Black Collegians' Experiences in Us Northern

BLACK COLLEGIANS’ EXPERIENCES IN US NORTHERN PRIVATE COLLEGES A Narrative History, 1945-1965 Dafina-Lazarus Stewart Black Collegians’ Experiences in US Northern Private Colleges Dafina-Lazarus Stewart Black Collegians’ Experiences in US Northern Private Colleges A Narrative History, 1945–1965 Dafina-Lazarus Stewart Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, Ohio, USA ISBN 978-1-137-59076-3 ISBN 978-1-137-59077-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59077-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934657 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A. For Michael and all of us who were not raised to be “ordinary children” (GKB) FOREWORD Dr. Dafina-Lazarus (D-L) Stewart is a deeply committed human being. I have known this since meeting D-L years ago at an academic confer- ence. The seriousness, rigor, thoughtfulness, passion, and commitment of D-L are contained wholeheartedly in Black Collegians’ Experiences in US Northern Private Colleges: A Narrative History, 1945–1965. Unfortunately, few scholars of higher education pursue historical research. It is not a methodological approach that is encouraged or even taught in most higher education programs. Higher education scholars often don’t understand its benefits or its beauty. Perhaps after reading D-L’s handsomely crafted book, they will. D-L fastens together historical narratives with skillful representations of educational theory. D-L provides opportunities for voices of Black collegians to shine, roar, sit silently, reflect, and inform throughout the book. The voices of the 68 Black students who attended liberal arts colleges in the North tell the story of Blacks on college campuses—majority White northern college campuses—between 1945 and 1965. However, their stories do more than that as D-L captures their formative years growing up and their experiences after graduating or leaving college. Whereas the focus in higher education research is almost always on students, D-L thinks about these Black students when they are alumni and as vibrant individuals, making their way in various communi- ties across the nation. We get a full picture of their lives. Black Collegians’ Experiences in US Northern Private Colleges tells us about segregation in the North—a topic that is often ignored or overshad- owed by the vast manifestation of segregation in the South. D-L shows us the complexities through the lives of these students. Given my interest vii viii FoRewoRd in Black college students during this time, I found D-L’s portrayal of the collegiate lives of these students to be most riveting. I was almost giddy about the ways that I could use this work in my classroom to motivate and empower Black students who often feel left out of history texts—here, they were in full brilliance. And the complexities with which D-L presents them will push back against the flattened and narrowed views of Black students that many White students bring to the classroom. Knowing so much about these Black students’ school experiences, their college choice decisions, their college adventures, and their postcollege contributions changes the presentation of Blacks in the larger history of education narrative. By far one of the most interesting aspects of Black Collegians’ Experiences in US Northern Private Colleges is D-L’s presentation of divergent college experiences based on gender. Far too often gender is not discussed in histories of Blacks, and in history of education overall, gender has referred to women only and typically White women. Because D-L is sensitive to gender issues and challenges in research and practice, gender is a carefully woven narrative throughout the book. D-L doesn’t make assumptions and judgments but allows the Black collegians to present their own experiences, fears, and voices. One aspect of Black Collegians’ Experiences in US Northern Private Colleges that I found particularly interesting, and D-L’s treatment of it unique, was those students who did not finish college for various rea- sons—joining the military, marriage, and other obligations. Once again, D-L doesn’t pass judgment and treat these students as failures like so many scholars do today. Instead, D-L gives them the space to tell their story, avoiding the trap of the single collegiate experience that we often fall into with research. For D-L, graduating from college wasn’t the end goal for these Black collegians—it was one step on the way to the rest of their lives and sometimes they took a different pathway—away from college—and that is a respectable choice from D-L’s perspective. There is no shame or judgment on D-L’s part or in the words chosen to describe the students’ choices. Another area that D-L doesn’t ignore, but that is ignored almost sys- tematically by scholars of the history of education and higher education, is the postcollege experiences of students—their lives as alumni. D-L gives us a window into the lives of these Black collegians postcollege by show- casing their careers, families, and roles as alumni of their alma maters. Again, as I read these stories, I thought about how empowering these individual lives are and how they will empower other Black alumni who FoRewoRd ix are often ignored by their institutions and by researchers interested in alumni contributions to higher education. As D-L, from my perspective, always seems beautifully open to learning, this book is also a learning experience for the author. D-L presents personal experiences and reflections—what was learned in the process of writing this book and from these Black college students. I appreciate D-L’s reflections, moments of silence, commitments, and passions throughout the text and think that much is added to the overall book through D-L’s inclusion of self. In the end, Black Collegians’ Experiences in US Northern Private Colleges is a compelling narrative of beautiful stories, often untold. As readers, we learn students’ motivations, goals, desires, struggles, and hopes. From my perspective, D-L lifted the personal narratives and voices of these students off the pages, telling complex stories of social isolation, self-discovery and growth, cross-racial friendships, dating, inter- and intra-cultural learning, and academic learning. D-L has given us individual stories and a larger historical narrative to fill the void that exists in our understanding of Blacks in higher education. Professor Marybeth Gasman University of Pennsylvania July 2016 PREfACE The Civil Rights Movement has been well-documented in many respects (Anderson, 1995; Day, 2014; Farber, 1994; Farber & Bailey, 2001; Lewis & D’Orso, 1998; Williams, 2004, 2013), including the educational narratives of those Black students who first sought to integrate southern primary, secondary, and postsecondary institutions (Beals, 1995; Clark, 1992; Doyle, 2003; Halberstam, 1998; Hunter-Gault, 1992, 2014; Meredith & Doyle, 2012; Sayre, 1995). Yet, missing from those narratives are the voices of Black1 people who were admitted to and decided to attend private, liberal arts colleges in northern states after the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras. Some discussion has reviewed northern racial integration in higher education in the early twentieth century (Plaut, 1954; Woodson, 1933/2006), but the literature is largely silent regarding the period between World War II and the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Acts. Indeed, due to the greater presence of Black people in the South, much of what is known about their experiences in US colleges and universi- ties is geographically focused there. When the education of Blacks in the North prior to the mid-1960s has been discussed, it has been typically in the context of elementary and secondary education (e.g., Franklin, 1979; Harding, 1981). Also, there has been little known and discussed concerning the process of integration as enacted in specific institutional contexts. Public discourses would imply that integration “just happened” uniformly, rather than the more authentic reality of the uneven, partial, and paradoxical juxtaposition of inclusion and exclusion that character- ized the era between World War II and the passage of the 1964 Civil xi xii PReface Rights Act. The more gradual integration that occurred on northern college campuses has been mostly ignored in favor of the relatively rapid, and violently contested, racial integration that occurred across the South. The ways in which these northern institutions that were early adopters of lim- ited racially heterogeneous student bodies actually engaged the demands of integration for institutional policy and practice and the nature of Black student experiences with those institutional climates are the focus of this book.

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