History of Higher Education Annual: 2003-2004

Torcuato Di Tella, Roger L. Geiger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351515528
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

History of Higher Education Annual, Volume 23 provides insight into the struggle for civil rights and desegregation of Southern higher education, illuminating how this conflict affected private, historically black colleges and white denominational colleges, while interpreting the dynamics of segregation and desegregation in South Carolina. Other contributions examine town-gown relations for Harvard students in the eighteenth century and the challenge of creating an urban public university in Chicago. Review essays examine the demographic and cultural transformation of British higher education and the curious phenomenon of historical encyclopedias of individual colleges and universities. History of Higher Education Annual will be of interest to historians, sociologists, educational policymakers as well as those concerned with the future of higher education in the United States and throughout the world. Roger L. Geiger is Distinguished Professor of Higher Education at the Pennsylvania State University. He has edited the History of Higher Education Annual since 1993. His two volumes Research and Relevant Knowledge and To Advance Knowledge (both published by Transaction) cover the history of universities in the United States during the twentieth century.

“Quacks, Quirks, Agitators, and Communists”: Private Black Colleges and the Limits of Institutional Autonomy

Joy Ann Williamson

Private black colleges and their students played a vital role in the Civil Rights Movement of the middle twentieth century. The colleges’ corporate structure shielded the colleges and their students from direct state intervention, and students took advantage of the liberal campus climate. Private philanthropic support and control enabled a more active form of participation in the movement, but insecure economic situations, internal dissention, and other convenient liabilities left the colleges vulnerable. State agencies found creative ways to interfere in campus affairs and capitalize on institutional weaknesses. This piece examines the battle for institutional autonomy as it played out in the state of Mississippi. It offers a picture of the lengths to which racists would go to crush the Civil Rights Movement, an evaluation of the public role of private institutions, and a window into the role of higher educational institutions in society.

The end of the Civil War forced the nation to grapple with integrating freedmen and freedwomen into the social order. Benevolent societies and denominational bodies created what are now labeled private, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) throughout the South to train African American leaders to uplift the race. These private institutions depended on private donations, tuition, and philanthropic gifts to sustain them and remained outside the state’s purview. The campuses were tiny islands that promoted racial equality but rarely challenged the existing Southern social order. Racist state officials paid little attention to the internal affairs of private HBCUs until the middle twentieth century when students joined the campaign for black liberation. Private HBCUs enjoyed political and economic autonomy not shared by their state-supported counterparts, and students took advantage of the liberal campus climate. The corporate structure of private HBCUs buffered them from the most intense forms of state interference and allowed them and their students to play an active role in the Civil Rights Movement. But, their private status did not shield them completely from state pressures, particularly when college aims collided with state interests. Private HBCUs battled with state legislatures, racist citizen’s organizations, and other groups hostile toward the colleges’ role in the black freedom struggle. The public role of the private colleges made them enemies of the state.

This piece examines the battle between the state of Mississippi and private HBCUs and its consequences for institutional autonomy during the civil rights era. Mississippi, more than any other state, aggressively attacked all sources of activism. Its agency of choice, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, vowed to preserve and defend racial segregation at any cost. It targeted three private HBCUs in particular: Campbell College, Tougaloo College, and Rust College. Other private HBCUs existed in the state, but the Commission considered these three institutions the greatest threat to Mississippi laws and customs. The Commission never succeeded in destabilizing any of the colleges by itself, but it created conditions under which private HBCUs weighed the benefits and costs of remaining involved in civil rights. Its success hinged on its ability to act as a parasite that capitalized on institutional vulnerabilities. The weakest institutions suffered dire consequences, and none of the colleges were immune to the Commission’s agenda. The colleges fought back, and in some ways were successful, but the tug-o-war for ultimate control of campus affairs exacted a toll. The experience of the three colleges demonstrates the value of civil society in an oppressive state and the price private HBCUs paid for assuming an active role in the Civil Rights Movement.

The Mississippi Context

Mississippi, like other Southern states, created public HBCUs to insure social stability, to create a separate black professional class, and to keep African Americans from attending historically white institutions.¹ Public college curricula taught respect for the racial order and the proper limits of black aspirations. The all-white Board of Trustees of Institutions of Higher Learning, the state legislature, and campus administrators carefully controlled the institutions to thwart radical notions of black equality. Religious philanthropists created a separate set of private HBCUs. Rather than fit African Americans to the racial status quo, these institutions educated African Americans for full political and civic equality. Religious philanthropists argued that a classical curriculum, paired with religious training, equipped future leaders in the black community with the skills and knowledge necessary for full citizenship. The campuses maintained an uneasy agreement with the surrounding white community: they instilled racial pride, a sense of entitlement, and leadership skills but accepted the segregated Southern reality.²

The growth of the Civil Rights Movement dissolved the compromise between the private colleges and hostile whites. The state aggressively attacked individuals and institutions sympathetic to the movement. The high rate of HBCU student participation, particularly by those at private campuses, marked HBCUs as prime targets. The use of campus facilities for integrated events and civil disobedience planning sessions infuriated segregationists. The state completely controlled the public HBCUs and felt confident about its control of some private HBCUs. The state, however, encountered resistance at Campbell College, Tougaloo College, and Rust College. In 1960, the three colleges, combined, educated 1,300 students total. An even smaller number participated in active protest. The number of students meant less than the colleges’ private status, role in the movement, and key geographic locations in the state. Mississippi racists increasingly monitored events at private campuses as civil rights activism escalated.

The state of Mississippi organized its anti-desegregation efforts after the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which declared racial segregation unconstitutional. The state legislature passed a parade of bills that ranged from repealing the state’s compulsory education laws to an interposition resolution. It also created the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a tax-supported implementation agency and “a permanent authority for the maintenance of racial segregation.”³ Incorporated on 29 March 1956, the Commission sought to “do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi, and her sister states, from encroachment thereon by the Federal Government or any branch, department, or agency thereof.”⁴ The Commission hired informants, conducted investigations on suspected integrationists, and distributed segregationist propaganda to defend Mississippi’s racial hierarchy. It also allocated funds to the White Citizens’ Council, a private citizen’s organization whose agenda paralleled that of the Sovereignty Commission.⁵ The Commission and the Council became part of an extensive network of racist public officials who closed ranks to protect the racial hierarchy.

Meanwhile, students at HBCUs across the South joined the Civil Rights Movement and inaugurated a period of sustained mass activism beginning in 1960. Their brand of activism broke with the past and shifted civil rights agitation from the courts to the streets. Four students from North Carolina A&T, a public HBCU, staged a sit-in at the local Woolworth’s to protest segregation and discrimination in eating establishments (1 February 1960). Other HBCU students in North Carolina followed their example, and HBCU students in other states soon conducted their own sit-ins. Shaw University, a private HBCU in North Carolina, hosted a conference to organize the sit-in movement in April. The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) grew out of the conference and enabled students across the South to coordinate their activities. SNCC turned its attention to voter registration as proprietors desegregated their facilities. HBCU students and interested others traveled to the deep South and provided voter education classes, transportation to registration and voting locations, and psychological sustenance to disenfranchised African Americans.⁶ Activists used local churches, homes, and HBCU campuses to organize their assault on racial domination.

Conditions in Mississippi stalled full-blown direct action in the state. White political and economic terror reigned, and conservative civil rights leaders worried that direct action would lead to violent retaliation and counseled activists to be patient.⁷ Militant activists ignored the advice. Medgar Evers, Jackson resident and Mississippi Field Secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1954, organized an Easter boycott of downtown Jackson stores to protest poor treatment and discrimination in 1960. Local students from Tougaloo College, Campbell College, Jackson State College (a public college), and black high schools canvassed door-to-door to solicit support, but only for a short while and with limited success.⁸ The same April, NAACP members on the Gulf Coast organized a wade-in in Biloxi to protest regulations that prevented African Americans from patronizing beaches along the Gulf of Mexico. A white mob chased and assaulted the swimmers as police watched.⁹ Intense white scrutiny and reprisals forced Mississippi activists to regroup. Almost an entire year passed before black Mississippians initiated another direct action attack on Mississippi’s racial caste system.

In 1961, Jackson became the center of increasing civil rights activity after nine Tougaloo College students staged a sit-in at the whites-only public library in March. The sit-in inaugurated a period of sustained and massive civil disobedience across the state and Jackson in particular. Local NAACP branches and other interested individuals organized and executed a variety of attacks on segregation and discrimination in the city in the next few years. Between 1961 and 1964, activists in Jackson launched another longer lasting and more effective boycott of white stores, conducted sit-ins, pickets, mass marches, and letter writing campaigns, and initiated a school desegregation suit. Police arrested over six hundred people in 1961 and 1962 alone.¹⁰ The assault on Jackson, the urban center and capital of the state, angered white Mississippians. The Citizens’ Council, local police, and the Sovereignty Commission jailed, harassed, and killed activists to stem the tide of protest. They also targeted the organizations and institutions in which activists pooled their resources and devised plans of action. Campbell College and Tougaloo College, both of which were located in Jackson, fell under heavy scrutiny.

Mississippi’s dismal record on civil rights brought increasing media attention and more civil rights workers in 1964. During the summer months, SNCC spearheaded the Mississippi Summer Project. SNCC hoped to force the state to change its racist policies or coerce federal intervention, highlight the rabid resistance to racial equality, and develop local leadership to sustain the movement.¹¹ The Project brought hundreds of mostly white volunteers to Mississippi to teach in Freedom Schools and to work in voter registration alongside local activists. After completing a week of training in Oxford, Ohio, in classroom pedagogy, Mississippi history, and nonviolent self-defense, volunteers made the long drive to Mississippi. Their journey often took them through Holly Springs. Some workers remained in Holly Springs and joined other SNCC workers and local activists in a major campaign against segregated facilities and voting rights violations. As one of the only sizable towns in northern Mississippi, Holly Springs and its independent institutions, including Rust College, became invaluable for movement purposes. They also became targets for state intervention.

The Institutional Consequences of Involvement in the Civil Rights Movement

The Sovereignty Commission and the Board of Trustees of Institutions of Higher Learning policed public HBCU campuses and expected full compliance from their presidents. As an arm of the legislature, on which public HBCUs were economically dependent, college presidents followed the Commission’s advice and fired any faculty labeled as an agitator. Tenure did not exist at state-supported HBCUs, nor did the state pretend to value institutional integrity. The Commission also forced the presidents to be agents in its fight against student participation in the movement. Students at Mississippi Vocational College staged a thirty-six-hour walk-out to demand a student government in 1957, the first boycott in an HBCU in Mississippi. The president stalled the issue for four years before allowing the students to form an association. He guaranteed the student government’s compliance with college regulations against activism by requiring the presence of two faculty members and the Dean of Students at all meetings.¹² Also in 1957, the Board of Trustees fired the president of Alcorn A&M College after he sided with students boycotting classes to protest pro-segregation editorials written by an Alcorn professor. The Board demanded his immediate resignation, expelled the entire student body, and appointed a new president more amenable to its attitudes on proper student behavior.¹³ In 1961, Jackson State College’s president dissolved its Student Government Association after accusing it of instigating civil rights activities and “embarrassing” the school when Jackson State students rallied in support of the Tougaloo students arrested at the whites-only library.¹⁴ He also provided the Sovereignty Commission with the names and home address of activist students.¹⁵ Students at public institutions were not dormant, but the nature of state control and the severe consequences leveled by the administration negatively influenced participation in the movement.

Conditions at Mississippi’s private HBCUs were different. The high rate of pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Higher Education and Civil Rights: South Carolina, 1860s–1960s
• In Pursuit of Excellence: Desegregation and Southern Baptist Politics at Furman University
• “Quacks, Quirks, Agitators, and Communists”: Private Black Colleges and the Limits of Institutional Autonomy
• Collegiate Living and Cambridge Justice: Regulating the Colonial Harvard Student Community in the Eighteenth Century
• Envisioning an Urban University: President David Henry and the Chicago Circle Campus of the University of Illinois, 1955–1975
• REVIEW ESSAY: From Donnish Dominion to Economic Engine: Explaining the Late 20th-Century Revolution in English Higher Education
• REVIEW ESSAY: Encyclopedias as Institutional History
• Selected Recent Dissertations in the History of Higher Education
• Contributors