F. 2d 595 (8th Circuit 1970).
- 28.
Michel, Struggle for a Better South.
- 29.
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).
- 30.
Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power, 44 (second quotation); Peniel Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006).
- 31.
It should be noted that the number of black students enrolled in predominantly white institutions outside the South was also small. For instance, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, black students constituted only 3.6 percent of the undergraduate population in 1975. D. J. Wermers, Enrollment at the University of Illinois by Racial/Ethnic Categories: Fall Terms, 1967–1975 (Urbana: University Office of Academic Policy Analysis, December 1976), 12, obtained from the University Office of Academic Policy Analysis, University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign.
- 32.
Mohr and Gordon, Tulane, quotation on 357; “Founding of the Black Student Movement,” The Carolina Story: A Virtual Museum of University History, accessed January 3, 2017, https://museum.unc.edu/exhibits/show/integration/preston-dobbins--left--and-reg; “Black Student Movement and Black Ink,” The Carolina Story: A Virtual Museum of University History, accessed January 3, 2017, https://museum.unc.edu/exhibits/show/student-organizations/black-student-movement-and-bla.
- 33.
Elsie Watts, “The Freshman Year Experience, 1962–1990: An Experiment in Humanistic Higher Education” (Ph.D. diss., Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario Canada, 1999), 144 (both quotations), 145.
- 34.
William Billingsley, Communists on Campus: Race, Politics, and the Public University in Sixties North Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999); Elsie Watts, “The Freshman Year Experience,” 134, 156–60, 171–200.
- 35.
Turner, Sitting In, 190; Charlayne Hunter, “Black Colleges and the Black Mood,” Southern Education Report 4, no.9 (May 1969): 28–31, quotation on 30.
- 36.
Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Nashville: Winston-Derek, [1933] 1990); W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Vintage Books, [1903] 1990); E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (New York: Free Press, 1957); Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967).
- 37.
“Major Demands as Presented to the Administrative Council,” 1960, cited in Sammy Jay Tinsley, “A History of Mississippi Valley State College” (Ph.D. diss., University of Mississippi, 1972), 222–26, 227. Many students in both 1969 and 1970 were allowed to reenroll after hearings before the Administrative Council.
- 38.
Exhibit A in Board of Trustees, minutes, February 19, 1970, MDAH; J. H. White to Mississippi Legislature, letter reprinted in Commercial Appeal, March 26, 1971, 3, cited in Tinsley, “A History of Mississippi Valley,” 243.
- 39.
Orlanda H. White, “Testimony before Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders,” 91st Congress, 1st session, July 1969, part 22, quotation on 4796.
- 40.
White, “Testimony before Hearings,” 4785; Robert Romer, 1969/1970: Protests and State Troopers at Voorhees College, accessed December 4, 2106, http://www.americancenturies.mass.edu/centapp/oh/story.do?shortName=romer1969; “Voorhees College (South Carolina),” AAUP Bulletin (Spring 1974): 82–89; Biondi, The Black Revolution, 153–57, quotation on 154.
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Williamson-Lott, J.A. (2018). Campus Life for Southern Black Students in the Mid-Twentieth Century. In: Ogren, C., VanOverbeke, M. (eds) Rethinking Campus Life. Historical Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75614-1_11
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