(NAME-MCE) Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement

[Anselmo Villanueva]

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January 2, 2008
Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement




For every James Meredith, who gained fame for becoming the first black
student at the University of Mississippi, there were many other students who
broke racial barriers without attracting much attention. *Higher Education
and the Civil Rights Movement: White Supremacy, Black Southerners and
College Campuses * <http://www.upf.com/book.asp?id=WALLEF07> (University
Press of Florida) tells the stories of some of those students and also
portrays the broader story of the desegregation of higher education — which
the essays in the book argue was much more evolutionary than was James
Meredith's experience at Ole Miss. Peter Wallenstein, a professor of history
at Virginia Tech, edited the volume and responded to e-mail questions about
its themes.

*Q: The book talks about how the images many have of desegregation (James
Meredith's admission or George Wallace in the doorway) give a false
impression of how desegregation happened generally. How do those images
differ from the full story?*

*A:* Across the South, desegregation took place on campus after campus, in
program after program, eventually in residence halls and athletic programs,
usually with little fanfare or public notice. Yet the iconic moments in the
desegregation of southern higher education in the 1950s and 1960s, those
widely recognized, are four episodes that took place in Alabama (1956 and
1963), Georgia (1961), or Mississippi (1962). Each was characterized by
violence and visibility — a public show of mighty resistance to the
enrollment of the first one or two black students.

Those episodes, those snapshots in time, have proved enduring. They garnered
headlines at the time, and some 50 years later they continue to attract
attention from historians and the wider public alike. Largely unnoticed at
the time, and largely unnoticed since, are the dozens of moments at other
schools, where the first black enrollment took place in grudging silence, as
did various other breakthroughs on the way to full inclusion in the
institutional life of the place. Every school had its own time line, its own
pioneers. Each has its own stories.

Yet one must not exaggerate the differences between the most resistant
states or institutions and the least. Each of the 17 segregated states, even
if without public violence, acted only in the aftermath of litigation —
usually in their own states, but in some instances in response to
developments elsewhere, whether these were Supreme Court decisions about
higher education in 1938 or in 1948–1950 or the decisions in *Brown v. Board
of Education* in 1954 or 1955. Delaware, Maryland, and other Border South
states did not offer violent resistance, but they conceded change, step by
step, only as appeared required by court decisions.

Long after a black student began classes in one program, segregation —
deliberate exclusion — often persisted in other programs on the same campus.
We reprint a document from Missouri in 1950 in which university officials
calculate which black applicants they have to admit under court order, and
which ones they can continue to exclude. Even in schools — Arkansas in 1948,
for example — that acted without a specific court order, acceptance of a
black applicant into the law school or medical school did not bring an end
to the traditional policy of excluding black undergraduates.

*Q: Why was desegregation more controversial and difficult in some states
than others?*

*A:* Desegregation was most strongly resisted at flagship state schools in
the Deep South states of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Deep
South states had the highest proportions of black citizens, and their white
neighbors most feared the great loss of power and privilege that
desegregation would bring. Whites in those states typically voted against
the national Democratic Party in the presidential campaign of 1948, when
they voted for Dixiecrat candidate Strom Thurmond, or in 1964, when they
voted for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater rather than for Lyndon B.
Johnson. And yet there were variations on the theme. In South Carolina,
state leaders in 1963 did everything in their power, and that was a lot, to
avoid their state's becoming seen as "another Mississippi."

*Q: The collection includes an essay about the desegregation of big-time
athletics in the South. How significant do you see athletics being in race
relations in Southern higher education?*

*A:* Athletic teams and contests reveal much of what seemed to be at stake
in promoting or resisting the process of desegregation on campuses. Pioneer
black students in the 1950s were permitted to participate on the wrestling
team at Delaware or play intercollegiate tennis matches at North Carolina
State, but these examples were unusual. Far more often, the first cohorts of
black undergraduates were barred from representing their school in such
public fashion. Nowhere was resistance greater than on flagship campuses in
the Deep South — the Universities of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi — in
varsity football programs. There, white supremacy and black exclusion
endured well past the enrollment of the pioneer black students. Much had to
change — indeed, much had changed — by the time African Americans played
varsity football for Southeastern Conference schools.

*Q: You dedicate the book to black students — naming a number of them — who
were unable to earn degrees from Southern universities. Why did you focus on
those students?*

*A:* The dedication names various black Southerners who mounted serious
efforts — but who failed absolutely, sometimes at egregious personal cost —
to end the absolute segregation of public universities in the South. As one
example: "Pauli Murray, not of the University of North Carolina." I wanted —
all the contributors to the volume wanted — to salute agents of change who
did not themselves gain entrance but who led the way for those who followed.
These men and women will not be known well or at all to most of our readers.
But each of them demonstrated great resistance to segregation, and each
elicited great resistance to any change on the racial front in higher
education. Together they personify the varied stories we have told of the
power of white supremacy in the Jim Crow era. They embodied the troubled
process of bringing down the barriers that long maintained categorical black
exclusion in historically white institutions of southern higher education.

*Q: What lessons does this history have for race relations in higher
education today?*

*A:* Our book relates the lengthy process of desegregation on college
campuses to the long civil rights movement, from the 1930s into the 1970s.
We observe that desegregation was not complete as of 1970, nor, as we see
it, is full inclusion necessarily accomplished even now. If we understand
desegregation as a drawn-out process, often grudgingly conceded, unevenly
implemented, we have a potentially useful way to understand patterns we see
in the early years of the 21st century.

In institutions of higher education, much as in K–12 schools, white
resistance typically postponed any black enrollment, limited it when it
came, and, especially in the early years but not just then, narrowly
channeled the changes that did come. Decades after the first enrollment of
black students, historically white "public" institutions of higher education
largely continue to display disproportionate white enrollment. Moreover,
even though students of Asian ancestry could often fully participate in
campus life at "all-white" institutions during the Jim Crow years, the
historical experiences of African American and other nonwhite students are
often conflated.

At the close of the book, we speak of "unfinished business" — unfinished
business in reconstructing Americans' historical understanding of the past,
as well as unfinished business in eradicating the exclusionary past of
separate-and-unequal higher education. We tell of how various schools have
commemorated what they once resisted. Even today, on campus after campus,
questions of proprietary claims — and comfort levels — persist. Whose campus
is it, really?

— Scott Jaschik <scott.jaschik at insidehighered.com>