The Campus Color Line

College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom

Eddie R. Cole

• Éditeur: Princeton University Press
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691206752
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: North American History

"A stunning and ambitious origins story."—Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award–winning and #1 New York Times –bestselling author The remarkable history of how college presidents shaped the struggle for racial equality

Some of America's most pressing civil rights issues—desegregation, equal educational and employment opportunities, housing discrimination, and free speech—have been closely intertwined with higher education institutions. Although it is commonly known that college students and other activists, as well as politicians, actively participated in the fight for and against civil rights in the middle decades of the twentieth century, historical accounts have not adequately focused on the roles that the nation's college presidents played in the debates concerning racism. Based on archival research conducted at a range of colleges and universities across the United States, The Campus Color Line sheds light on the important place of college presidents in the struggle for racial parity.Focusing on the period between 1948 and 1968, Eddie Cole shows how college presidents, during a time of violence and unrest, strategically, yet often silently, initiated and shaped racial policies and practices inside and outside of the educational sphere. With courage and hope, as well as malice and cruelty, college presidents positioned themselves—sometimes precariously—amid conflicting interests and demands. Black college presidents challenged racist policies as their students demonstrated in the streets against segregation, while presidents of major universities lobbied for urban renewal programs that displaced Black communities near campus. Some presidents amended campus speech practices to accommodate white supremacist speakers, even as other academic leaders developed the nation's first affirmative action programs in higher education. The Campus Color Line illuminates how the legacy of academic leaders' actions continues to influence the unfinished struggle for Black freedom and racial equity in education and beyond.

1

“This Is a Good Movement”

BLACK PRESIDENTS AND THE DISMANTLING OF SEGREGATION

“IT IS MORE desirable at this time to advance the interests of the institution now committed to our care than to engage in controversy,” Morris A. Soper advised Martin D. Jenkins. This caution came on April 29, 1948, two days after Jenkins accepted the presidency of Morgan State College in Baltimore, where Soper, a white man, was chair of the Black college’s board of trustees. Black college presidents like Jenkins were critical actors in the shaping of racial policy and practices across the South and within the federal government. These academic leaders regularly advised white elected officials on issues pertaining to segregated white colleges and universities. They helped formulate the parameters of out-of-state scholarship programs that supported southern Black students’ enrollment at desegregated institutions. Black presidents also molded public discourse around the governance of Black colleges. And notably, they often championed the direct action campaigns and student demonstrations that challenged segregation; however, much of this work was done with extreme caution and out of plain sight.¹

This was necessary because Black presidents were also the most scrutinized subset of academic leaders. When southern higher education was faced with the question of desegregation, white leaders were suspicious of Black leaders’ ideas, arguments, and perceived radical acts. Therefore, Black presidents regularly relied on hidden networks to negotiate several pressures in order to help maintain control of their institutions, secure money from white legislators, and fight back against racists. They utilized personal and professional relationships to communicate among themselves and convey messages to white powerbrokers as needed. Black presidents’ efforts to challenge white supremacy was dangerous work and required meticulous attention to details and well-calculated strategies, whether leading a state-supported or private Black campus.

These were the harrowing realities of segregation, particularly in the Deep South, but a broader perspective on Black presidents is gained from Maryland—the last state to provide its Black residents with access to state-supported higher education. Morgan State was initially a private college but was later purchased by the State of Maryland and converted into a state-supported institution. This created unique tensions between white officials and the college’s Black leaders who were accustomed to independence and unwilling to concede their self-governed organizational structure to state control. With Maryland offering unimaginable concessions, Jenkins emerged as an intellectual leader and activist, and he used a silent network to influence policies and practices that advanced racial equality in Maryland and elsewhere throughout the South—demonstrating how Black college presidents supported Black liberation.

The Making of a Scholar

Martin David Jenkins was born September 11, 1904, in Terre Haute, Indiana, a small town tightly nestled along the Wabash River near the Illinois state line. There, his father David Jenkins started a business as a contractor working with the State Highway Commission of Indiana and the State of Illinois. The company specialized in roads, bridges, and general construction, and by age fourteen, Martin spent his summers on Indiana and Illinois highways working with his father. Just as childhood moved quickly into summers working, life also did not slow down for the younger Jenkins during the academic year. He was a sprinter and served as captain of Wiley High School’s mostly white track team and led it to win the city track championship in 1921. An apprentice and foreman during the summer and a sprinter during the school year, Jenkins had a clear path to follow in his father’s footsteps.²

After high school, he attended Howard University in Washington, DC, and majored in mathematics with a minor in industrial arts/commerce amid plans to return home to work with his father’s highway and bridge construction company. In fact, Jenkins returned from Washington, DC, to Terre Haute every summer to work the family business until he graduated from Howard in 1925, and by 1927, then well acquainted with the family business, the firm was renamed—David Jenkins and Son. The two were officially co-partners.³

Traveling along those highways, however, in and around the rolling hills of southern Indiana and elsewhere in the region, was no easy feat for Black people. At Howard, a hub of Black intelligentsia, Jenkins had spent his college years within the confines of the private, federally subsided university, where several students—particularly Black women students—were redefining what it meant to be full citizens in America, but when he returned home, Indiana was leading the post-Reconstruction resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. There were roughly 194,000 registered Klan members living in Indiana. In Terre Haute, there were two chapters—one with a membership of 7,250 whites and another with 990 whites on its roster—with the majority of candidates for public office in town as members. This is the social environment that hovered over Jenkins as he settled into his role alongside his father, and after two years, he stopped working as a co-partner. Education had taken the younger Jenkins’s heart as he enrolled at Indiana State Teachers College in Terre Haute and earned a second bachelor’s degree in 1930.⁴

Equipped with two bachelor’s degrees, Jenkins moved to Petersburg, Virginia, where, from 1930 to 1932, he was an instructor at Virginia State College for Negroes. But not satisfied with merely being an instructor, Jenkins returned to the Midwest during the Great Depression. There, he pursued graduate studies in education at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, during the economic downturn and earned a master’s degree in 1933 and a doctor of philosophy degree in education in 1935. He was a straight-A student while studying under Professor Paul A. Witty, his Northwestern advisor and dissertation committee chair.⁵

Witty was also born in Terre Haute and graduated from Indiana State, and the two cultivated a relationship around their commonalities and shared interests. Witty was a renowned scholar who challenged popular beliefs about giftedness in children, and like his advisor, Jenkins also studied gifted education with a focus on Black youth. Jenkins launched a prolific scholarly career following the successful defense of his dissertation, “A Socio-Psychological Study of Negro Children of Superior Intelligence,” on May 24, 1935.⁶

After Northwestern, Jenkins followed a common path for Black academics who earned doctorates at research universities in the Midwest and Northeast during this era. Regardless of how Black students excelled as doctoral students, those institutions were liberal only in enrolling them, not in employing or supporting Black graduates. For instance, between 1930 and 1943, 317 Black scholars earned PhDs. The University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania awarded the most earned doctorates to Black scholars during that period. But the white scholars at these institutions had a long history, even prior to Jenkins’s era, of shunning Black intellectuals or stealing their intellectual contributions and leaving them uncredited. In the early 1900s, W. E. B. Du Bois, who earned his doctorate at Harvard University, was not credited for his ideas that became key to the emerging field of sociology. Likewise, Georgiana Rose Simpson earned her doctorate in German at Chicago, but she was forced to live off campus and her career was largely ignored by the university. As a result, these scholars often found their professional homes at Black colleges.⁷

Jenkins’s first job post-Northwestern was at the Negro Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina in Greensboro, where he was the registrar and an education professor. There, he honed his administrative prowess as registrar, but he also maintained an unusually close scholarly relationship with his former Northwestern advisor. Generational contemporaries, with Witty only six years older, they co-authored a study published in the Journal of Psychology in 1936. Their study challenged the prominent argument that Black people were intellectually inferior to whites. Witty and Jenkins found that intelligence was attributable to a child’s environment more than race, thus the amount of white ancestry that a Black child possessed had no impact. Their study had national implications for the use of intelligence testing in schools and earned widespread media coverage, especially among the Black press.⁸

A few months later, in October 1936, Jenkins published in the Journal of Negro Education his first in a series of annual assessments of current trends and events in Black higher education. This initial evaluation focused on the scholarly activities among the “few Negro colleges making provision for the publication of faculty research.” His review of research activities highlighted research projects and recent publications by Howard and West Virginia State professors and discussed potential for research partnerships and grants for Black colleges. His commitment to scholarship and Black colleges’ intellectual contributions spoke to the longstanding ideological debate over the purpose of Black higher education.⁹

At the turn of the century, Booker T. Washington had risen to national prominence among white philanthropists and government officials. Born into slavery, he pursued his education at Hampton Institute and later founded Tuskegee Institute. From there, he promoted a program of industrial education for Black students, and whites backed his call for Black people to build their own independence to support themselves through industrial vocations. This appealed to southern and northern whites as philanthropists supported Washington and this educational plan.¹⁰

Du Bois led a contingent against Washington’s ideals. He argued that Washington’s own institution could not exist without the full-fledged colleges—those that offered more than vocational studies—that trained the faculty who taught at Tuskegee. He also cited whites’ efforts to politically disenfranchise Black people, the treatment of Black people as second-class citizens, and the withdrawal of aid from Black colleges as evidence that Washington’s views stifled Black liberation. “These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington’s teachings,” Du Bois argued in 1903, “but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment.”¹¹

This debate over the future of Black higher education framed the careers of the next generation of Black college educators like Jenkins, whose early career trajectory aligned more with Du Bois. Jenkins was interested in publishing his research and promoting more scholarly output at Black colleges. In 1937, he left North Carolina A&T to become the dean of instruction at Cheyney Training School for Teachers, a Black college in Pennsylvania. But Cheyney, like North Carolina A&T, did not offer the opportunity to connect his emerging scholarly profile with a well-established university. In 1938, however, he secured a faculty job at Howard—one of the few Black institutions offering graduate-level curricula. In fact, in 1926, when Mordecai W. Johnson became president, Howard received $218,000 in federal appropriations, and that amount only increased during his presidency. Jenkins’s skills and Howard’s infrastructure were an excellent match, and when he accepted the job, Johnson told him, “I rejoice. Your coming to us will be warmly welcomed by students, faculties, and trustees.”¹²

Once he arrived in Washington, DC, Jenkins’s impact as a scholar was felt at Howard and beyond. He conducted a national study on gifted Black youth, utilizing connections at larger white universities established with his advisor Paul A. Witty. By 1942, Jenkins had published twenty-six articles that spanned both white and Black acad...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “This Is a Good Movement”: Black Presidents and the Dismantling of Segregation
• 2. “We Simply Cannot Operate in Slums”: The University and Housing Discrimination
• 3. “Segregation Is Immoral”: Race, University Systems, and Bureaucratic Resistance
• 4. “The University Has Become a Pawn”: The Fight for Autonomy at a Public University
• 5. “The More Violent and Adamant”: Anticipating and Preventing White Resistance
• 6. “The Northern Outpost of Southern Culture”: Free Speech and Civil Rights
• 7. “A Truly Influential Role”: College Presidents Develop Affirmative Action Programs
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index