Black Women and Resistance at Black Colleges, 1957-2018. BY

Home , Barbara Ransby, Randolph Blackwell

Invincible, Not Invisible:

Black Women and Resistance at Black Colleges, 1957-2018.

JENNIFER ASH B.A., Western Carolina University, 2005 M.A., University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2008

DISSERTATION

Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Chicago, 2019

Chicago, Illinois

Defense Committee:

Barbara Ransby, Chair and Advisor Elizabeth Todd-Breland Lynn Hudson Cynthia Blair Roderick Ferguson, African American Studies Martha Biondi, Northwestern University To all the freedom fighters past, present, and future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Though I wrote this dissertation over the last few years as a doctoral student, the project really began over ten years ago when I was hired to teach at Bennett College in Greensboro,

North Carolina. When I began working there I was quickly introduced to the history of Bennett women’s activism in the civil rights movement. I was hooked from that moment on and have been ever since. Bennett students taught me more than I could ever teach them. Because of them and my time at Bennett in general, my political and historical lenses blossomed and matured. I am a better scholar, a better organizer, and a better person because of Bennett Belles who sat in my classes and talked with me in my office. Colleagues at Bennett were super supportive of my research and have continued to remain dear friends. Valerie Ann Johnson, affectionately known as Dr. VJ, Mia Mitchell, Steve Willis, Yvonne Welbon, and Tamara Jeffries have cheered me on through this journey. I owe a special acknowledgement of gratitude to Dr. VJ who saw something in me that I did not know existed myself. If it was not for Dr. VJ, this project would not exist. She introduced me to many feminist scholars who have supported this research, including Beverly Guy-Sheftall, whose remarkable body of work remains a source of inspiration and was key to the development of this dissertation.

I am also grateful for other mentors who have supported my intellectual journey over the years. At Western Carolina University Elizabeth Gillespie McRae modeled for me what an anti- racist southern white woman scholar should be and do. At the University of North Carolina at

Greensboro (UNCG) Lisa Levenstein modeled the importance of scholar activism and showed me how to be thorough and precise in my work. Peter Carmichael and his family have been supportive and the source of many laughs when I needed them. I met Tiffany Packer at UNCG

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (continued) and she has remained a dear friend, always offering words of support and encouragement.

In Chicago I gained a family – an intellectual and political one. By agreeing to take me on as a student, Barbara Ransby altered my life forever. I will never forget the day she encouraged me to apply for Ph.D. programs after knowing me for less than a week. Like Dr. VJ,

Barbara saw potential in me that I did not see myself and I am forever grateful. The steady support of Elizabeth Todd-Breland, Cynthia Blair, Jennie Brier, Lynn Hudson, Jane Rhodes, Rod

Ferguson, Nadine Naber, Atef Said, Martha Biondi, and Kishonna Gray has been remarkable.

The opportunity to learn from them and their messages of encouragement have kept me afloat.

Several peers of mine have been especially supportive as well. Deana G. Lewis is a constant and there is nothing I could say to adequately thank her for her support. Marla McMackin and

Sharaya Tindall have been especially supportive as well, offering feedback and encouragement when I needed it most. Chandni Desai, who was a Mellon fellow at the Social Justice Initiative has remained a source of support and a dear friend. Though she was not a student at UIC, I met

Isis Ferguson there and we have grown to be dear friends. She has been a source of joy and support from day one. There are too many people to list but Jennifer Viets, Alice Kim, and so many others have been sources of support and collaboration. Also, thank you to the people who sat and wrote with me at writing retreats and work sessions.

I am also indebted to the many archivists who helped me locate the source materials for this work. I especially want to thank Holly Smith and Ms. Kassandra Ware at Spelman College

Archives, and the staff at the Women’s Research and Resource Center who welcomed me on numerous occasions. This project has benefitted from generous funding from several

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (continued) institutions. I am grateful for financial support from the Department of History, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Department of African American Studies at the

University of Illinois at Chicago. In addition to these academic departments, the UIC

Chancellor’s office, the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, and the Social Justice

Initiative have generously provided financial support for my work. Outside of UIC, the Andrew

W. Mellon Foundation, the Black Metropolis Research Consortium at the University of Chicago, and the North Caroliniana Society also provided generous support.

Finally, there are no words to describe how much I appreciate the support of my family.

My maternal grandmother Judy Green drove me to the post office in our small town in 2001 to mail off my college applications. I was the first in her family to go to college and she saved every penny she could to pay for my applications and all the things I needed to attend. She has remained a constant in my life through many highs and lows including the passing of my mother, who I know would be glowing with pride if she were here to see me get this Ph.D. My partner’s parents, Alfred and Connie, have embraced me as their own child. Through them I have learned the kind of lessons only unconditional love teaches us. To my children Matty and Cheslynn, you are my most impressive accomplishments to date. You are the source of my joy every day and I hope I make you as proud as you make me. You are wise beyond your years and I cannot wait to see how you will change this world, because I know you will. Finally, to my partner Matthew, I love you more than I can put into words. Our journey together and our family histories are a book unto themselves. One day we can write it together. For now, lets relish in the fact that we have conquered this journey together, stronger than ever. From Kings Mountain to Chicago, peanut butter and jelly for life! JSA

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. INTRODUCTION ………………………………………… 1

II. “I DIDN’T KNOW I WAS SENDING YOU TO A CONVENT”: INSTITUTIONAL CULTURES OF RESPECTABILITY AND STUDENT RESISTANCE TO IN LOCO PARENTIS AT HBCUS, LATE 1950s – EARLY 1960s……………………………… 30

III. “SEGREGATION…DIMINISHES OUR STATURE AS WOMEN”: BENNETT COLLEGE STUDENTS AND GREENSBORO’S BLACK FREEDOM STRUGGLE, 1957-1960…………………………………………………… 91

IV. “WE NO LONGER WANT TO BE ‘LILY-WHITE YOUNG LADIES,’ BUT WE WANT TO BE BLACK SOUL SISTERS”: BLACK WOMEN AND ACTIVISM AT HBCUS, 1965-1975…………………………………….. 117

V. “WE ARE WILLING TO GO TO THE LAST EXTREME”: SPELMAN COLLEGE AND THE FIGHT FOR A BLACK WOMAN PRESIDENT, 1975-1976………………. 162

VI. CONCLUSION……………………………………………… 204

BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………... 226

VITA………………………………………………………… 241

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AFDC Aid to Families with Dependent Children

A&I Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial College

APD Atlanta Police Department

AUC Atlanta University Center

BPP Black Panther Party

ERA Equal Rights Amendment

GCA Greensboro Citizens Association

HBCUs Historically Black Colleges and Universities

LGBTQ Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer

NWRO National Welfare Rights Organization

NC A&T North Carolina Agricultural and Technical

PWIs Primarily White Institutions

SCLC Southern Christian Leadership Conference

SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

SOBU Student Organization for Black Unity

SSGA Spelman Student Government Association

UNCG University of North Carolina at Greensboro

USNSA United States National Student Association

WC Woman’s College at the University of North Carolina

WHMS Women’s Home Missionary Society

WRRC Women’s Research and Resource Center

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SUMMARY

“Invincible, Not Invisible,” is a historical study of Black women’s activism at

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) from the late 1950s through the early

2000s. The author uses historical records from institutional archives and oral history interviews to draw conclusions about how Black women students at HBCUs organized to challenge administrative oversight of their personal and social lives, and how they simultaneously participated in several social and political movements.

Beginning with an examination of institutional cultures, the dissertation analyzes how

Black women students resisted in loco parentis at Black colleges from the late 1950s through the early 1960s. Second, it focuses on the contributions of Black women students to the Greensboro sit-in movement and the broader civil rights movement during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

From there, the dissertation focuses on how Black women students participated in student activism at Black colleges during the era of the Black student movement and the rise of the women’s liberation movement. Next, the dissertation tells the story of the 1976 Board of

Trustees Lock-in at Spelman College, when Black women students and their faculty and staff allies demanded a Black woman president. Finally, “Invincible, Not Invisible,” concludes with an overview of the establishment of women’s studies and the Women’s Research and Resource

Center (WRRC) at Spelman College in 1981, and student activism that was nurtured and supported within the WRRC through the recent past.

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I. INTRODUCTON

In 1980 Dee Adams1, a student at Bennett College, received several notices from Dean of

Student Affairs Harold Bragg, informing her that she must leave the Greensboro, North Carolina, campus at once due to an unexpected pregnancy. Not only was she pregnant, she was not married and according to the College “pregnancy policy” she was both squatting illegally in her dormitory and attending classes without permission. Unlike married students, unwed students were required to report pregnancy to health services, were forced to vacate campus housing, and were also required to withdraw from classes. Essentially, they were forced to erase themselves from the Bennett experience. Pregnant married students were prohibited from living on campus but were not forbidden from attending classes. Bennett College, a women’s institution, did not have marriage dorms or accommodate men living on campus in any way, so naturally most married students lived off campus.2 The policy clearly articulated and maintained a double standard that favored family formation within a traditional patriarchal model. Dee, a graduating senior, refused to accept this double standard and decided to fight the administration’s policy so she could graduate and support her soon to be family.

1 Dee Adams is a pseudonym. This dissertation utilizes pseudonyms when necessary to conceal the identity of individuals who requested to have their names and other identifiers excluded from the narrative. Additionally, as in Dee Adams’ case, when the author uses archival materials that contain personal or sensitive information, pseudonyms are used unless the subject granted permission to do otherwise.

2 To this point in history the state of North Carolina and the rest of the United States, only recognized heterosexual marriage. When this study refers to marriage as it pertains to rules and regulations at Black colleges, it refers to those recognized as legal by the state though the author acknowledges that heterosexual, state-sanctioned marriages are not the only family formations in existence historically and contemporarily.

Soon after her initial encounters with Student Affairs regarding her pregnancy, Dee voluntarily withdrew from campus housing, but she refused to stop attending classes even after she was repetitively told to do so by the Dean of Student Affairs.3 Dee was resilient in her refusal to accommodate the administration’s demands. She simply would not stay away from her classes. She repetitively appealed the administration’s order to withdraw by arguing that she had the right to exercise choice in her own reproductive decisions and should not be penalized for choosing to parent instead of aborting. Dee did her homework on recent legal cases about pregnancy in the workplace and utilized these cases to support her own. Mentioning that the courts had ruled in favor of pregnant women in the work-place, she demanded that she be allowed to continue her studies for the final five weeks of the semester and graduate on time. In a letter to President Isaac Miller, she stated, “While I can understand why an institution may have such policies, such a policy does seem a bit out of date.” Dee was keenly aware of the history of her institution when it came to matters of reproduction. She knew that Bennett had historically maintained a zero-tolerance policy for pregnancy. She also had a deep understanding of the guiding principles Bennett espoused as both an institution connected to the United Methodist

Church and one invested in producing alumnae that were viewed as respectable women who had been modeled into the “Bennett Ideal.” Instead of seeing these as stumbling blocks to her case, she utilized them to her advantage.

In addition to the more progressive notion that women should be allowed to work or study while pregnant, she also called attention to her conviction that her choice to keep the pregnancy upheld the “Christian morals” she believed defined Bennett. She complained to

3 Harold Bragg, Letter to Dee Adams, February 27, 1980, Isaac H. Miller Papers, Box 20, Folder: Student Affairs, Bennett College Archives. 3

President Miller that while other students who found themselves in the same circumstances chose to abort, she, out of moral and religious beliefs chose to carry her child to full-term and was in turn being punished for doing so. This policy, she believed, directly conflicted with fundamental religious principles of the institution.4 The brilliant strategy of utilizing respectability politics, religious beliefs, and legal cases, combined with her intense refusal to be physically moved from classes, helped Dee win her case. Eventually, at the direction of the

President the administration gave in. She was allowed to remain enrolled in her classes.

Additionally, Dee’s case generated a major shift in the administration’s policy regarding pregnancy.5 The policy evolved from one that required all unwed pregnant students to both vacate the dormitories and withdraw from classes, to a policy that allowed students to continue their studies until delivery. Students, married or not, were still required to move off-campus for what the administration consistently cited as “liability issues.”

Utilizing stories like Dee’s, “Invincible, Not Invisible,” examines the history of Black women’s activism at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) from the late 1950s through the early 2000s. I begin with student resistance to and organizing against in loco parentis in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and conclude with HBCU student organizing around issues pertinent to cisgender women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) students of the 1990s and early 2000s.6 This research investigates the ways HBCU students and allied

4 Dee Adams, Letter to Isaac Miller, March 13,1980, Isaac H. Miller Papers, Box 20, Folder: Students, Bennett College Archives.

5 Harold Bragg, Letter to Executive Council and Faculty, March 26,1980, Isaac H. Miller Papers, Box 5, Folder: Student Affairs, Bennett College Archives.

6 I use “cisgender women” or “cis-women” here to refer to individuals whose assigned sex at birth matches their gender identity as “women.” I recognize that transgender people have always existed at HBCUs, even if they were not “out” as trans. I also recognize that queer students have 4 faculty members organized for progressive changes to their campus cultures and administrative policies that permeated their daily lives. Additionally, this research examines how their choices to mobilize, the issues they chose to focus on, and their organizing strategies, were influenced and/or motivated by gender normativity and heteropatriarchy embedded both in campus cultures and society in general. I investigate the ways HBCU students and allied faculty voiced concern for and challenged middle-class respectability politics, particularly the normative gender rhetoric of said politics, and how they simultaneously confronted racial inequality at distinct historical moments as participants in various movements and struggles against segregation and white supremacy.

“Invincible, Not Invisible,” combines the methodology and theory of social history and an intersectional analysis rooted in Black feminist epistemologies, to show how essential considerations of gender and sexuality are to Black college institutional histories and to the history of Black student activism. This research aims to provide important analysis that will impact not only the historical narrative of HBCUs and the student-led movements that occurred on their campuses, but also educational and administrative policy and practice in the present day.

While Dee Adams’ case may not be an example of activism or political organizing in the traditional sense, individual cases like hers are telling as they illustrate the ways students historically navigated administrative politics and campus cultures in an effort to generate a broader definition of campus citizenship that accommodated the needs and desires of women and

always existed at Black colleges, even if they were not “out” as queer. With the exception of the last chapter, this dissertation covers primarily the experiences of Black cis-women at HBCUs. When the experiences of transgender people are covered, and the author knows they identified as trans, the terms trans and/or transgender are used. The author does this not to delegitimize the identities of trans women, rather I do this to ensure their experiences and identities are fully recognized and legitimized as significant to the history of HBCUs and student organizing. 5

LGBTQ students, all while pushing back against white supremacy. Cases like hers, examined in conjunction with more traditionally defined forms of student activism that involved collectives, mass actions, and group strategies, illustrate the dialectic between campus cultures and strategies students deployed in an effort make their campuses places where they felt embraced, where their personal autonomy was respected, and where resources they needed as racialized, gendered, and queered subjects were made available.

Black women HBCU students were involved in many social and political movements between the 1950s and early 2000s. These included but were not limited to the civil rights and

Black power movements, (more specifically the sit-in and Black student movement) the movement to end in loco parentis on college campuses, the feminist movement, and the LGBTQ movement. They left their mark on each of these movements in small and significant ways. Their actions have been marginalized in historical narratives not because they did not participate, but because the historiography has not accounted for the nuanced ways gender normativity informed and silenced their demands and actions in movements themselves and in the historical archive.

They were not invisible in the movements they participated in or in the histories of their institutions, and they left a vibrant archive behind. While their struggles were not typically labeled as feminist or Black feminist, their actions demonstrate how Black women have both demanded a seat at the table of movement and institution building while also carving out space for their personal and political needs and desires to be fully imagined and obtained both on and off campuses. “Invincible, Not Invisible,” examines the details of Black women’s activism and political stances at Black colleges showing how their political labor often existed at the intersection of many political formations instead of clearly defined ideological boxes. 6

This research depends on an analysis of primary source material located in nine archives across the U.S. South. The majority of the archival materials that serve as the evidentiary basis for this research are print media sources such as student newspapers, oral history interviews, and administrative and institutional records found in the papers of Black college presidents. This study includes institutions in three cities: Nashville, Tennessee, Atlanta, Georgia, and

Greensboro, North Carolina. “Invincible, Not Invisible,” uses archival material from Tennessee

State University, Fisk University, Spelman College, the Atlanta University Center’s Woodruff

Library, Bennett College, and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University.7 I selected

Nashville, Greensboro, and Atlanta as sites for archival research for several reasons. First, selecting these three cities allowed me to incorporate evidence from multiple private, public, co- ed, single sex, “elite” and “non-elite” institutions that are representative of the array of student demographics and administrative politics at HBCUs during this era. Second, I did not select

HBCUs outside of the U.S. South because the vast majority of HBCUs are southern institutions.

In fact, only six HBCUs out of the approximately one hundred remaining today were established outside of southern states. I also selected Nashville, Greensboro, and Atlanta because the institutions within them were sites of considerable action during the Black Freedom Movement.

HBCU students filled leadership roles and were in many ways the backbone of all three of these local movements. The HBCUs in these cities also experienced a considerable amount of student resistance to conservative administrative oversight during the time covered in this study and before. Additionally, the way in which HBCU administrations responded to student activism

7 Beyond the college and university archives of HBCUs, other institutional archives containing material related to activism at these HBCUs are: the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change; the Nashville Public Library; and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

7 across the chronology I examine was varied. The institutions in this study represent the range of institutional response to HBCU student organizing, from the most conservative and punitive to the most liberal and supportive. This fact has led me to conclude that despite all HBCUs having communal ties and common traditions, each campus has a history of its own and therefore a campus culture that is in many ways reflective of institutionally-specific historical struggles. The institutions in this study reflect both the individualism of HBCU campuses and the common ties maintained through similar cultural and social traditions as well.

Stories like Dee Adams’ bold resistance motivated me to write about intracommunal student activism at HBCUs. Additionally, learning how women from Bennett College have been marginalized in the popular narrative of the local civil rights movement made me curious about women’s activism at other HBCUs. My project illustrates the dialectic between student organizing in the civil rights and Black power movements and their intra-communal campus- based organizing that critiqued and changed administrative policy. When I combed the historiography on HBCUs I discovered significant gaps in the research on women’s experiences and influence, and the themes of gender and sexuality. Inspired by Beverly Guy-Sheftall and

Johnetta B. Cole’s work Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American

Communities8, Marybeth Gasman argues in her essay, “Swept Under the Rug? A Historiography of Gender and Black Colleges,” that Black women have been practically written out of the historical narrative of HBCUs.9 By highlighting this silence Gasman demonstrates that an

8 Johnetta B. Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003).

9 Marybeth Gasman, “Swept Under the Rug? A Historiography of Gender and Black Colleges,” American Educational Research Journal 40, no.4 (December 2007): 760-805.

8 investigation into the influence of the construction of gender is virtually non-existent in HBCU historiography. Through my own research I also discovered that by extension and in relation to the historiographic silence around gender, sexuality is a theme historians of HBCUs have not directly approached.10

In her essay Gasman divides the historiography of HBCUs into three categories:

“Philanthropic Outside Control,” “Internal Campus Relations,” and “Black Women’s Higher

Education,” and tackles decades of historical writing in search of gender and women. She concludes that the largest body of HBCU literature (Philanthropic Outside Control) focuses on the relationships between white men who were industrial philanthropists and Black men who were college presidents. What is lacking in this portion of the literature is the impact the intersection of race and gender had on matters of philanthropy and institutional control.11 The second largest body of HBCU literature (Internal Campus Relations) focuses on the inner workings of HBCU campuses, and as Gasman states, is dominated by the sociological tradition.

Gasman clearly articulates that the dynamics and impact of gender are not a part of this portion of the historiography either.12 Finally, Gasman illustrates through the third category of “Black

Women’s Higher Education,” that despite this body of literature’s existence, it is typically

10 Since starting this project, a few works have been published that speak to these topics though not across numerous institutions. See: Treva Lindsay, “Climbing the Hilltop: New Negro Womanhood at Howard University,” Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood In Washington, D.C. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017); Brittney C. Cooper, “Queering Jane Crow: Pauli Murray’s Quest for an Unhyphenated Identity,” Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017); Robert Cohen Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Sit-ins, Civil Rights, and Black Women’s Student Activism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018).

11 Gasman, “Swept Under the Rug?” 762.

12 Ibid.

9 excluded from the category of HBCU historiography, as if the examination of Black women’s experiences in education are separate and not relevant to the inner workings and history of

HBCUs. Gasman argues that this is especially problematic given the vast majority of the research in this category was written prior to a critical mass of Black women’s acceptance and enrollment into Primarily White Institutions (PWIs) and therefore focuses overwhelmingly on their experiences at HBCUs.13

Gasman’s essay was published in 2007 and my own historiographic research has proven that since this publication date, there has not been a significant influx of research in this area, especially from a historical perspective. This dissertation aims to fill this noteworthy gap in the historiography of HBCUs and to generate a larger discussion regarding how the institutions were important to political organizing of various kinds in the second half of the twentieth century and into our current moment. While HBCUs have been most closely associated with political organizing against segregation and racial discrimination of various forms, “Invincible, Not

Invisible,” reveals the ways HBCUs were, through student activism, also sites for other struggles. Reading against the grain of the archive in search of Black women’s activism at

HBCUs helps illustrate this point. Hopefully, examining these campus-based struggles of the past can help shed light on the present-day politics of gender and sexuality at HBCUs, efforts to contain or eliminate radical student-led political potential nationally, and attempts to dismantle

HBCUs altogether.

Most scholars who have written about the politics of gender and sexuality at HBCUs are social scientists whose work is concerned foremost with present day issues and/or with very

13 Ibid., 762-763. 10 recent history.14 Though this body of literature most certainly contains a historical perspective, historians themselves have had little to say about gender and sexuality at HBCUs. This dissertation addresses a notable gap in the historiography by focusing on specific historical moments over the past sixty years, aiming to historically situate and enrich the social science literature that primarily covers the present and recent past. This research is not rooted in a historiography that tightly exists; rather it is in conversation with several historians in numerous historiographic fields. Each chapter has its own body of literature to contend with and expand upon, though several works of history and theory inform threads of analysis throughout the entire project. Existing at the intersection of African American history, U.S. women’s history, the history of gender, and the history of social movements in the U.S., this work is in conversation

14 Examples of such research include: Shirley M. Tolliver Geiger, Understanding Gender at Public Historically Black Colleges and Universities: A Special Report of the Thurgood Marshall Fund (Washington, D.C.: Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund, 2006); Florence B. Bonner, “Addressing Gender Issues in the Historically Black College and University Community: A Challenge and Call to Action,” Journal of Negro Education 70, no. 3 (2001): 176-191; Marybeth Gasman, Ufuoma Abiola, and Ashley Freeman, “Gender Disparities at Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” Higher Education Review 47, no. 1 (2014): 56-76; Kelly M. Mack, Claudia M. Rankins, Cynthia E. Winston, “Black Women Faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Perspectives for a National Imperative,” in Henry T. Frierson, and William F. Tate, eds., Beyond Stock Stories and Folktales: African Americans’ Paths to the STEM Fields, Diversity in Higher Education, Volume 11 (Bingley, U.K.: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2011); Marybeth Gasman, “Historically Black Colleges and Universities and the Issue of Gender,” in Barbara J. Bank, Sara Delamont, and Catherine Marshall, eds., Gender and Education (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2007); Valerie Lundy-Wagner and Marybeth Gasman, “When Gender Issues Are Not Just About Women: Reconsidering Male Students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” Teachers College Record 113, no. 5 (2011): 934- 968; Tabbye M. Chavous, Angel Harris, Deborah Rivas, Lumas Helaire, and Laurette Green, “Racial Stereotypes and Gender in Context: African Americans at Predominantly Black and Predominantly White Colleges,” Sex Roles 51(1/2): 1-16; Sheena C. Howard, “Intercultural (Mis) Communication: Why Would You ‘Out’ Me In Class?,” Sexuality and Culture 16, no.2 (2012): 118-133; Lori D. Patton, “Perspectives on Identity, Disclosure, and the Campus Environment Among African American Gay and Bisexual Men at One Historically Black College,” Journal of College Student Development 52, no. 1 (2011): 77-100; Lori D. Patton and Symone Simmons, “Exploring Complexities of Multiple Identities of Lesbians in a Black College Environment,” The Negro Educational Review 59 (2008): 197-215. 11 with at least five historiographic categories: 1.) Black Women, Respectability, and Racial Uplift.

2.) Civil Rights and Black Power (specifically on college campuses). 3.) Women and Gender in the Black Freedom Movement (specifically on college campuses). 4.) Black Women and

Reproductive Rights. 5.) Black Feminism and Queerness as Intellectual and Political Projects.

My work builds on existing historical analysis of the ways the Black middle-class deployed the politics of respectability in racial uplift projects, how these politics produced and reinforced heteropatriarchy as a response to white supremacy, and how African Americans of varying identities embraced or resisted said politics. This project is in conversation with the work of historians such as Glenda Gilmore, Kevin Gaines, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Paula

Giddings, Linda Perkins, and Cynthia Blair.15 While most of these historians write about respectability from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, the ground work they lay for understanding the educational models of HBCUs and political traditions of Black women is important to this dissertation. My analysis of the communal standards of behavior, physical appearance, living arrangements, and political traditions that HBCUs maintained and how those standards were gendered, depends on these historians’ analysis of a preceding era. The

15 Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Cynthia Blair, “I’ve Got to Make My Livin’”: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Linda M. Perkins, “The Impact of the Cult of True Womanhood on the Education of Black Women.” Journal of Social Issues 39, no.3 (1983): 17-28; Howard Zinn, and Paula Giddings, “From the Howard Zinn Archive: Fighting Respectability Politics at Spelman College.” Mother Jones, March 24, 2015. Accessed February 20, 2016. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/03/howard-zinn-spelman-black-women-liberation- respectability%20; Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Amistad, 1984); Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

12 archive reveals historical linkages that demonstrate that while change over time is an important acknowledgement to make, the HBCUs included in this study were deeply rooted in the traditions of middle-class respectability and gendered educational models that were created generations prior in the aftermath of slavery.

The second body of historiography this dissertation research is conversation with is Black student activism in higher education during the civil rights and Black power eras. Several have written specifically about organizing at HBCUs during this time period, but more has been written about Black student activism at PWIs. Historians who have written extensively about the

Black student movement are Joy Ann Williamson-Lott, Jelani Favors, Martha Biondi, Ibram

Rogers, Fabio Rojas, Robert Cohen, and to a lesser extent Peniel Joseph.16 Some have provided insight into gender struggles in the Black student movement, revealing that many individuals and student groups debated the role of women in the movement despite the vast amount of labor they dedicated to the cause. However, there is still much to learn about how women, who were often disregarded as leaders, participated in spite of the sexism. My research builds on the existing literature by examining how Black women students of this era, many of whom identified with the

Black student movement, put forth demands and agendas that were specific to their needs and

16 Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Joy Ann Williamson-Lott, Radicalizing the Ebony Tower: Black Colleges and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi (New York: Teachers College Press, 2008); Peniel Joseph, “Dashikis and Democracy: Black Studies, Student Activism, and the Black Power Movement,” Journal of African American History 88, no. 2 (2003): 182-203; Ibram H. Rogers, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstruction of Higher Education, 1965- 1972 (New York: Palgrave, 2012); Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Robert Cohen and David J. Snyder, eds., Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Robert Cohen, Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Sit-ins, Civil Rights, and Black Women's Student Activism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018).

13 desires as students who were more socially restricted than the young men who were often the faces of the struggle. These demands were interwoven with and influenced by both the Black student movement and the coming of the women’s liberation movement. As many historians have documented, students placed a heavy emphasis on the development of Black studies departments that were free of middle-class respectability, but they failed to adopt progressive notions of gender roles, thus leaving the gender ideologies of respectability unchallenged. This dissertation argues that the demands of some Black women students expanded the purview of the

Black student movement by addressing issues that impacted women students specifically.

This dissertation is also in conversation with numerous historians who have written about the political labor of HBCU women and about gender and Black women’s roles in the Black freedom movement more broadly. “Invincible, Not Invisible,” centers the experiences and contributions of HBCU women who provided massive amounts of labor to various political campaigns and projects from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s. This includes the sit-in movement and the beginning of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), but also highlights lesser known campaigns that were organized by HBCU women like Operation

Doorknock - a massive voter registration campaign led by Bennett College women in 1960.

There are a few works that center HBCU women’s political labor in the civil rights movement, but they are institutionally specific, often only focusing on one HBCU. Examples of these are:

Linda B. Brown, Deidre Flowers, and Barbara Ruth Irene Isaac’s works on Bennett College;

Harry Lefever’s work on Spelman College; and Danielle McGuire’s book chapter “It Was Like

All of Us Had Been Raped,” that tells the story of the rape of Betty Jean Owens, a student at 14

Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University.17 My work builds on the gender analysis of these scholars and illustrates how students were both fighting Jim Crow and in loco parentis simultaneously.

This research is also in direct conversation with other histories of women in the Black

Freedom Movement that are not focused on HBCUs explicitly.18 Biographies and autobiographies were influential to this work as a foundation for understanding the personal and

17 Danielle McGuire, At The Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance – A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2010); Linda B. Brown, Belles of Liberty: Gender, Bennett College, and the Civil Rights Movement in Greensboro, North Carolina (Greensboro: Women and Wisdom Press, 2013); Linda B. Brown, The Long Walk: The Story of the Presidency of Willa B. Player at Bennett College (Danville, VA: McCain Printing Company, 1998); Deidre B. Flowers, “The Launching of the Student Sit-in Movement: The Role of Black Women at Bennett College,” Journal of African American History 90 (Winter 2005): 52-63; Harry G. Lefever, Undaunted By the Fight: Spelman College and the Civil Rights Movement, 1957-1967 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005).

18 Examples of African American women’s history relevant to this dissertation topic include but are not limited to: Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Amistad, 1984); Darlene Clark Hine, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement, 1830-1970 (New York: Scribner, 2001); Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin, eds., Sisters in Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Tanisha C. Ford, Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Kimberley Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: African American Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000); Stephanie Evans, Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850-1954: An Intellectual History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008); Robnett, Belinda. “African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965: Belinda Robnett, “Gender Leadership and Micromobilization.” The American Journal of Sociology 101 (May 1996): 1661-1693; Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

15 political connections of Black women to the movement. The autobiography of Anne Moody,

Barbara Ransby’s biography of Ella Baker, and Cynthia Fleming’s biography of Ruby Doris

Smith Robinson are just a few of the works of this genre that were influential.19 Works that center the threat of sexual and gender-based violence are important to my work as well because they help explain the gender dynamics of organizing strategies within student movements and they illuminate the ways women’s issues were central to the formation of numerous campaigns.

For example, Danielle McGuire’s work At the Dark End of the Street examines the organizing strategies of women in the Black freedom movement and how their activism related to their experiences with white supremacist sexual violence.

The fourth historiographic category significant to this dissertation is “Black Women and

Reproductive Rights.” Much that has been written about reproductive rights on college campuses is focused on PWIs. The most well-known example being Beth Bailey’s work Sex in the Heartland.20 No historian has written extensively on reproductive rights at HBCUs. Since the 1990s, there has been an increase in the amount of research published that chronicles how

African American women contributed to, struggled with, and defied mainstream white feminist reproductive rights campaigns, transforming them into reproductive justice campaigns that did not solely focus on access to birth control and abortion. These studies also highlight how Black women often challenged Black Nationalist discourse around birth control and abortion as genocide. There has also been, within the last ten years, an increase in the amount of research on

19 Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Cynthia Griggs Fleming, Soon We Will Not Cry: The Liberation of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson. (Lanham, M.D.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1998); Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Dell, 1968). 20 Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).

16 the abuses Black women have historically faced at the hands of the medical industrial complex.21

However, the historiography still lacks an analysis of how HBCUs fit into this struggle, including how their students reacted to reproductive rights campaigns from both sides of the political aisle, and what side of said aisle HBCU administrations allied with. This dissertation examines how students advocated for themselves and organized campaigns around reproductive issues including but not limited to: forced sterilization, abortion, and birth control.

“Invincible, Not Invisible,” also examines the development of Black women’s studies and Black queer politics at HBCUs. This portion of the research builds on numerous anthologies of Black feminist history and theory but also the work of historians who have examined the historical trajectory of Black women’s intersectional politics across the history of the United

States. As an examination of the intellectual projects of Black feminism at HBCUs, my work builds on the work of historians like V.P. Franklin whose article, “Hidden in Plain View: African

American Women, Radical Feminism, and the Origins of Women’s Studies Programs, 1967-

21 Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Angela Davis, "Racism, Birth Control, and Reproductive Rights," Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); Loretta J. Ross, "African- American Women and Abortion: 1800-1970," In Stanlie M. James and Abena P.A. Busia, eds., Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women (New York: Routledge, 1993); Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998); Susan Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women’s Health Activism in America, 1890-1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena Gutierrez, eds., Undivided Rights: Women Of Color Organize For Reproductive Justice (Cambridge: South End Press, 2004); Beverly Smith, "Choosing Ourselves: Black Women and Abortion," In Marlene Gerber Fried, ed., From Abortion to Reproductive Freedom: Transforming a Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1990).

1974,”22 tells the narrative of how Black feminists contributed to the rise and development of women’s studies in the academy, despite being ignored, erased and silenced in the curriculum offerings and the analysis; and Kimberly Springer, whose work chronicles the history of Black feminist organizations from the late 1960s through the 1980s.23 In addition to these historians, this chapter is theoretically rooted in the research of social scientists like Cathy Cohen who has written extensively on sexuality politics and youth organizing in Black communities.24 The main objective of this portion of the research is to understand how intellectuals, mainly those at

Spelman College, contributed to women’s studies nationally, how students embraced Black feminist and queer inclusive politics and theories taught in women’s studies curriculum, and how they used that knowledge to challenge campus cultures in radical ways. Both women’s studies faculty and students have pushed HBCUs significantly on gender normativity and

22 V.P. Franklin, “Hidden in Plain View: African American Women, Radical Feminism, and the Origins of Women’s Studies Programs, 1967-1974.” The Journal of African American History 87 (Autumn 2002): 433-45.

23 Kimberley Springer, Living For the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

24 Cathy Cohen, “African-American Youth: Broadening Our Understanding of Politics, Civic Engagement, and Activism,” research note prepared for Social Science Research Council, Youth Activism Web Forum, 2005, http://ya.ssrc.org/african/Cohen/; “Black Sexuality, Indigenous Moral Panics and Respectability: From Bill Cosby to the ‘Down-Low’,” In G. Herdt, ed., Moral Panics and Sexual Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2009); The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1999); “Contested Membership: Black Gay Identities and the Politics of AIDS,” in S. Seidman, ed., Sociology/Queer Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996): 362-394; “Health Activism and the Black Church,” in D. Smith, ed., The Public Influences of African American Churches: Policy Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). Cathy Cohen and Tamara Jones, “Fighting Homophobia versus Challenging Heterosexism: ‘The Failure to Transform’ Revisited.” in E. Brandt, ed., Dangerous Liaisons: Blacks and Gays (New York: The New Press, 1999); “Punks, Bull Daggers and Welfare Queens: The Real Radical Potential of ‘Queer’ Politics.” GLQ. 3 (1997): 437-485. 18 sexuality politics, expanding what the campuses offer students socially, intellectually, and politically.

In addition to the bodies of historical literature that this research builds upon, to understand the historical and contemporary makings of campus cultures at HBCUs and students’ roles in that process, I have turned to Black feminist theorists. There are few notable exceptions to the general lack of HBCU literature that centers gender and sexuality as categories of analysis from a historical perspective. As an interdisciplinary project, not all materials contained within the 2011 publication Facilitating Campus Climates of Pluralism, Inclusivity, and Progressive

Change at HBCUs are historical in nature, but it represents an admirable attempt to rectify this severe lacking in the literature and makes suggestions for the future of HBCUs.25 This report was the outcome of the Spelman College Women’s Research and Resource Center’s Breaking the

Silence: The Audre Lorde Black Lesbian Feminist Project; a multi-year project funded by the

Arcus Foundation beginning in 2006. One essay included in this report is Roderick Ferguson’s

“The Past and Future Diversities of HBCUs: Queerness and the Institutional Fulfillment of Black

Studies.” In this essay, Ferguson builds a theoretical underpinning for the development of a new interpretation of HBCU history that in turn supports radically different intellectual and political possibilities at the institutions. He states, “in order to build academic institutions that affirm gender and sexual diversity, we must address the gendered history of Black Studies- that is, its masculinist foundations – and put forth a version of Black Studies first articulated by black

25 Facilitating Campus Climates of Pluralism, Inclusivity, and Progressive Change at HBCUs (Atlanta: Spelman College Women’s Research and Resource Center, 2011).

19 feminist intellectuals.”26 Ferguson illustrates the parallels and direct connections between the masculinization of Black Studies in U.S. higher education and the politics of gender and sexuality at HBCUs. This dissertation builds on Ferguson’s call to center Black feminist formations in the histories of Black intellectual traditions. Ferguson’s essay, and the larger report it is published within, function as a theoretical foundation for this research and its agenda to provide a narrative inclusive of both women and LGBTQ students, faculty, and staff; illustrates the ways students resisted constricted identity politics instilled in the definitions of campus citizenship; and delivers critical analyses of the ways (often white and middle-class) hegemonic power had an impact on the founding and sustaining of the institutions.

In order to not only to write women and queer Black students, faculty, and staff, into the narrative, but also to examine the ways gender and sexuality norms had an impact on the founding and subsequent histories of HBCUs, this work relies on the theory of intersectionality, defined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in her 1991 essay “Mapping the Margins.”27 This means moving beyond a contributory history of sorts to a structural analysis, to ask questions like: how did white supremacist notions of Black womanhood and Black masculinity shape the ways HBCU administrations created and enforced campus community codes of conduct? How did notions of middle-class respectability have an impact on the reproductive lives of students at HBCUs?

And, how did students resist and embrace heteropatriarchal notions of family at HBCUs?

26 Roderick A. Ferguson, “The Past and Future Diversities of HBCUs,” Facilitating Campus Climates of Pluralism, Inclusivity, and Progressive Change at HBCUs (Atlanta: Spelman College Women’s Research and Resource Center, 2011): 50.

27 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (July 1991): 1241-1299.

Though Crenshaw’s focus is explicitly on violence against women of color (a political issue that should be considered in new histories of HBCUs, no doubt, but not as the only gendered concern for these institutional histories) her examination of what she terms “structural intersectionality” is useful for a reinterpretation of HBCU history. She points out that because women of color are situated differently than white women, and thus have different needs based on unique and intersecting identities, uniform means and resources that address violence against women will not in fact adequately reach or support women of color. As she argues, the distinctiveness of “woman,” as a marker of identity, is not a sufficient measure to actually meet the needs of all women. Crenshaw states that resources, including the labor of counselors, are often deployed to address violence against the model of white, middle-class women because the identity of “woman” has been historically implied as such.28 This analysis of the ways the intersecting identities of women of color are marginalized from the broad identity of “woman” and thus how women of color are further marginalized by institutions that claim to protect, provide care for, and empower them, is useful as a model of structural analysis for the institutional histories of HBCUs. As Ferguson points out, like Black studies, HBCUs and the official histories of the institutions have traditionally been rooted in a heteropatriarchal foundation that historically has not made space for Black students who identify as women and/or

LGBTQ.29 By extension, and as products of masculine-centered narratives of Black Studies, most histories have yet to fully explore the ways HBCUs were and were not successful at protecting, educating, and empowering Black women and queer students as marginalized subjects that do not fit within a narrow definition of Blackness as a heteropatriarchal ideal.

28 Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1250-51.

29 Ferguson, “The Past and Future Diversities of HBCUs,” 50. 21

The fact that Black feminists have long documented the ways they were and continue to be marginalized from both feminist and anti-racist movements, combined with the sheer impact of the theorization and naming of “intersectionality” in the academy, indicates the historiography is overdue an explanation of the ways the constructs of gender and sexuality influenced the political organizing strategies of HBCU students during the Black freedom and feminist movements. These marginalizations have to be acknowledged, but as this project demonstrates, that is not where the historical unearthing must end. It is not enough to say Black women and

LGBTQ students were marginalized or ostracized. What they did in reaction to and in spite of this marginalization is important as well.

In her book Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred, M. Jacqui Alexander explains the connections between heteropatriarchy and nationalism. In particular, her chapter “Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: An

Anatomy of Feminist and State Practice in the Bahamas Tourist Economy,” illuminates the ways in which the state and nationalism, even when intended as a post-colonial project, generate a definition of citizenship that is narrowly defined. She states:

The ideal typical citizen is still premised within heterosexuality and maleness and this, for women, prostitutes, lesbians, gay men, those who are HIV-infected, and all who occupy the marginalized category of noncitizens, poses a profound dilemma. If, however, these groups cease making demands upon the state, they make it more possible for the state to solidify noncitizenship status, to continue to make citizenship masculine, and to continue to make women irrelevant to the project of nation-building.30

30 M. Jacqui Alexander, “Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization,” from M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New York: Routledge, 1997): 97. 22

While Alexander’s focus in this particular work is the Bahamas’ neocolonial tourist economy, her arguments and the structure of her analysis in Pedagogies of Crossing can be applied to numerous contexts in order to shed light on the ways hegemonic power reinvents itself within political formations that supposedly challenge and bring said power to its end. Alexander’s analysis of Black heteropatriarchy in the Bahamas can be extended to illuminate the ways citizenship has been historically defined within many communities, including HBCUs. Much like the nationalist formations Alexander refers to in her essay, HBCUs were and are often still framed as institutional spaces for the liberation of Black identity, though, as Alexander points out in the quote above, these claims are often rooted in middle-class, patriarchal, and heteronormative notions of identity; a Black identity (not plural) that embraces heteropatriarchal formations of self, family, and community, despite student resistance to this singular identity as all encompassing. Additionally, this narrowly defined notion of “ideal citizen” can be seen in the

Black student movement’s responses to bourgeois notions of Black identity. While those involved in the Black student movement rejected much of what they claimed were accommodationist stances and policies of HBCU administrations, many of the gender normative ideas of what a Black woman should be and do were kept intact, along with heteronormative ideas about sexuality and family making.

Alexander’s work and others like it have helped me think through these complexities not only on the level of identity-based struggle, but as a means to analyze student organizing. This theoretical lens helps explain how movements like the civil rights movement, Black student movement, and women’s liberation movement, fell short in their accounting of the complexities of power. But it is not enough to say that Black women or LGBTQ students were “left out,” after all, they always demanded and took a seat at the tables of movement building. Similar to 23

Alexander’s marginalized subjects of the Bahamas’ nation-making project, Black women and queer students have persistently made demands of their administrations so not to be erased and made irrelevant to the formation and re-formation of campus cultures. These ideas on citizenship were especially influential to the analysis of the first chapter, where I explain how HBCU administrations defined campus citizenship and how students resisted the conservative bourgeois notion of the “ideal student” in their fights against in loco parentis. Additionally, Alexander’s work was particularly influential to chapter three where I analyze how Black women students forged their own paths between 1965 and 1975, weaving demands particular to their needs and desires as Black women into the Black student movement.

Many Black feminist scholars and activists, including Alexander, have written about how white supremacist power structures have always depicted Black sexuality as non-normative in

U.S. culture and how as result, intracommunal policing developed to combat this notion.

Through the policing of sexuality, gender roles, and gender identities, negative stereotypes of

Black people were relegated to the margins as deviant and counter-productive to the progress of the race.31 Alexander argues that women’s sexual autonomy is a direct threat to the neocolonial state because heterosexual family formation is a colonized model that the state depends on for legitimacy.32 Furthermore, she states, “Particularly for the neocolonial state it signals danger to respectability – not only to respectable Black middle-class families, but, most significantly, to

31 For analysis of this see: Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2005); Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); E. Frances White, Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010); Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, & Class, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1981).

32 Alexander, “Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization,” 64.

Black middle-class womanhood, given the putative impulse of this eroticism to corrupt, and to corrupt completely.”33 While HBCUs are not the neocolonial state (though many were entities of the state as public institutions), numerous parallels can be drawn between Alexander’s arguments about the neocolonial state’s desire to control women’s (and queer people’s) sexuality and gender identities, and HBCU administrations’ efforts to do the same to students since the founding of the schools in the era of Reconstruction. Through certain gendered customs and traditions, HBCUs have historically depended on respectability politics to ensure their continued legitimacy in a white supremacist heteropatriarchal society. Chapter One explains how this came to be and how students resisted it.

Alexander’s work on erotic autonomy in the neocolonial Bahamas provides a framework for extrapolating arguments about how hegemonic beliefs about both gender and sexuality have been challenged historically by Black women and Black queer and trans students at HBCUs, and the ways these challenges were either/both resisted and embraced at various moments in history by the institutions. HBCU students have frequently organized for personal autonomy, sexual and otherwise, resisting both campus traditions and white hegemonic power. Their organizing was

(and still is) historically directed at expanding the notion of what it meant to be included in the citizenship of HBCU campuses. They challenged, and continue to challenge, administrations on everything from dress codes that discriminate against gender queer and transgender students, to curfews aimed at keeping young women chaste; from the availability of reproductive care and choice on campuses, to regulations about the movement of Black women’s bodies on and off campuses. Historically, many HBCU students have demanded the autonomy to define their

33 Ibid.

25 identities for themselves. Black feminist intellectuals, including Alexander, representing a diverse range of academic disciplines and activist projects, call for a nuanced and contextualized examination of the Black experience, past and present, that takes not only race into consideration, but also accounts for other markers of identity and power such as gender, class, sexuality, age, and ability.34 While most histories of HBCUs center race as the most central feature in the history of resistance at the institutions, this dissertation follows in the footsteps of historians of African American women who have, for the last forty years, generated a vibrant body of work that contextualizes both African American experiences and the structures of domination that weighed upon them as intersectional.35

34 Examples of Black feminist scholarship influential to this project are: Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000); Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (New York: The Feminist Press, 1982); bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1982); Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1982); bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Southend Press, 1981); Beverly Guy-Sheftall, ed., Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (New York: The New Press, 1995); Stanlie M. James, Frances Smith Foster, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women’s Studies (New York: The Feminist Press, 2009); Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman: An Anthology (New York: The New American Library, 1970).

35 Examples of African American women’s history relevant to this dissertation topic include but are not limited to: Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Amistad, 1984); Darlene Clark Hine, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement, 1830-1970 (New York: Scribner, 2001); Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin, eds., Sisters in Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Tanisha C. Ford, Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Kimberley Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: African American Women in 26

It is important to acknowledge the problematic ways heteropatriarchy has influenced the institutional formations and histories of HBCUs without pathologizing Black institutions as innately and unusually homophobic and sexist spaces in comparison with PWIs. Black feminist theory provides a theoretical lens to write historical narratives of HBCUs that adequately address the issues of patriarchy and heterosexism, while also situating the institutions’ histories in a broader narrative of hegemonic power that has both influenced and threatened the existence of

HBCUs since their founding. Though the histories of PWIs and HBCUs differ, both have been significantly impacted by the constructions of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

Chapter One utilizes the institutional records of HBCUs from Greensboro, Nashville, and

Atlanta, to generate a portrait of campus cultures at HBCUs during the 1950s and 1960s, paying particular attention to how students challenged rules and behavioral expectations. Black women students at HBCUs participated in the movement to end in loco parentis during this time.

Administrations embraced educational models that were deeply connected to racial uplift ideology and aimed to mold students into models of respectability that students claimed pandered to white power interests. Students saw Jim Crow and segregation as historically and ideologically entangled with the intense daily surveillance they experienced on campus. Black women students contributed to the fight against in loco parentis through organized group actions, individual acts of resistance, and through their public writings. While most historians have focused on battles waged in the courts and PWIs as the main sites for this movement, this chapter demonstrates that in addition to the famous court case, Dixon v. Alabama, HBCUs were critical sites of grassroots student activism that strengthened the movement’s momentum. The content of

Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000); Stephanie Evans, Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850-1954: An Intellectual History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008). 27 this chapter overlaps chronologically with the second chapter showing exactly how Black women involved themselves in both the civil rights movement and intracommunal fights on their campuses simultaneously.

Bennett College women’s participation in student organizing against segregation in the late 1950s and early 1960s and how that movement has been remembered is the focus of the second chapter. Their contributions to the civil rights movement should be understood as political labor that spanned years, involved a variety of tactics they inherited from other politically active Black women who came before them, and sustained the local Greensboro struggle throughout its entirety. This chapter illustrates how Bennett women’s political labor was marginalized in both student organizing of the late 1950s and early 1960s and in historical narratives created after. By acknowledging their political labor, the traditional timeline of the southern student movement is expanded, the historiography on gender and women’s roles in the civil rights movement is strengthened, the genealogical chain of Black women’s politics becomes more complete, and more is learned about how some HBCUs supported student organizing in the southern civil rights movement despite the financial and political risks of doing so.

Chapter Three moves to the years between 1965 and 1975, the decade of the Black student movement, to show how political and social issues specifically relevant to the lives of

Black women were percolating at HBCUs. In some cases, women’s issues were embedded within the demands made by the organizers of the Black student movement. Even as women participants of said movement were overshadowed by their male comrades on the surface, they inserted their own demands and put forth agendas that focused on their needs and desires as women. This chapter challenges the popular idea that Black women students were completely 28 pushed to the margins of the Black student movement. Instead, I argue that they made demands and produced knowledge that pushed the boundaries of both Black nationalist and middle-class bourgeois definitions of Black womanhood. This chapter examines both administrative and student stances on issues relevant to feminism and women’s rights and shows how these issues interplayed with the politics of the Black student movement. Beyond compensating Black women for their political labor by highlighting their voices and experiences in and around the

Black student movement, focusing on their responses to what were deemed “women’s issues” helps further develop the historical understanding of how the Black power and women’s liberation movements played out simultaneously and further develops our understanding of the inner workings of Black politics nationally between 1965 and 1975.

The lock-in of the Spelman Board of trustees in 1976 and the demands of the Ad-Hoc

Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family are the focus of Chapter Four. This action was by far the boldest action Black women students made at HBCUs during this era. Their demands challenged Spelman, an institution that claimed to fight injustice through the education of Black women, to shift its vision of leadership and live up to the ideals it espoused about the potential of

Black women. Students and allied faculty and staff demanded that they be included in the process of selecting their president in a meaningful way and that their president be a Black woman. Both demands represented the culmination of their involvement in the Black student movement and their gaining interest in issues relevant to the women’s liberation movement.

Though they did not win this fight and another Black man was appointed President, their actions represented the first major gender-based struggle at Spelman and laid the ground work for Black feminist knowledge production and activism at the institution for years to come. 29

The concluding chapter of this dissertation brings the chronology of this work into the recent past and argues that the founding of the Women’s Research and Resource Center (WRRC) at Spelman College in the 1980s served as a catalyst for Black feminist knowledge production and Black women’s studies in the academy. Additionally, beyond being the source of academic knowledge production, it has also served as a safe space for student activism. From feminist organizing against misogynoir and sexual assault, to LGBTQ student organizing against transphobic dress codes and homophobia on HBCU campuses, the WRRC, grounded in Black feminist scholarship and activism has remained true to its founding mission to merge Black women’s studies with activist fights for a more equitable future for marginalized peoples.

Each chapter of “Invincible, Not Invisible,” centers Black women’s activism at HBCUs in order to restore their voices to the pages of academic and popular histories while also examining the history of the institutional cultures of HBCUs. Despite being footnoted and at times wholly erased from historical memory, HBCU women participated in and supported several movements. However, as stated previously, contributory history is not the end goal of this dissertation. By looking at Black women’s experiences, resistance, and organizing at

HBCUs, these chapters weave a narrative about the building of and interaction among various movements between the late 1950s and early 2000s, as they played out at HBCUs.

II. “I DIDN’T KNOW I WAS SENDING YOU TO A CONVENT”: INSTITUTIONAL CULTURES OF RESPECTABILITY AND STUDENT RESISTANCE TO IN LOCO PARENTIS AT HBCUS, LATE 1950S – EARLY 1960s.

During the 1962-1963 school year at Spelman College, freshwoman Beverly Guy requested permission to stay with her mother, Ms. Ernestine Varnardo Guy, at a nearby Atlanta hotel for a few days. Beverly’s mother was traveling to Atlanta to spend time with her daughter, who was but sixteen years old when she left their Memphis home, Atlanta bound for college.

Spelman had a reputation as an institution that not only provided a quality education for young

Black women but provided protection and safety through their rules, regulations, and security.

The notion that Spelman was a place of shelter appealed to Beverly’s mother. While Ms.

Varnardo Guy was a woman known for bucking rules, especially those that policed gender norms, she certainly needed confirmation that the institution she selected for her young daughter would provide safety in her absence.1 Beverly claims, “She chose Spelman because she figured I would be sheltered here.” Protection was a high priority for many parents who sent their children to southern HBCUs to be educated. At a time when women began attending college at a much higher rate than ever before, this was the objective of parents both within and outside the Black community who sent their young daughters to school during the post-World War II era. With this increase in women’s enrollment, parents expected colleges and universities to care for their daughters in what Renee Lansley refers to as a, “structured, protected, and academic atmosphere that would teach them how to fulfill their future roles in American Society,” though the expectations of Black women differed pointedly from white women. Educated Black women were expected to play a prominent role in the progress of their race in order to confront the racial

1 Beverly Guy-Sheftall, interview by author, Atlanta, Georgia, December 13, 2016. 31 hierarchy and gain social mobility, something white women were not expected to do.2 There was no social burden attached to whiteness and therefore white women were free from any racially- driven community obligations for the progress of their own. Additionally, young Black women were particularly vulnerable to white supremacist sexual violence. As Danielle McGuire’s work shows through the 1959 rape of Florida A&M student Betty Jean Owens, HBCU students were not immune to this horrific possibility and while this concern was not the only concern Black parents faced, it was certainly on their radar when sending their young people to HBCUs, especially their daughters.3

Following the rules of Spelman’s residential living code, Beverly submitted her request to stay in the hotel with her mother. The administrative authority this kind of request was submitted to, probably the Dean of Women Ms. Mercile Johnson Lee, denied her request. After learning her daughter’s request had been denied, Ms. Varnardo Guy telephoned Spelman to make the appeal herself, thinking surely institutional authorities would comply with the wishes of a mother. Yet, once again the request was denied. “Can you imagine? Can you imagine being told your child is not allowed to stay with you in a hotel? Can you imagine? My mother was stunned,” said Beverly.4 Even though she wanted Spelman to be a safe environment for her daughter, Ms. Varnardo Guy apparently had not anticipated the extent to which the administration exercised the principle of in loco parentis, a Latin term that refers to practices

2 Renee N. Lansley, “College Women or College Girls?: Gender, Sexuality, and In Loco Parentis on Campus,” (Ph.D. diss., The Ohio State University, 2004), 23-63.

3 Danielle McGuire, “It Was Like All of Us Had Been Raped,” At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance – A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Knopf, 2010): 160-190.

4 Guy-Sheftall, interview by author. 32 where teachers or others act as surrogate parents vis a vis a young person in their charge. In this case and in others, Spelman’s administrative authorities who oversaw the matter refused to relax their rules regarding overnight off-campus visits, even when parents granted permission in writing or were physically present themselves. When she arrived and saw her daughter for the first time at Spelman, Ms. Varnardo Guy said to her, “I didn’t know I was sending you to a convent.” 5 She was not alone in her opinion of Spelman and other HBCUs as places where students, especially women students, were unduly restricted.

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. Part One, “Respectable Campus Citizens,” paints a portrait of the ethos of HBCU campus cultures as they came to be by the late 1950s and early

1960s. Part Two, “Redefining Campus Citizenship,” demonstrates how Black women students expressed frustration with these campus cultures and participated in the national movement to end in loco parentis during the late 1950s and early 1960s, when many were also deeply engaged in the struggle for civil rights. Black college students saw the two struggles, one against segregation and the other against the intense daily surveillance of students as entangled and they voiced concern over the historical and ideological overlap of these issues. Their most well- known contribution to the legal fall of in loco parentis occurred in the courts and involved student activists who were expelled due to their participation in the civil rights movement.

Beyond court cases that emerged out of HBCU administrations’ punishment of student activists,

Black college students also participated in the fight against in loco parentis through everyday resistance to codes of conduct, their public writings in student newspapers, and organized struggles with conservative administrations. Rarely did students at Black colleges call the ideological enemy they were fighting against on their campuses in loco parentis. Instead they

5 Ibid. 33 and allied faculty used the language of academic freedom, anti-intellectualism, paternalism/maternalism, and conservatism to describe the thing they wanted to eradicate from campus cultures.

“RESPECTABLE” CAMPUS CITIZENS

The orthodox rules students resisted most at HBCUs were reflective of the politics of respectability and racial uplift ideology that were deeply embedded in the history and cultural fabric of Black colleges since their founding during and soon after the era of Reconstruction. The codes of conduct and rules Black college students resented the most were intended to mold them into model citizens who would emerge from HBCUs empowered to challenge stereotypes of

Black people. Due to the need to defy these stereotypes and to protect young Black students from the possibility of white supremacist violence, Black college administrations had a different relationship with in loco parentis than their white counterparts did. Though they too socialized students, especially white women, in conservative ways, primarily white institutions (PWIs) were not forced to genuinely consider racial discrimination or the potential for racist violence when formulating codes of conduct for students.

In addition to being a class-inflected mandate for success, racial uplift ideology was predicated upon the belief that traditional philosophies about gender roles and a strong commitment to sexual modesty could protect African Americans from racist discrimination.

African Americans who espoused racial uplift ideology believed that class mobility in American society was dependent upon working-class African Americans behaving like “ladies” and

“gentlemen” according to the standards of elite whites. Black women students were targeted disproportionately by rules designed to curb sexual impropriety and squelch more liberal ideas about gender roles and sexual behavior. At times, Black women students resisted these rules and 34 attempted to convince or force administrations to shift their politics regarding what young Black women should be allowed and expected to do within the context of a racist sexist society. Thus,

Black women students at HBCUs were responsible for much of the momentum that aimed to take down in loco parentis at Black colleges and nationally during the late 1950s and early

1960s. Many did so while participating in the civil rights movement where they were also forced to confront tensions surrounding their participation and roles in movement building due to their gender. This first chapter provides a general overview of the institutional cultures of HBCUs in the late 1950s and early 1960s, demonstrates how HBCUs were grounds for student resistance to in loco parentis, and elaborates specifically on how Black women students participated in that movement as racialized gendered subjects at institutions who were historically tied to racial uplift ideology.

In the period between 1914 and 1929 no less than eleven HBCUs were rocked by organized student rebellion. This wave of student organizing was in reaction to what historian

Martin Summers calls the “missionary paternalist” model of education.6 This model called for strict codes of conduct that governed students’ daily lives and was preferred by white philanthropists and religious institutions who sought to support Black colleges if and only if they implemented specific pedagogical philosophies that centered industrial training over a liberal arts model. One of the most famous examples of student unrest during this era occurred at Fisk

University in 1925. Under the leadership of conservative white President Fayette McKenzie, students’ free speech was squelched and censored, dating and dancing were forbidden, and

6 Martin Summers, “A Tempestuous Spirit of Rebellion,” Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2004).

35 general conversation between men and women students was restricted. The racist belief that young Black people were unable to restrain themselves sexually and needed to be controlled in a highly surveilled environment drove much of the authoritative philosophy McKenzie was known for. McKenzie enforced such a conservative code of conduct because he himself bought into the stereotypes of African Americans and because he aimed to please potential funders who sought to rid Fisk of any political influence that challenged Jim Crowism in what was perceived as a radical manner. That same year, W.E.B. DuBois galvanized students in a speech he gave that directly criticized McKenzie while he sat in the audience at Fisk. Their rebellion turned violent when in response to their minor vandalism of property, McKenzie called in the all-white

Nashville Police who mercilessly beat student protestors. Armed with riot gear, they broke down the doors of a men’s dormitory and arrested students who were later charged with felony offenses. Upon their fortunate release, these students left Fisk immediately, but students did not cease their organizing. Soon after, an eight-week strike ensued that eventually forced

McKenzie’s resignation despite continued support from the Fisk Board of Trustees. This event sent shock waves through the Black college community and soon after similar events unfolded at

Howard University in Washington, D.C., where students and Black faculty faced off with another conservative white president, Durkee J. Stanley.

Students were successful in ousting Stanley, who was replaced by Mordecai Wyatt

Johnson in 1926.7 Johnson’s appointment as the first Black president of Howard certainly represented progress for the institution, but Johnson had a reputation for being an authoritative administrator as well. He was grounded in a deeply conservative form of Christianity and his patriarchal views on gender roles were emblematic of his controlling form of leadership. Johnson

7 Ibid. 36 pushed back against much of the advances progressive faculty accomplished on behalf of women at Howard. He especially bumped heads with Dean of Women Lucy Diggs Slowe who advocated for women’s education at Howard to prepare them for meaningful roles in public life beyond the family and private sphere. Diggs Slowe continuously fought back against Johnson’s views and gender-normative policies that she believed limited what Black women could be and do, not only on campus but in society in general.8 As this chapter demonstrates, by the late 1950s and 1960s, students and their allies at HBCUs were still pushing back against the remnants of the

“missionary paternalist” model of education that embraced conservative bourgeois views on

Black progress and advocated for conservative gender roles. This model of education was connected historically to racial uplift ideology broadly speaking. Not all who resisted this model of education framed it as backwards on gender roles specifically, but many connected the ideological dots between how women students were regulated by detailed codes of conduct and the larger restrictive weight of in loco parentis supported by the model and the core beliefs of racial uplift ideology.

According to Kevin Gaines, racial uplift was an ideological self-help response to legal segregation promoted by educated African Americans. He states:

Against the post-Reconstruction assault on black citizenship and humanity, black ministers, intellectuals, journalists, and reformers sought to refute the view that African Americans were biologically inferior and unassimilable by incorporating “the race” into ostensibly universal but deeply racialized ideological categories of Western progress and civilization.9

8 Treva Lindsey, “Climbing the Hilltop: New Negro Womanhood at Howard University,” Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017).

9 Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), xiv.

Additionally, racial uplift ideology was not a purely Black middle-class project. As Gaines and other historians have shown, white elites were ultimately responsible. No matter the intricate complexities or core guiding principles of Black HBCU administrator and faculty beliefs on

Black progress, they were bound to pleasing white elite donors and white politicians, who as

Gaines demonstrates, “reasserted control over black and white labor by disfranchising blacks and poor whites after the democratic experiment of Reconstruction.”10 One symptom of this power dynamic was the existence of decidedly strict codes of conduct that expected students to conform to traditional expressions of masculinity and femininity.

Since the founding of the institutions Black college students were subjected to codes of conduct that were saturated in the language and rhetoric of racial uplift ideology. Historically, many students came from working-class families and/or were raised in rural communities. The codes of conduct included stringent rules that governed students’ social and political lives and were intended to mold them into models of respectability and steer them away from embodying the class-based stereotypes of poor and working-class Blacks - of their parents and grandparents.

Black college students were warned that they were being observed wherever they were by college authorities, community members, and strangers. Administrations published guides to student living that included reminders about everything from bathing daily to having a friendly attitude. They prompted students to “refrain from loud, boisterous laughter, conversations, or any acts which may be disturbing to those around you.”11 The publications directed them to “Talk in

10 Ibid.

11 North Carolina A&T College Student Handbook, 1958-1960, 60, University Archives, Bluford Library.

38 moderate tones and only to the person or persons at your table,” in the dining hall.12 In North

Carolina A&T’s publication, “An Aid to Gracious Living,” students were also reminded to obey the customs of nationalism in public, being told to, “Remove hat and stand erect when the flag is being lowered or the National Anthem is being played.”13

The ability of Black colleges to transform young working-class Black students into models of respectability served as evidence that the entire race was capable of progression according to the standards initially set forth by elite whites, many of whom ruled over HBCUs themselves as administrators or as philanthropist patrons. Racial uplift ideology argued that elite

Blacks were responsibly deserving of citizenship, a “deeply contradictory” argument and appeal made to white elites that, “trafficked in claims of racial and gender hierarchy,” and

“overshadowed post-emancipation arguments by blacks and whites that posited inalienable rights as the basis for black male citizenship, economic rights, equal protection, and group empowerment.”14 Also, and importantly, as Gaines and other historians have argued, the fact that

Black elites resorted to adopting dominant and highly problematic racial theories as a means for generating a positive image of their own communities, “says more about power, black vulnerability, and the centrality of race in the nation’s political and cultural institutions than it does about the motives or complicity of black elites.”15

12 Ibid., 62.

13 Ibid., 61.

14 Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 81-84.

15 Ibid., xv. 39

Black and white elites who promoted racial uplift ideology downplayed structural inequality as the basis for Black poverty and chose to promote the notion that individual behavior and morals prevented social mobility. They often pointed to gender-specific reasons for such individual behaviors and morals and focused on vice as a central problem inherent in the lives of working-class communities. While at its foundation, racial uplift was a class-oriented project, gender ideologies were essential to its professed success. Gender specific explanations for Black poverty were aimed at reforming working-class Black people to meet the criteria of heteronormative patterns of marriage and family. Stereotypes of Black women, in particular, were sexualized and therefore it was Black women’s bodies that were highly surveilled in order to prevent sexual impropriety. Additionally, training Black women to be good mothers was of central importance to defying racial stereotypes because according to white supremacist logic,

Black mothers were responsible for the immorality of their own families.16 Black colleges served as training grounds for all Black students in the ways of acceptable gender roles and family life.

For Black women, pregnancy before marriage was unacceptable according to racial uplift ideology and Victorian ideals including chastity were to be followed. Extremely strict codes of conduct and rules for socializing on and off campus were implemented in order to mold Black women into respectable ladies prepared to continue the project of racial uplift through the domestic sphere, teaching, and charity work. These rules, established during the founding of

HBCUs, continued well into the second half of the twentieth century. While white institutions

16 See Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race; Cynthia Blair, “I’ve Got to Make My Livin’”: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Linda M. Perkins, “The Impact of the Cult of True Womanhood on the Education of Black Women,” Journal of Social Issues 39, no.3 (1983): 17-28.

40 also implemented strict rules for women and socialized students according to middle-class ideologies, Black institutions did so as a racialized project to counteract the power of white supremacist stereotypes of Black people that were also inherently gendered and saw Black women as particularly over-sexualized beings to be tamed and de-sexualized. Just as Evelyn

Brooks Higginbotham’s Black Baptist women believed in the politics of respectability as a means to instill self-pride and dignity while countering negative stereotypes of Black women,

HBCU administrations aimed to do the same for their students.17

As Nadrea R. Nkoku, Lori D. Patton, Linda Perkins, Marybeth Gasman, and many other scholars have concluded, HBCUs, in their effort to survive in a white supremacist world, perpetuated sexist and racist ideas about Black women in particular.18 As Linda Perkins demonstrates, “although blacks considered the women of their race “women” in the early and mid-nineteenth century, by the end of the century they began to place more emphasis on them being ‘ladies.’”19 In addition, as Perkins also points out, the administrations of Black colleges were overwhelmingly led by whites and eventually educated Black men who had adopted sexist notions of womanhood in an attempt to climb the social ladders of post-Civil War society. For

17 Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent.

18 Nadrea J. Njoku, Malika Butler, and Cameron C. Beatty, “Reimagining the Historically Black College and University (HBCU) Environment: Exposing Race Secrets and the Binding Chains of Respectability and Othermothering,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 30 (7): 783-799; Lori Patton, “Perspectives on Identity, Disclosure, and the Campus Environment Among African American Gay and Bisexual Men at One Historically Black College,” Journal of College Student Development 52, no. 1 (2011): 77-100; Linda M. Perkins, “The Impact of the Cult of True Womanhood on the Education of Black Women,” Journal of Social Issues 39, no.3 (1983): 17-28; Marybeth Gasman, “Historically Black Colleges and Universities and the Issue of Gender,” in Barbara J. Bank, Sara Delamont, and Catherine Marshall, eds., Gender and Education (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing, 2007); Marybeth Gasman, “Swept Under the Rug? A Historiography of Gender and Black Colleges.” American Educational Research Journal 40, no.4 (December 2007): 760-805. 19 Perkins, “The Impact of the Cult of True Womanhood,” 17-28. 41 this reason, it is not surprising that women students were surveilled to a much higher degree at

HBCUs than men. After emancipation African American women were expected to bear the burden of racial uplift through their work as teachers and rulers of the domestic sphere. As

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham argues in her work Righteous Discontent: The Women’s

Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920, rather than simply focusing on structural inequality alone, Black women’s organizations like the Women’s Baptist Convention placed special emphasis on changing individual behavior as a strategy for reform within the Black community. Higginbotham argues Black women were not taking an accommodationist stance against white supremacy, nor were the politics of respectability simple mimicry of white behavioral standards. Yet, the pressures of living in a hostile racist environment shaped this outlook on behavior in a conservative way.

Higginbotham explains that the politics of respectability created and maintained by Black women were subversive at a time when scientific racism ruled. However, despite the usage of respectability as a tool to dignify images of African Americans as worthy of equality, it was a politics that both “reflected and reinforced the hegemonic values of white America, as it simultaneously subverted and transformed the logic of race and gender subordination.”20 Special emphasis was placed on public behavior as a means to challenge racist stereotypes of Black women. As Higginbotham states, “By claiming respectability through their manners and morals, poor Black women boldly asserted the will and agency to define themselves outside the parameters of prevailing racial discourses.”21 The politics of respectability did not disappear as

20 Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 187-88.

21 Ibid., 192

42 the twentieth-century pressed forward, though the actual rules that the politics maintained often changed as the “bridge discourse,” as Higginbotham calls it, that mediated relations between

Black and white reform efforts necessitated shifts.22 This chapter demonstrates that not only was the bridge discourse between Black and white reform efforts shifting, but during the late 1950s and early 1960s the intergenerational discourse between young Black college students and an older generation of college administrators was shifting as well. It was often student resistance to policies that policed students social lives that caused administrations to re-evaluate and re- negotiate the bridge discourse between their efforts and that of white allies, and many were not willing to take the risks associated with this political shift.

Until the late twentieth century, 23 U.S. universities and colleges depended on the legal concept of in loco parentis to justify institutional oversight of student conduct and the policing of individual “character.” Under this interpretation of university power, institutions could suspend, expel, and penalize students without any guarantee of due process and without regard to their

22 Ibid.; It is fitting to utilize Higginbotham’s notion of “bridge discourse” in the case of Bennett College specifically due to the relationship between the United Methodist Church and Bennett’s administration. Of particular relevance is the relationship between the Women’s Home Missionary Society (WHMS) and Bennett’s administration. It was the WHMS that devoted their efforts to transforming the College into a women’s institution in 1926, and thus a bridge discourse existed that mediated the reform visions of Black and white, for young Black women.

23 Some scholars of higher education and the law argue that in loco parentis has been revived on college campuses since the 1980s due to particular demands parents, caregivers, and students make of colleges and universities. See: James J. Szablewicz and Annette Gibbs, "Colleges' Increasing Exposure to Liability: The New In Loco Parentis," Journal of Law & Education 16, no. 4 (Fall 1987): 453-466; Gavin Henning, “Is In Consortio Cum Parentibus the New In Loco Parentis? NASPA Journal 44, no. 3 (September 2007): 538-560; Richard L. Morrill, C. Eric Mount Jr., and Richard A. Fass, “In Loco Parentis Revisited?” Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning 18, no. 1 (July 2010): 34-41.

43 constitutional rights.24 Administrations, supported by the courts, claimed that they and faculty were acting in the place of parents to protect students and maintain institutional standards.

Parents generally supported administrations’ efforts to police students in their place.

Administrators often argued that attending a university was a privilege, not a right, and were allowed to implement rules and regulations that would not be legal options for other institutions.

However, since the late nineteenth century students resisted this notion arguing for their autonomy and taking legal action to protect the rights they believed they deserved. As Scott

Gelber argues, students of both public and private institutions of higher education sued their respective institutions on numerous occasions long before the 1961 landmark case of Dixon v.

Alabama Board of Education – the lawsuit legal scholars consider to be the death knell to in loco parentis. Gelber shows that, “the courts regularly reinstated expelled students during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These cases indicate that the power to act in loco parentis was limited by a countervailing tradition that emphasized college access and compelled institutions to provide due process prior to dismissal.”25 In other words, these early cases set the stage for the cases of the 1960s that brought in loco parentis to its knees. As historian Renee N.

Lansley argues, college women made a significant impact on campus cultures and fights against in loco parentis throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, though their contributions have often been ignored or downplayed in the historiography.26 This chapter builds on this argument,

24 Phillip Lee, “The Curious Life of In Loco Parentis in American Universities,” Higher Education in Review 8, (2011): 66.

25 Scott Gelber, “Expulsion Litigation and the Limits of In Loco Parentis, 1860-1960,” Teachers College Record 116, no.12 (2014): 1.

26 Renee N. Lansley, “College Women or College Girls?: Gender, Sexuality, and In Loco Parentis on Campus,” (Ph.D. diss., The Ohio State University, 2004), 16-17. 44 further developing the analysis of how HBCU students resisted traditional gender norms during this era. For Black women students, their choice to participate in the civil rights movement and their choice to disobey the rules set forth in their student handbooks meant they were grappling with redefining Black womanhood and promoting progressive ideas regarding the roles of Black women both intra-communally and in society in general.

Legal scholar Philip Lee credits the simultaneous occurrences of the sit-in movement and the Dixon v. Alabama case with empowering students to join the fight against segregation.27 In addition to this, I argue that at HBCUs this spirit of resistance was also infused with student motivations to push back against restrictions that regulated their everyday existence: curfew, dress codes, visitation policies, the purview of student government, and pregnancy policies among many other things. While scholars have focused primarily on student attacks on in loco parentis emanating from PWIs, HBCUs were very much a part of the battle to loosen the university’s reigns on student freedom. In fact, the plaintiffs in the leading case on due process for students, the Dixon v. Alabama case, were HBCU students who were expelled from Alabama

State College (now Alabama State University), for participating in sit-in demonstrations in

Montgomery.28

PWI’s, private and public, co-ed and single-sex, often had strict administrations that sought to squelch student resistance and organizing against in loco parentis as well. However, as

Philip Lee contends, in loco parentis at PWIs was not, “melded with Jim Crow policies to

27 Phillip Lee, “The Case of Dixon v. Alabama: From Civil Rights to Students' Rights and Back Again,” Teachers College Record, 116 (2014): 1-18.; Lee, “The Curious Life of In Loco Parentis,” 65-90.

28 Other similar court cases that involved HBCU students were Knight v. State Board of Education (1961) and Hammond v. South Carolina State College (1967).

45 strengthen white supremacist ideology,” at least not in the same way it was at Black colleges.29

White institutions may have faced threats from conservative alumni and donors, but they did not face the racist challenges HBCUs faced. Lee’s work on the Dixon case shows that white supremacists in corporate, state, and local government entities used their political power over colleges and universities to squelch resistance to Jim Crow, in order to further their racial agenda and maintain a social order of inequality. Additionally, white philanthropists and liberal moderate donors who believed in “gradual change,” as they often described it, demanded proof that the HBCUs they supported were not hotbeds of radical politics and “loose morals.”

More was at stake for Black college students than their white counterparts. What was deemed individual bad behavior acted out by white students did not help congeal an ideological basis for white stereotypes. What was deemed improper or socially reckless behavior on the part of individual white college students did not place them as individuals, or as a group, in the same precarious position as Black students in a racist society. To be sure, stereotypes of poor whites existed but they were class-based stereotypes that, to a degree, could be transcended through social mobility and the privileges whiteness delivered. African Americans, no matter their class or educational status, were still forced to confront racist stereotypes that put them economic, political, and physical risks in numerous ways. In addition to the socially and economically damaging effects racial stereotypes had on Black mobility, they were also used as fodder for justifying white supremacist violence.

Black students, especially those living and studying in the Jim Crow South, were at risk of being targeted by violent whites, both physically and sexually. While ultimately white supremacist ideology embedded in the law and customs of the South held more power than

29Lee, “The Case of Dixon v. Alabama, 12. 46

Black respectability, African American organizations and institutions achieved some modicum of political progress by utilizing the imagery of respectability to fight discrimination in the courts and in other spaces of political influence. Though not guaranteed, their reputation could, to a point, protect them if they were assaulted by whites or accused of a crime against a white person.

It was not a full proof strategy, but in many instances, it was believed to be the strategy with the greatest potential given the discriminatory circumstances. Many HBCU administrations had reputations among students for being autocratic; however, this reputation was not rooted in a desire to mimic white standards of behavior. It was often, in addition to serving as a tool for racial uplift, intended to shield students from the very real possibility of dangers that existed outside the gates of their campuses at the hands of whites. In comparison to white women, Black women faced sexual violence that was legitimized through racial stereotypes and historically the law was not on their side as police departments, the courts, and other entities of the state refused to hold white men accountable for horrific acts of sexual violence against them.30

Black and white women college students experienced in loco parentis on U.S. campuses through rules that governed their bodily appearance, physical movement, and social lives. White women were, in many respects, highly surveilled by college administrations and student judiciary bodies. To be sure white women’s student handbooks contained long lists of rules and regulations and a vast amount of detailed protocol for gaining permission to socialize.31 As result

30 For more on white supremacist sexual violence directed at Black women see: Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance – A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Knopf, 2010); Johnetta B. Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003), 107; Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Amistad, 1984).

31 Lansley, “College Women or Girls?”, 376-384. 47 they too participated in the national movement to eliminate in loco parentis as policy at U.S. colleges and universities during the 1960s.32 However, many PWI’s codes of conduct were slightly less restrictive for women than some HBCUs. For example, white women students at the

Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina (WC/UNCG) could obtain blanket written permission from parents to enjoy off-campus visiting and overnight privileges to approved destinations for an entire semester, a privilege many HBCU women had to fight for in the

1960s.33 While they were required to let their dormitory counselor know they were leaving campus for an overnight visit, WC/UNCG students were not required to obtain approval up the chain of command, from the Dean of Students, for each off-campus trip. While the Dean of

Women at many HBCUs could deny or revoke parental requests for their daughter to visit off- campus if she deemed it necessary, parental permissions, at least in writing, were deemed the equivalent of administrative privileges at WC/UNCG, as long as they did not go above and beyond the normal privileges granted. In contrast, the 1958-1959 Tennessee Agricultural and

Industrial College (now Tennessee State University) student handbook stated, “No young woman shall be permitted to spend the night off campus or to visit relatives and friends without written permission from parents or guardians, which in turn is acted upon by the Dean of Women who

32 Ibid.

33 Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina Student Handbook, 1960-61, University of North Carolina at Greensboro Digital Collections, accessed January 14, 2019, http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/Carolinian/id/35658/rec/56; Also, it should be noted that 1960 was the first year African American women graduated from WC. Joanne Smart and Bettye Tillman were the institution’s first Black graduates. The institution became co-educational in 1964 with Black and white men joining the student body. With men students, the institution changed its name to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Therefore, the handbooks I reviewed from WC/UNCG are representative of both primarily white single-sex and co-educational institutions. 48 has the right to refuse or grant permission.” The language of a Dean’s right to deny parental permission did not exist in the WC/UNCG handbooks of the same era.34

Additionally, the sign in and out protocols for women at WC/UNCG were more permissive than many HBCUs. Like HBCUs, the rules at WC/UNCG varied according to student classification, with freshmen being required to gain signatures from dormitory counselors for more off-campus occasions than the rest of the student body. Students gained permission for attending off-campus outings through a permission slip system. Some had to be signed by their residence counselor and others did not. Women at WC/UNCG were not required to sign out for any on-campus functions no matter the time of day and were not required to gain permission for all off-campus activities. Their first semester, freshmen were required to submit counselor- signed permission slips if they were going off campus after 7:30pm or before going on a date off campus at any time. After their first semester they were required to submit signed permission slips only if going on a date off campus after 7:30. Upperclassmen enjoyed the privilege of simply notifying their residence counselor of their plans and were not required to get signed permission for off campus dates or any other off campus excursion that occurred after 7:30pm, with the exception of “Uptown excursions” which no student could make alone without special permission from the dormitory counselor. They could go Uptown in groups, however, without special permission. Curfew was still in place and students were required to adhere to it. Yet, upperclassmen were only required to get signed permission slips when planning overnight or weekend absences, staying in a hotel in Greensboro overnight, swimming at a pool other than the college pool, going horseback riding, or if they (with the exceptions of seniors) were going beyond the vicinity of Greensboro for the day. All students were required to report when they

34 Ibid. 49 were planning an on-campus date but were not required to gain permission through signatures.

Though the protocol for WC students to gain permission to socialize off-campus was extensive and highly detailed with dos and don’ts, these requirements were still less strict than many

HBCUs requirements. Many HBCUs required students to sign in and out for any off-campus occasion and for on-campus destinations after 6:00pm. In the early 1960s WC students were also allowed to ride in cars and seniors were permitted to have a car on campus for their transportation and leisure. The only caveat regarding cars was that students were forbidden from accepting rides from strangers, unless it was a ride to and from church functions. In contrast, several public and private HBCUs forbade women from riding in cars unless they received special permission from the Dean of Women or another administrator. Additionally, they were not allowed to have a car for personal use on their respective campuses during the 1960s and some for many years after.

In addition to women at primarily white institutions being less restricted than Black women, Black men enjoyed a greater freedom of movement and more privileges than Black women at HBCUs. While men were also held to high standards and were punished when they did not meet those standards, they generally had far fewer restrictions than women from the very early years of HBCUs forward. The major difference in men’s and women’s regulations were documented in student handbooks that HBCUs distributed each year. These handbooks were often named things like, “A Guide to Wholesome Living” (Clark College); “The Companion”

(Morehouse College); and “The Art of Living” (Bennett College). The differences between the degree to which men and women were surveilled at HBCUs rested in heteropatriarchal notions of manhood and womanhood. The content of these handbooks was very similar across institutions with rules and regulations governing student life nearly identical in many cases. Additionally, 50 through the early 1970s, the handbooks of co-ed schools often contained separate rules for men and women students.35 These separate rules reveal a double standard regarding what men and women were allowed to do while enrolled at their respective institutions. The handbook sections that outlined rules for men tended to be much shorter than the sections exclusively written for women students. For example: Clark College’s 1958-1959 student handbook contained approximately two pages of rules and regulations specific to men living in the residence halls and over seven pages for women residents.36 Women’s behavior was regulated and scrutinized in many ways that men’s behavior was not. At the two Black women’s colleges, Bennett and

Spelman, rules tended to be even more restrictive.

Comparatively, men at Morehouse College enjoyed more privileges than women at

Spelman and Bennett. As Spelman alumna Ann Ashmore Hudson stated:

As Black women, we not only had to fight for our freedom as a people but we had to fight on campus at the same time [for] basic fundamental freedoms. It was absurd… The guys [at Morehouse] were not as restricted as the [Spelman] women. We were much more restricted than they were. And so we had to fight for freedoms they didn’t.37

35 Separate rules were published for men and women students at primarily white institutions as well. In most cases I studied for this research, at both HBCUs and PWIs rules for men were rarely marked specifically as “men’s rules” in college handbooks prior to the 1970s. Instead, rules that governed men were simply marked as “Student Rules” or with an equivalent phrase. These rules also regulated women, but women were also required to follow additional rules marked as “Women’s Rules,” or with an equivalent phrase.

36 Clark College Student Handbook, 1958-1959, Box 94, Folder 16, James P. Brawley Collection, Robert W. Woodruff Library Archives Research Center, Atlanta University Center.

37 Molly Blank, “Birth of Consciousness: Activism at Spelman College, 1953-1965,” unpublished paper, Tufts University, 1998, 105, Zinn files, American Association of University Professors Archives, George Washington University, quote in Robert Cohen, Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Sit-ins, Civil Rights, and Black Women’s Student Activism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 62-65.

To point out this double standard does not dismiss the extent to which Black college administrations restricted men students as they too were highly regulated in their physical mobility, their dress and personal hygiene, and in their social lives to maintain their image as respectable gentlemen. Two institutions in this study, Fisk University and Tennessee A&I, included statements in the student handbooks asserting that men students were also held responsible for infractions they were caught committing with young women. In a 1957-1958 student handbook, Fisk administrators made it clear that, “When in the company of a woman student, the man is equally responsible for conforming to the University’s regulations.”38

Tennessee A&I’s student handbook from 1958-1959 stated similarly: “Men students shall acquaint themselves with the policies and regulations governing young women. In violation of any regulation, a young man is held equally guilty as the young woman whom he is accompanying.”39 Despite these statements that surely carried some sort of weight when it came to the discipline of young men who were accused of breaking campus codes of conduct, Black women were still under much more scrutiny than men.40

However, the uneven distribution of surveillance along a gender binary is not surprising given the history of the surveillance of Black women’s bodies as sites for racial uplift.41 This double standard was not only found in the Black community. White middle-class standards of

38 Fisk University Student Handbook, 1957-58, 52, Handbook Collection, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library Special Collections and Archives, Fisk University.

39 Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial College Student Handbook, 1958-59, 18, Handbook Collection, Special Collections and Archives, Tennessee State University.

40 At PWIs men students were also given many more privileges than women students.

41 See Cynthia M. Blair, I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the- Century Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

52 behavior were also predicated upon gendered double standards. The difference being that in addition to “refining” what they saw as students in need of refinement, the double standards at

Black institutions were also enforced as a means to challenge white supremacist notions of

African Americans. Despite this strategy being extremely limited in its ability to win power for

Black students, administrators held fast to the traditions and rules that guarded their campuses and students. They were not hesitant to punish students who did not meet the standards set out in student handbooks. As the North Carolina A&T student handbook for 1958-1960 explained:

Any student who manifests unwillingness to conform to the rules and regulations that are prescribed, or that may be prescribed to govern the student body, or any student whose influence or deportment seems detrimental to the best interests of the college will be asked to withdraw from the institution.42

During the late 1950s and early 1960s curfews, off-campus visits and excursions, and co-ed visitation in the dormitories; dress codes and personal hygiene; women students’ permission (or lack of) to ride in automobiles; and marriage and pregnancy regulations consumed a significant portion of the pages of student handbooks at Black colleges. Rarely were rules regarding each of these issues absent from student publications. Black college administrations took these issues very seriously, surveilled their students regularly, and kept meticulous records of their behavior, especially women students, to enforce what they believed was ideal campus citizenship.

During this time, and for many years after, curfew was regulated through a dormitory sign in and out system at every institution included in this study; however, the rules for signing in and out were generally more meticulous for women than for men. For example, during the

1958-1960 school years women students at North Carolina A&T were required to sign in and out for all off-campus activities and for on-campus activities that occurred after 6:00pm. There was

42 NC A&T Student Handbook, 1958-1960. 53 no similar policy published for men students in the handbook. At North Carolina A&T not only were women students given strict curfews, they were also assigned “Bed Times,” according to classification: Freshwomen (10:30pm) Sophomores and Juniors (11:00pm) and Seniors

(11:30pm).43 If an A&T woman student wanted to visit a family or friend in Greensboro, she had to submit written permission from a parent or guardian to the Dean of Women for approval.

Additionally, any hostess of a freshwoman was required to accompany the student to their home in the city and accompany her back to the dormitory where she resided on campus. Men students, no matter their classification, were not required to do any of these things to visit family and friends within the city.44

Other Black colleges included in this study also maintained similar sets of rules for regulating off-campus visits for women. For example, Fisk women had to submit “Parental

Authorization Forms” that designated specific persons whose homes they could visit, automobiles they could ride in, and whether they could travel with student organizations.

Although the paperwork was required and was authorized by a parent or guardian, it did not ultimately guarantee the permissions it outlined. Acting in loco parentis, the Residence

Counselors could eliminate parental permissions if they believed students did not meet the standards of campus citizenship.45 Additionally, when a Fisk woman left campus for approved overnight visits to a family member’s home or other approved homes, she had to fill out a postcard indicating her intended destination and time of leave. This postcard was sent to her

43 Ibid., 35.

44 Ibid.

45 Fisk University Student Handbook, 1963-64, 45-46.

54 parents to notify them of her whereabouts, thus holding her accountable to the College and to parental authority.46 This procedure was also followed at Spelman College.47 In addition to this regulation being a gender-specific one, it was also class inflected, and was clearly meant to police and limit ‘fraternizing’ with non-college locals. At Fisk, during the 1957-1958 school year, men who wished to leave campus or Nashville for an overnight or weekend trip were merely required to notify their Residence Director by registering the address of their intended stay.48 At Clark College men and women were held to similar standards as students at Fisk and

North Carolina A&T. Men students were simply required to “confer with the Dean of Men,” when leaving campus or the city of Atlanta overnight, while women at Clark were only allowed a certain number of off-campus overnight visits per month according to their classification and were also required to submit a letter from their mother or guardian and the hostess they intended to visit.49

Similar to Spelman women’s experiences during the era, women students at Tennessee

A&I were not allowed to spend the night off campus unless they had written permission from a parent and even when parents granted this permission, the Dean of Women had the ultimate authority to grant or deny this request. The Dean of Women had to approve visits to local homes.

She requested actual invitations from hostesses as proof of proposed outings. Even women graduate students at Tennessee A&I were required to gain permission to stay off campus. This

46 Ibid., 47.

47 Spelman Student Handbook, 1961-62, 6.

48 Fisk University Student Handbook, 1957-1958, 52.

49 Clark College Handbook, 1958-59, 24-25.

55 rule was waived for married graduate students and in-service teachers with three or more years’ experience demonstrating that accountability to a husband or career was believed to be a substitute for stricter surveillance by residential living staff. Regardless of marital status though, the leave from campus had to be registered with the residence hall administrator.50 This rule for married women graduate students and in-service teachers during the late 1950s and early 1960s, was similar to the rules that governed off-campus leave for single undergraduate men at most institutions in this study. The sign-in and out procedures for Tennessee A&I were also very similar to the other institutions in this study. Fisk women students had to sign in and out for any event after 6:00pm and for any off-campus event no matter the time of day. They were required to sign back in as soon as they returned from campus, giving the exact time of arrival. Curfew for women was assigned according to classification, and similar to other Black colleges’ there were no published curfews for men though the curfews for women were clearly outlined in great detail.

For example, while the Fisk handbook had no curfew times for men, women were made aware that “Regulations for the current year for each classification shall be posted in each woman student’s room.”51 Each year, the Residence Directors of the women’s dorms consulted with the Dean of Women at Fisk to determine curfews. Quiet hours, study hours, and calling hours (times when men were allowed to visit women in the parlors of the women’s dormitories) were determined by the Residence Directors in consultation with the Residence Council.

Certainly, if students were deemed too immature, administrative authorities would tighten the

50 Tennessee A&I Student Handbook, 1965-1966, 33.

51 Fisk University Student Handbook, 1957-1958, 60.

56 reigns on curfews and other residential living permissions, making it an incentive for students to follow the rules as a group from year to year. Dormitories were often occupied by students of the same classification, making it easier for residential living administrators to keep up with student behavior because all students in their dormitory were held to the same rules according to their classification. This was especially true for women’s dorms; however, students often resisted these rules.

In addition to providing lists of rules, many of the handbooks from this era contained a general statement that outlined the ideal student per the administration’s standards. For example,

Tennessee A&I’s student handbooks from the late 1950s and early 1960s called this statement the “Criteria for Competence in Living at the University.” Beyond academic excellence, this criteria included physical fitness “as evidenced in health habits and participation in suitable sports,” and social fitness, “as evidenced in ability to keep friends, to respect others, poise and manner, social accomplishments, taste in dress, grooming.”52 Similarly, Bennett College handbooks from this time period contained a two page statement called, “The Bennett Girl

Strives to Be.” Included in this statement were things like: Poised: She is well-groomed and appropriately dressed; and she demonstrates poise by her manner, graciousness, and self-control, reinforced by a sense of dignity and worth.”53 These sorts of statements illustrated in words what each HBCU administration believed defined the ideal campus citizen. While some of the characteristics of these images of HBCU perfection were slightly different according to the campus context they represent, the criteria for the ideal student was very similar across HBCU

52 Tennessee A&I Student Handbooks, 1958-1965.

53 “The Bennett Girl Strives to Be,” Player Presidential Papers, Box 12, Folder: Students, Bennett College Archives. 57 campuses as it was formulated through a binary notion of gender and the social norms of middle- class respectability. Staying true to the intent of this imagery, Bennett College has traditionally referred to their idyllic student as the “Bennett Ideal.” The phrase, “The Bennett Ideal,” comes from a song written by alumna Carrie Robinson, class of 1933:

Bennett’s Ideal Is the girl who is real She’s a friend ever loyal and true, In work and in play By her simple way She makes herself known to you

Chorus

If she greets you with a smile, She’s the Bennett Ideal, Always doing things worthwhile, That’s the Bennett Ideal. If she places her cares on the shelf, Thinks of others far more than herself, If from the start She has love in her heart Then she’s the Bennett Ideal.

You’ve heard it said She’s a girl who’s well bred, For her college she’ll stand any test; Her motto is skill, Her creed is good will, And here’s how you know her best;

If she smiles through thick and thin She’s the Bennett Ideal; If she strives wholehearted to win She’s the Bennett Ideal; If she’s honest and willing to share, If she’s eager to do and to dare, Pep and vitality, Sweet personality; She’s the Bennett Ideal54

54 Linda B. Brown, Belles of Liberty: Gender, Bennett College, and the Civil Rights Movement in Greensboro, North Carolina (Greensboro: Women and Wisdom Press, 2013), 26. 58

The lyrics of this song indicate that Bennett women were expected to be both active in their community and “polished.” The institution was not apologetic for its dual mission. As alumna

Linda Brown states:

…by having an “ideal” you have defined a collection of values as representative of your institution. You have a specific philosophical position...undergirding your methods and your aims. And you are saying to all within and without the walls of the institution, that you have an “ideal.” You are not neutral about your values. You are not simply in the business of teaching information alone, but you are deliberately passing on values.55

The Bennett ideal and other campus equivalents are historically rooted in specific expectations of womanhood that were maintained through the policing of Black women’s bodies from postemancipation forward. Stereotypes of Black women proliferated, yet, HBCU administrations chose to fight these stereotypes through the politics of respectability that mandated the performance of a specific kind of feminine womanhood. Many women were unwilling to conform to this notion of womanhood and they faced consequences. Nikki Giovanni was unwilling to put on the performance of a “Fisk Woman.”

In the fall of 1960, Giovanni matriculated into Fisk University and was expelled before the school year was over for not obeying the rules. The Dean of Women, Ann Cheatam, punished Giovanni because she left campus to visit her grandparents for Thanksgiving without gaining the proper permission. Giovanni was particularly annoyed with this type of rule, finding it not only ridiculously stringent but antithetical to what it meant to be an intellectual with a sense of political awareness – what she envisioned college to be about. She also understood that these rules were intended to police students’ behavior and physical mobility to mold them into

55 Ibid., 27-29. 59 the administration’s ideal of respectability. In her work Gemini she writes of not regretting her decision to disobey Fisk’s rules:

I could not/did not adjust to the Fisk social life and it could not/did not adjust to my intellect, so Thanksgiving I rushed home to Grandmother's without the bitchy dean of women's permission and that dean put me on social probation. Which would have worked but I was very much in love and not about to consider her punishment as anything real I should deal with. And the funny thing about that Thanksgiving was that I knew everything would go down just as it did. But I still wouldn't have changed it because Grandmother and Grandpapa would have had dinner alone and I would have had dinner alone and the next Thanksgiving we wouldn't even have him and Grandmother and I would both be alone by ourselves, and the only change would have been that Fisk considered me an ideal student, which means little on a life scale…I left Sunday night and saw the dean Monday morning. She asked where I had been. I said home. She asked if I had permission. I said I didn't need her permission to go home. She said, "Miss Giovanni," in a way I've been hearing all my life, in a way I've heard so long I know I'm on the right track when I hear it, and shook her head. I was "released from the school" February 1 because my "attitudes did not fit those of a Fisk woman."56

Dean Cheatam’s gendered language quoted here by Giovanni, demonstrates that the rules that policed student behavior at Fisk were enforced out of a desire to mold students into a form of middle-class behavior that was informed by and fused with the ideological framework of gender normativity. Proper displays of lady-like behavior were expected as a way to learn and express middle-class status. Part of this expectation involved learning to obey communal expectations.

Giovanni found this expectation to be at best annoying and at worst anti-intellectual and politically conservative. Fortunately, in 1964, Giovanni traveled back to Fisk to find a new Dean of Women in charge, Blanche McConnell Cowan, who quickly grew fond of Giovanni and encouraged her to re-enroll. Giovanni did and among other things, reignited the Fisk Student

56 Nikki Giovanni, Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company,1972), 7-8. 60

Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) chapter and participated in the Fisk Writers

Workshop.57 The type of support Dean Cowan provided Giovanni was reminiscent of the style of mentorship Dean of Women Lucy Diggs Slowe practiced in the 1930s at Howard University.

This leadership style made space for students to take pro-feminist stances that defied conservative gender ideologies at HBCUs, as well as participate in the Black freedom movement in ways that many administrators did not support due to the institutional risks associated with political protest.58

In addition to regulating the daily schedules and overnight off-campus visits of students,

Black colleges often limited the public spaces students could visit to a small number of approved establishments. This was especially true for women students. Fisk University, for example, did not allow women to frequent any business that had a liquor license and neither did North

Carolina A&T.59 Additionally, the 1963-1964 Fisk student handbook stated: “Fisk women, will not visit places of public or private resort where their presence will bring discredit upon themselves and the University.”60 There was no misunderstanding about what “places of resort” the administration found tolerable and decent. In fact, the Fisk administration designated particular businesses of the surrounding neighborhood as places acceptable for women students to frequent without special permission. If a woman patronized these specific locations before

6:00pm, she was not required to sign out of the dormitory, indicating that these establishments

57 Ibid.

58 Lindsey, “Climbing the Hilltop,” Colored No More.

59 Fisk Student Handbook, 1963-64, 45.

60 Ibid.

61 were considered to have an upstanding reputation according to Fisk administrators. These destinations were identified in the handbook to be “in the area from 14th to 21st Avenues, North, between Jefferson and the multiple railroad tracks located at 17th Avenue, North.”61 Similarly

Spelman College students were allowed to frequent three restaurants that were approved by the

College as respectable businesses close by: Paschal, Parmesan, and Frazier’s. Students could patronize these restaurants and the approved Ritz Theater nearby at certain times and in frequencies according to their classification. Freshwomen, of course, were restricted much more with these off-campus excursions and were not allowed to attend as many times per semester as upper-class students. Chaperones and escorts were often required and were determined necessary or unnecessary according to student classifications.

Even some on-campus locations at Black colleges were restricted from students after certain hours as well. These rules were often intended to keep women and men students separated after women’s curfews or they were intended to keep students, particularly women, from congregating in areas that bordered working class neighborhoods surrounding Black colleges. Men at Fisk could not congregate in the Jubilee Oval area of campus, near the women’s dormitory, after dormitory closing hours. To do so put oneself at risk of being arrested or severely disciplined by the administration.62 Similarly, at North Carolina A&T the “north campus area” was off limits to women students after 6:00pm on Saturdays and all day on

Sundays.63 At a 1955 meeting of the Advisory Committee on Student Life at Spelman College,

61 Ibid.

62 Fisk Handbook 1963-64, 43.

63 NC A&T Handbook 1958-1960, 35.

62 members of the committee expressed concerns about students congregating with young men from Morehouse at one of the campus gates after the library closed in the evening. One committee member stated, “this looked very bad as he has observed this situation several evenings when he was going home.” Men were not allowed to escort women back to Spelman dormitories, so they gathered with them outside between campuses in the Atlanta University

Center, lingering and prolonging their evening time together. The committee saw this as “a matter of self-respect,” and debated about whether it would be advantageous to allow young men to escort Spelman students to their dormitory buildings to avoid the scene of students congregating outside. The members of this committee were concerned with students congregating in groups in public and open displays of affection, both deemed inappropriate behavior for Spelman women and students in general.

Spelman women’s visits to the Atlanta University Center library were such a concern that freshmen were forbidden from visiting the library unless permission was granted from the head resident of their dormitory. Faculty members who found it necessary for freshmen to visit the library for course work had to communicate with head residents to make the proper arrangements.64 Many Spelman faculty were simply astonished by this restriction and felt it was ridiculous for college students to not be able to utilize the library to complete the work required of them. This cohort of faculty members included Professor Howard Zinn. He stated:

Other faculty members, as well as myself, brought it up again and again in faculty meeting[s] what we thought was a hinderance to the education of Spelman students: freshmen were not allowed to use the main library of the Atlanta University Center. Cost was cited as a factor, but an underlying reason seemed to be the fear that students would use the library as an opportunity to meet young fellows from Morehouse College. Here was a clear example of how students were

64 Spelman Student Handbook, 1961-62, 6.

intellectually cramped by a policy which put administrative difficulties and puritanical fears above the requirements of a first- rate education.65

In step with the administrative approach at Spelman, the administrators of North Carolina A&T were also concerned with the public appearance of women students congregating with or showing displays of affection with men in public. The 1958-1960 North Carolina A&T student handbook stated, “Young ladies are expected to maintain desirable standards of conduct on the campus. Young ladies do not lounge on the grass or allow the young men to do so. They do not lean upon the young men, or exhibit any evidence of poor social grace harmful to the character of young women.66 Additionally, A&T students were reminded that “People of social grace refrain from intimate expressions of affection in public places.”67 How a “college man” and

“college woman” behaved in the presence of one another on campus was seen as an indicator of their enthusiasm or disregard for the ideals of campus citizenship at Black colleges. To break rules around co-ed socializing was to demonstrate that one did not value the notion of the ideal

Black college student. These administrations were just as concerned (perhaps more concerned) with how students behaved off-campus at popular social, shopping, and dinning venues as well.

Movie theaters, department stores, drug stores and “five and dimes,” dances, and restaurants were all popular businesses and venues for college students to run errands and socialize in the 1950s and 1960s. Students who wished to shop, see a movie, or attend a dance

(usually on campus) were highly surveilled by college authorities to both ensure their safety and to ensure they were behaving in a manner that would not bring shame upon their institution. For

65 Howard Zinn, Letter to Spelman Campus Community, August 1963, Box 151, Folder: Zinn Matter, Albert E. Manley Collection, Spelman College Archives.

66 A&T Student Handbook, 1958-1960, 37.

67 Ibid., 61. 64 example, at North Carolina A&T women could only take a certain number of shopping trips per week according to their classification and they had to shop in groups of two or three through their sophomore year. Freshwomen had to have an additional chaperone with them while they shopped. Women’s permissions to attend movie theaters and restaurants also depended on their classification. If women wanted to attend a dance on campus, they had to be chaperoned and escorted. They were required to arrive at the dance no later than thirty minutes after it began and had to return to their dormitories within thirty minutes after the dance ended. Women could not leave a dance without the permission of their chaperones and were forbidden from loitering with their escorts at the entrance/exit of the event.68 Spelman College required that students be accompanied by another student any time they left campus for any reason excluding classes at other institutions in the Atlanta University Center. Freshmen at Spelman could only shop once a week in groups of two and were required to report to the head resident in their dormitory when they returned. They were also only allowed to attend the Ritz Theatre during certain hours and were allotted a limited number of trips to the Theatre per month, according to their classification.69

Even though students were allowed to frequent off-campus venues for entertainment and shopping, women students were generally not allowed to ride in automobiles to travel to these venues unless special permission was granted by their parents. This rule was not isolated to one campus but was generally the custom for women students at all the institutions included in this study. Fisk University was the most lenient when it came to women riding in cars. Yet still some

Fisk women had to obtain written permission from parents, were only allowed to ride with

68 NC A&T Student Handbook, 1958-1960, 35.

69 Spelman Student Handbook, 1961-62, 6. 65 particular drivers, and only on specific days of the week during certain hours. At Fisk, senior women were allowed to ride in cars at their discretion and junior women could ride in cars on the weekends during certain hours of the day. To take a ride with someone, women had to submit the name of the person they intended to ride with and report their intended destination. Freshwomen and sophomores at Fisk were allowed to ride with adult relatives, Fisk faculty, and the parents of other students if parental permission was granted in writing. All Fisk students were also allowed to ride in licensed taxis “when the occasion demands.”70 There were no published rules about men students riding in cars at Fisk. During this time period, no other institution in this study allowed women of any classification to ride in cars at their discretion or without written parental permission. That permission also had to be approved by the Dean of Women, who acting in loco parentis, could choose to deny the request despite a parent’s written consent. Or, in the case of

Bennett College, permission to ride or drive in cars had to be approved by the President of the institution.

During her tenure at Bennett College, between 1955 and 1966, President Willa B. Player granted few students permission to ride in or drive cars. These cases were notable exceptions to the rules and were generally granted for unusual circumstances. Player approved permission for

Annette Hall, a local student from Greensboro, to drive a car. Her mother wrote directly to Dr.

Player requesting approval for Annette to drive and accepted responsibility for anything that happened while her daughter drove the car. In a letter to Annette’s mother, Serena Hall, Dr.

Player stated:

As you know, it is the policy of the College to have girls use cars only under certain circumstances. Because of the difficulty which you have and because we feel that your daughter is a mature young woman, we are granting her the permission to use the car to transport

70 Fisk Student Handbook, 1957-58, 61. 66

the child to from nursery school, only. This means that we should not expect use of the car for other purposes.71

One year prior, in December 1960, Dr. Player granted student Peggy Bryant permission to ride in a car with a Mrs. Lamb72 who was travelling to Bryant’s home away from Greensboro. Bryant was a married student, making her life circumstances different than most students at Bennett, yet

Bennett did not grant her special permissions simply because she was married. Dr. Player granted permission for her to travel home for the winter holiday in a car, with the condition that

Bryant would provide written permission from either her mother or her mother’s husband. She also cautioned Bryant from making too frequent visits home and asked her “to stipulate the means of travel.”73

HBCU administrations paid special attention to the issue of marriage on their campuses and “Marriage Committees” were common at HBCUs during this time. Consisting of mostly women staff members, these committees oversaw all matters related to students getting married and reported to the Deans (usually the Dean of Women) and President of the colleges directly.

Their job was to ensure that students followed protocol when it came to marriage and report any indiscretion to the administration. Administrations did not favor students getting married while they were enrolled in college; however, they created mandatory procedures about student marriage to regulate the issue instead of banning it outright. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, students at North Carolina A&T were required to obtain written permission from their parents to

71 Willa B. Player, Letter to Serena Hall, September 21, 1961, Player Presidential Papers, Box 7, Folder H, Bennett College Archives.

72 It is unknown who Mrs. Lamb was in relation to Peggy Bryant, her family, or the College.

73 Willa B. Player, Letter to Peggy Bryant, December 5, 1960, Player Personal Papers, Box 12, Folder: Students, Bennett College Archives. 67 marry if they were under twenty-one years old. If they failed to provide written parental permission, they were dismissed from the College. All students who planned to marry, no matter their age or classification, had to report their marriage to the Marriage Committee. The A&T

College Minister was the head of this committee. Students were also responsible for formally announcing their marriages in newspapers according to the student handbook.74 At Clark

College, students were required to report marriages at least ten days prior to the day. Married women at Clark could live in Holmes Hall, a dormitory for senior women, and could “enjoy the privileges granted to second semester senior women.”75 This was one of the very few examples of an institution that made social restriction exceptions for married women students. At Spelman

College students who wished to marry had to notify the President or Dean of Women at least four weeks prior to the wedding date. If students married during the school year without following this protocol, they were required to withdraw from the College. If students married during the summer months while they were away from the College, they had to notify the

College one month before registering for the upcoming school year. These students were then required to undergo a medical examination. The student handbook did not clarify the purpose of this exam; however, given the nature of the requirement it is plausible that it served to either confirm sexual activity post-marriage and/or determine if a student was pregnant before she was allowed to register for classes. Married students were not allowed to live on campus at Spelman but had the opportunity to move into a dormitory at nearby Atlanta University where married students could be accommodated.76

74 North Carolina A&T Student Handbook, 1958-1960, 32.

75 Clark Student Handbook, 1959-1960, 36-37.

76 Spelman Student Handbook, 1960-61, 19. 68

During this era, college administrations worked to curb the sexual lives of students of all races and Black colleges were no exception. Sex outside of marriage was not tolerated and students faced severe punishment if caught in the act. At North Carolina A&T students were warned in their handbook, “The College will not tolerate behavior between sexes which is undignified and unbecoming to college men and women. Any act constituting undue familiarity between sexes will not be tolerated by the institution. Any breach of decent behavior will be considered a matter for severe disciplinary measures.”77 Women students were under heightened levels of surveillance regarding inappropriate sexual behavior. It was often residence hall staff that surveilled women and reported their indiscretions to higher ups. While men were technically held to the same standard, far more students of all genders were punished because of the surveillance of women students.

Beyond sexual acts alone, if a student discovered they were pregnant, they were typically required to withdraw from all institutions included in this study. The timing of withdrawal depended on the particular regulations dictated at each institution. However, in general, pregnant students were not permitted to re-enroll in their institution until a certain amount of time post- partum. Clark College enforced a vague policy that helped administrators maintain the decision- making power in these situations. Clark’s policy stated that pregnant students were required to withdraw at the close of semester that pregnancy was discovered and could readmit within a

“reasonable period” after the birth of the child. It was up to the administration to decide what

“reasonable period” meant, removing the power to make that determination from the student.

Men students who were soon-to-be parents were not required to withdraw from school.

77 NC A&T Student Handbook, 1958-1960, 32. 69

Unmarried women students who discovered they were pregnant were put in a particularly precarious situation. While pregnant married students were shielded from shame via their marital status and allowed to remain enrolled for a certain amount of time, unwed students were often swiftly punished with expulsion. Their parents were notified immediately that they should “send for their daughter.”

At Bennett College unwed students were sent home immediately if it was discovered they were pregnant. In 1959 an unwed student at Bennett learned exactly what it meant to “accept the consequences” when she revealed to her parents and President Player that she was pregnant. The language and tone of the correspondences between Dr. Player, the student’s parents, and the student herself demonstrate just how severe those involved deemed this infraction to be. Only once was the newborn mentioned and never were the words pregnant or pregnancy used to describe the student’s “situation.” In the correspondences between the family and the college president, the student’s pregnancy was always referred to as her “personal situation” or her

“problem.” Identifying her pregnant body as a site of contention, in September 1959, her mother wrote:

Unknowing to her father and I, she had done an unexcusable thing but, being her parents and we love her we have decided to forgive her. Dr. Player, my husband and I wish that with your help and with the wisdom that Jehovah God had endowed you with, we would like for you and the committee to give our daughter another chance.78

On May 24, 1960, Dr. Player replied with a definite solution:

78 Letter from a Parent to Willa B. Player, September 9, 1959, Player Presidential Papers, Box 12, Bennett College Archives. 70

I think the degree could not be released to her in any event until 1963, or as our regulation states after the fourth class has graduated provided she has completed her work successfully.79

In other words, the administration did not allow the student to finish her degree requirements until after all classes present during her matriculation at the College graduated. In this case, the punishment for unwed pregnancy was a three-year separation from the College and a significantly delayed graduation date. Her pregnant body was essentially banned from campus as it was a constant reminder of her failure to live up to the expectations of the Bennett Ideal. After the Player years, unmarried students who found themselves pregnant faced similar consequences.

Dress codes have often been controversial at HBCUs and students have resisted them throughout history. During the 1950s and early 1960s, they were spelled out in great detail in student handbooks at every institution in this study. Dress codes were often enforced through a system of demerits similar to other markers of campus citizenship. Residence Directors reported students to the Deans or President of their respective institution when they repeatedly refused to meet institutional standards regarding dress and appearance outlined in student handbooks.

Students were also graded on their appearance at many institutions and received these grades each term along with their regular academic grades. During this time rules around both women’s and men’s attire were similar across the campuses included in this study. Many students found long lists of attire they were expected to own and wear for specific occasions.80 For example,

North Carolina A&T detailed men’s and women’s clothing for all of the following events, venues, and times of day in student handbooks: Week Daytime (classroom, dining hall, morning

79 Willa B. Player, Letter to a Parent, May 24, 1960, Player Presidential Papers, Box 12, Bennett College Archives.

80 This was also the case at many PWIs during the 1950s and 1960s. See: Lansley, “College Women or Girls?,” 376-384. 71 chapel, library, offices); Tennis Courts; Week Nights (sporting events; concerts, lectures, debates); Calling or Visiting; Off Campus During the Week (daytime and evening); On Campus;

Sundays; Dances; Informal Events; Formal Events; and Semi-Formal events.81 Clearly the administration of A&T found it necessary to direct and monitor students’ personal appearance for any event, no matter how significant or insignificant the occasion.

Women students at Black colleges were rarely allowed to wear pants of any kind and most did not win the fight to wear pants at their discretion until the late 1960s or early 1970s.

Usually if pants were allowed it was during certain hours inside the women’s dormitories or other secluded locations on campus. Women were also required to wear either socks or stockings at all times at most institutions and were forbidden from wearing bandannas, scarves, hair curlers, hats, etc. in the dining hall. Women at North Carolina A&T were informed that,

“Dressing for dinner is a trait of a well-trained College Woman.”82 Spelman women were told:

Young women dress simply, comfortably, and appropriately for all occasions. Simple tailored dresses, skirts, sweaters, or blouses are routine classroom apparel, worn with low-heeled, comfortable shoes, socks, or stockings. Bermuda shorts and/or jeans are worn only on occasions when the activity warrants such attire – never for classroom apparel.83

While the appearance of men was a concern for Black college administrations, much more detail was given regarding the standards of women’s appearance. Staff policed men’s clothing and general appearance mostly when they attended social events and calling hours at women’s dormitories. At Fisk University, men who did not “wear clothing in keeping with the occasion,”

81 NC A&T Student Handbook, 1958-1960, 30-31.

82 Ibid., 36.

83 Spelman Student Handbook, 1960-61, 17. 72 could be asked to leave the event or the calling hours they were attending in the parlors of women’s dormitories.84 Tennessee A&I men students were also held to a similar standard when they attended calling hours. Their policy took things a step further and stated that a residence hall director could deny a young man the privilege of leaving his hall if he was inappropriately dressed.85

Black college administrations were concerned not only with dress codes, but overall personal hygiene and the appearance of bodily cleanliness. Many student handbooks included statements about bathing, wearing deodorant, hair maintenance, and dental hygiene. “Cleanliness begins with your house which is your body. Remember cleanliness promotes attractiveness. If you desire to be attractive, be clean.”86 Additionally, it was often stated that a large wardrobe was not necessary, in fact it was often couched as excessive; however, keeping the wardrobe clean was key.87 It was emphasized that individual cleanliness was not only important, but that group cleanliness was essential as well. In this case, it was young Black college students whose cleanliness was being judged as a group. College administrations knew they were navigating a racist society that already deemed their students unclean and unhealthy. Appearing up to par in public was of utmost importance not only for the protection of individual students and the reputations of Black institutions but was also seen as a tool in the fight for racial equality.

84 Fisk Student Handbook, 1957-58, 52.

85 Tennessee A&I Student Handbook, 1958-59, 32.

86 NC A&T Student Handbook, 1958-1960, 59.

87 Ibid. 73

REDEFINING CAMPUS CITIZENSHIP

Many of the rules and regulations HBCU students resisted during the late 1950s and early

1960s were those that policed their social lives in ways that upheld the beliefs of racial uplift ideology including rules that policed women’s whereabouts and appearance and the class- inflected mandates that sought to extract what was perceived as working-class behaviors from students’ daily lives. Students often rejected the class and gender binary makeovers administrations attempted to force on them. While administrative authorities wrote off many of these acts of resistance as generalized “youth rebellion,” the grievances students expressed reflected a continuation of the historical legacy of student organizing against in loco parentis and the paternalist missionary model of education at HBCUs. The momentum students generated during this time around personal freedoms such as curfews, dress codes, visitation policies, automobile usage, etc., brought about some policy changes at Black colleges. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, this student-led momentum fueled the fight against in loco parentis that was happening nationally on college campuses. Some students organized actions against administrative control of their personal freedoms, while other students defied administrative authority as individuals.

Students at Black colleges used student organizations as an outlet to push their concerns to the forefront of campus politics. Many became active in national and international organizations that represented student interests including the United States National Student

Association (USNSA, also known as NSA) and the World Student Congress, both of which formed in the aftermath of World War II. The NSA’s mission was to:

maintain academic freedom, academic responsibility and student rights; to stimulate and improve student government; to develop better educational standards, facilities and teaching methods; to improve student cultural, social and physical welfare; to promote 74

international understanding and fellowship; to guarantee to all people because of their inherent dignity as individuals, equal rights and possibilities for primary, secondary and higher education regardless of sex, race, religion, political belief or economic circumstances; to foster the recognition of the rights and responsibilities of student to the school, the community, humanity and God, and to preserve the interests and integrity of the government and Constitution of the United States.88

Fisk students attended conferences planned by these organizations that brought university students together from across the world to share their experiences with one another and debate national and world politics.89 Student government was becoming a formally recognized entity at many college campuses across the country, including HBCUs. The emergence of these new forums for student organizing were important to students of all genders, even though the power these organizations possessed was very fragile. This was due to both the newness of the student government bodies and the university administrations’ strong desire to reign in student rebellion against in loco parentis. Black college administrations sought to keep these organizations under their influence and punished student leaders whose visions of student government power conflicted with their own. Students were hopeful that their governing bodies would be granted power to make decisions about their rights and responsibilities as students. They were also nervous that student government associations would fail if they did not operate in a manner that was acceptable to administrations. In 1957, students organized a probationary student government at Spelman College. That year student government leader Pauline Drake wrote an open letter to her Spelman sisters in the Spelman Spotlight:

The success of this year of trial depends on us. Our interest in and co-operation with our student leaders to make our dreams of

88 Milton O.C. Hayes, “NSA Congress – A Challenging Experience at Fisk,” Fisk Forum, October 4, 1963, 5.

89 Theopolis Fair, “Four Attend Student Congress,” Fisk Forum, September 30, 1960, 1,5. 75

student government a reality, regardless of how slow and laborious these efforts may seem, will determine to a large extent whether or not student government will continue next year…I have already told many of our fellow students not to become discouraged because so few changes have been made in those rules and regulations which govern the students in the dormitories and on the campus. To alter in any way any of the patterns of behavior which have been in existence for over seventy-five years is going to take longer than one school term and certainly longer than six weeks. However, we must work patiently and prepare ourselves to accept compromises.90

While fighting for a loosening of the reigns, Drake felt forced to use respectability as a means to achieve privileges. She encouraged her peers to be on their best behavior during this process of testing out student government. She was noticeably fearful that if students were deemed too impatient for change, administrators would not see the value in the organization and end the experiment in student government. Yet some students refused to be quiet during this transitional period of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Several took great individual and collective risks in defying the authority of administrations and risked expulsion and other punishments by speaking out further.

For example, Herschelle Sullivan, the class of 1961 Merrill Scholar and leader in the

Atlanta Student Movement, published an editorial in the Spelman Spotlight in January 1958 that caught the attention of the administration. Sullivan’s creative allegorical piece titled “Cowering

Experience,” was a form of written resistance to the control the college administration wielded over the entire campus, especially students. Using the language of fairy tales, she wrote:

Once upon a time in the country of Atlintio-Georgio, there was a small kingdom of Spielmon which was isolated from the rest of the world. Spielmon was smothered by a tradition curtain. ….at Spielmon it was customary to do things as they had been done in the past. Their ideally democratic government was in reality an

90 Pauline Drake, “Student Government at Spelman,” Spelman Spotlight, November 1957, Spelman Spotlight Collection, Spelman College Archives. 76

oligarchy…...Spielmon’s objective was peace and goodwill...The subjects of Spielmon were, however, discontented with their lot and were eager to find out about the outer world. ….One evening, an inquisitive subject ventured past the night watchman and out of the gate. Our adventurer...encountered a BIG CAT!! Not well-versed in things of this nature, our naïve subject offered the cat some goodies which he carried in his pouch, and attempted to stroke him. This cat, however, did not purr, he ROARED!! Our adventurer had chanced upon a Lion! The lion attached him and he hastened back to Spielmon’s safety. He had indeed gone through a cowering experience. Upon hearing about his adventurous subject’s experience, the ruler hastened to remedy this unfortunate situation. Did he conduct classes on “Living in the Outer World”? NO!!! He put two well-armed watchmen on the gate and increased the punishment for venturing outside the confines of the kingdom. The benevolent ruler then congratulated himself on his wise action.91

Sullivan’s piece rubbed President “benevolent ruler” Albert Manley the wrong way. Manley demanded Sullivan meet with him to discuss the piece. He chastised her for writing it and also scolded the editor of the Spotlight Geneva Evans, for publishing it. Soon after, when Sullivan was awarded a Merrill Scholarship to study abroad, President Manley informed her that he was allowing her to receive the award despite her choice to actively speak out against the college’s rules and regulations.92 Later, in 1963, Sullivan wrote Manley to express disdain for his decision to fire beloved social sciences professor Howard Zinn. Zinn was a vocal advocate for pro- feminist students who spoke out against the confining situation at Spelman and supported the

Atlanta Student Movement. Sullivan stated:

In my sophomore year I am reminded of the threatened expulsion by you because of an editorial written in the college newspaper. You called me into your office in the spring of my junior year to inform me that I had been “tentatively” selected by the faculty committee to study abroad, but that there were some reservations because of

91 Herschelle Sullivan, “Cowering Experience,” Spelman Spotlight, January 1958.

92 Howard Zinn, Letter to Spelman Campus Community. 77

the “bad marks” on my record. You asked me at that time if I would “embarrass Spelman overseas.”93

Though Sullivan was disappointed and disheartened by Manley’s opinion of her, the result could have been worse. Though an allegory, Sullivan’s editorial was rather accurate in its reflection of the power Manley and other HBCU presidents exercised. A few years after Sullivan published

“The Cowering Experience,” during the 1962-1963 school year, resistance to in loco parentis at

Spelman reached a height never seen on the campus. As historian Robert Cohen’s work on

Howard Zinn demonstrates, student activism at Spelman, just like other HBCUs across the

South, spoke to both intracommunal issues of respectability and segregation simultaneously.

Students faced severe consequences on each front. In the same letter to Manley, Sullivan stated in conjunction with her defense of Zinn:

Can we demand that Negro College youth stand up for their civil rights, protest against unjust city ordinances and state laws, make decisions about going to jail that may jeopardize their parents’ jobs, successfully negotiate with city officials, study and travel in Europe without surveillance, and yet not permit them to make constructive criticisms in their college newspapers, distrust them in their social relationships, thwart decision-making in student government councils?94

Spelman students were not alone in their choice to voice opinions about the constraints of the rules that defined their campus culture. Fisk University students were very active in the fight against in loco parentis as well. While students like Nikki Giovanni often fought back through individual acts of resistance, other students published their opinions in the Fisk Forum.

93 Herschelle Sullivan, Letter to Albert Manley, October 26, 1963, Committee A Zinn files, American Association of University Professors Archives, George Washington University, quote in Robert Cohen, Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary, 62-65.

94 Ibid. 78

Ramona Hoage was one of the most outspoken students regularly published in the Fisk

Forum in the early 1960s. In 1963 Hoage penned a piece called, “Now About These Rules.”

Hoage maintained that rules at Fisk were not, “guideposts but rather impediments,” and that “the difference between good and bad taste is not stressed so strongly as the difference between not getting caught and getting caught.” She noted the inflexibility she witnessed on campus with regard to rules. She complained, “Our cafeteria and bookstore close their doors exactly at the designated hours regardless of imperative activities that coincide with them, or what time it is in the rest of Nashville. While I in no way advocate anarchism, I am opposed to such rigid, unaltered regulations.” She critiqued the university administration but also her peers stating, “On the political level, absolute rule and authority are often indicative of an insecure government and unreliable masses” ….at the “university level, an unhappy parallel can be drawn.” Hoage acknowledged student apathy and the inability of some students to handle mature situations.

Yet, in the end she believed the university was irresponsible in developing specific rules that were so unrealistic that students were inevitably forced to break them. She believed there was a balance between restricting students from experiences they were not ready for and allowing them to have more personal freedoms so that they might mature through experience.95 Hoage’s tone illustrated frustration with the confining nature of in loco parentis, but also showed deference to the administrative opinion that students needed to earn gradual freedom. Her complaints paralleled many other less radical students who preached moderation about student privileges but also saw criticisms against specific rules as valid. Similarly, student Glenda Smith wrote in 1964 that students wanted later curfews, the ability to frequent any establishment they desired, and the

95 Ramona Hoage, “Now About These Rules…” Fisk Forum, November 23, 1963, 4, Fisk Forum Collection, Fisk University Archives. 79 removal of any restrictions on drinking and parties. She too acknowledged that she felt many students did not have the maturity to have such liberties without negative consequences, yet she argued that the administration should give students the chance to prove themselves. She stated,

“my plea is for more academic and personal freedom. I am not suggesting that the Bluebook be thrown into the waste basket, merely that a few pages be discarded.”96

Tennessee A&I students spoke out about rules that regulated women specifically. In the

1959-1960 school year, the student government and administration went back and forth over women’s curfews. They, like other women at HBCUs, were growing tired of the double standard they were held to with regard to curfew and were organizing for changes to the policies that dictated when they could come and go. The staff of the student newspaper randomly polled students across campus regarding the issue of women’s curfew. Students polled, men and women, overwhelmingly supported an extension of the hours for women’s curfew. While men students were not as restricted as women, they were not absent from the debate over women’s curfew and in loco parentis in general. Many were undeniably sexist in their views, but others likely saw women’s struggles against paternalistic rules as the bellwether for their own experiences at their schools. Student Leon Clark, a freshman from Miami, Florida, pointed to the fact that many women students were not restricted with as stringent a curfew in their parents’ homes, suggesting that the University should relax the rules. Another male student expressed that if a student was mature enough to attend college, she was mature enough to use her own judgement regarding when she should return to her dorm room at night.97 But HBCU

96 Glenda Smith, “Honorable? – Yes, But Freedom First,” Fisk Forum, March 28, 1964, 2.

97 A.P. Nalls “The Student Speaks,” Tennessee State A&I Meter, January 1960, 8, Meter Collection, Tennessee State University Archives. 80 administrations remained extremely conservative on the matter of curfew and student dissent grew as time passed and their involvement in the civil rights movement strengthened.

In the spring of 1963, the year student organizing against segregated businesses reached a peak in Greensboro, Bennett College students also attempted to organize a campaign that would significantly expand their social privileges. Though they did not use the term to qualify the thing they were fighting against, Bennett women were challenging in loco parentis. While Bennett’s administration, at the time led by Willa B. Player, allowed students to participate in acts of civil disobedience off campus, Bennett students’ physical mobility and social interactions were still, in many ways, conservatively confined to their campus. While they were allowed to put their bodies on the line to fight discriminatory policies and traditions in public spaces, they were not allowed to attend events at many of the very venues they fought to desegregate without a chaperone, were not allowed to ride in cars (especially with men) and were held to a strict curfew in the dormitory halls.

On April 11, 1963, the Bennett College Student Senate Cabinet, headed by Dolores Polk, sent a letter to all Bennett parents asking them to support their effort to force a loosening of the reigns at Bennett. They did this without the knowledge or consent of the college administration.

In a meeting of nearly two hundred students, a unanimous Senate vote was taken to draft and send a letter to parents concerning a lack of personal freedoms at Bennett. Undoubtedly, if they had sought administrative approval for such a letter their request would have been rejected. This letter explained that if their parents trusted them to attend college in the first place, then parents

“should feel confident in their daughter’s ability to handle most situations, particularly those 81 concerning her social life.”98 They requested that parents support their cause by signing and returning a form that outlined three major changes they wished to see at Bennett. They described these changes as follows, in the voice of the parents, and asked them to underline the privileges they wanted their daughter to have:

1. I feel that my daughter should be able to ride in cars with close relative, adult friends, other Bennett students, and young men at any time she wishes to do so. 2. I feel that my daughter should be able to attend, at her discretion, social functions in the community, as long as they are in places not considered off limits by the college. 3. I feel that my daughter should be allowed to visit other campuses and friends in Greensboro and in other cities within a fifty mile radius, without my written permission each time, if I consent to this at the beginning of the school year. This privilege includes overnight visits.99 Very soon after the letters reached parents, the administration began to hear wind of the students’ campaign. They immediately sought to punish those who led this effort, in particular: Dolores

Polk who was the Student Senate President at the time, Barbara Whitfield, Catherine Bounds, Iva

Baker, and Bonita Davis, who also held positions in student government. Player also ensured that student government was reminded of its actual powers in relation to the administration’s authority. Polk’s boldness deeply disturbed President Player who reminded Polk, her comrades, and the entire student body the history and original purpose of student government from an administrative perspective. In a statement to the campus community she said:

Such an action is not only contrary to the constitution of the Student Senate which calls for cooperative endeavor, but the action is regarded by the College administration as exceeding the authority of the Senate, a student org. The student senate is not an autonomous body nor is any other student organization brought into existence by the administration mainly for the purpose of enriching student life within the objectives, the philosophy, the traditions and the standards established by the administration and accepted by you

98 Bennett College Student Senate, Letter to Parents, April 11, 1963, Box N, Folder: Central Committee, Player Personal Collection, Bennett College Archives.

99 Ibid. 82

by virtue of your enrollment as a student here. Student government is a relatively new phenomenon in higher education. It came about because colleges thought it valuable to work with students in maintaining standards, in fostering activities of interest, in improving personal and group behavior. Although working together is rewarding, although securing opinions of parents and graduates among others stimulates thought and evaluation, it is ultimately the responsibility of the administration to establish the policies and standards of the college in accordance with the authority delegated by the Board of Trustees. Although students may and are invited to participate in the regulation of college life, they nor their leaders are to be considered as makers of policy, or wielders of pressure except in the areas of the particular responsibility.100

Player demanded that student government leaders be dealt with firmly because they had overstepped their power and authority according to administrative policies that governed student organizations. Individual students who organized this action faced suspension. However, students across campus were not convinced that severely punishing individual students was the proper response to the situation. They were emboldened by such threats and collectively organized a counter campaign that fought back against President Player and the Central

Committee’s recommendations. They submitted a petition on behalf of student leaders who faced suspension from the College. They stated:

We the undersigned students of Bennett College believing that the principles of a democratic society are learned, developed and affirmed in the colleges of that society, protest the undemocratic practices of Bennett College in suppressing the attempts on the part of students of said college to utilize their rights as individuals to improve the conditions of their community and society in a manner that they see fit so long as it is within the confines of disciplined, legal procedure...The possible suspension involving students who have given their best to this institution involves the type of suppression of which we speak and is unchristian, undemocratic and a serious threat to the potential of this institution and to academic freedom. We feel that when an institution ceases to honor the freedom of an individual to think, formulate opinions,

100 Willa B. Player, Untitled Statement on Student Actions, Player Personal Papers, Box N, Folder: Central Committee, Bennett College Archives. 83

express these opinions and act accordingly – it thereupon defeats its purpose for existing.101

This bold defiance of administrative authority was signed by over three hundred and fifty students – a majority of students enrolled in the College at the time.102 One can imagine that

Player and her administration were taken aback by such a strong declaration of resistance that applied the civil rights discourse Player herself encouraged students to use in their quest to end segregation. The core organizers of this action were summoned to face the Central Committee.

Each student was given a chance to express her thoughts regarding their decision to carry out such a campaign. All five students were interrogated individually and asked to reveal their memory of how the letter to parents came to be. As they faced the committee, some claimed they did not know they were in violation of any rules and were apologetic. Members of the committee read Dolores Polk as detached from the “seriousness of the matter.”103

Despite the petition to save their comrades, a statement of solidarity that clearly reflected the opinion of the vast majority of Bennett students, President Player still considered suspension.

Unclear where she stood on the matter exactly, Dolores Polk, continued to boldly push President

Player to both make a decision and to do it quickly. The meeting where the Central Committee questioned Polk and her comrades left her confused on what was to come. She wrote Player demanding that her status be sent to her in writing so that she could accurately communicate her situation to her parents. Despite the request for her to leave campus Polk wrote:

101 Untitled Student Petition, April 11, 1963, Player Personal Papers, Box N, Folder: Central Committee, Bennett College Archives.

102 Ibid., Petition signatures attached to letter.

103 Central Committee Meeting Minutes, April 29, 1963, Box N, Folder: Central Committee, Player Personal Papers, Bennett College Archives. 84

I am prepared to remain here on the college campus, because I strongly feel that I can not risk leaving without an official written statement regarding my present status or my future status as a student. It was not clearly defined where I stand in the eyes of this institution officially. I need this information for unerring communication with my parents and for future reference.104

According to Dr. Player’s records, this request was denied, and Dolores Polk was forced to leave campus at the start of vacation without knowing her fate. Additionally, the Central Committee, led by Dr. Player, concluded that there was significant evidence that the student leadership was quite immature, that the line of communication between student organizations and the administration should be clarified, and that perhaps it had never dawned on certain student leaders that they were required to clear their effort with the administration. “The record of each girl must be reviewed to determine what should be done for her. They will each be spoken with along the lines of their individual needs as indicated by their personal involvement. The girls could do a self analysis with their response to the records.”105 A review of student organizations was ordered by the Committee. As Player pointed out, student government was a fairly new phenomenon and the administration had what seemed to be a very different understanding of the power student government held.

One school year later, just down the street from Bennett, women students at North

Carolina A& T State College led their own fight against social restrictions. They presented a list of recommendations to President Samuel D. Proctor in January 1964. Among these recommendations was that, “the excessive number of chaperones be curtailed,” and that curfew

104 Dolores Ann Polk, Letter to Willa B. Player, April 20, 1963, Box N, Folder: Central Committee, Player Personal Papers, Bennett College Archives.

105 “Central Committee Minutes,” April 29, 1963, Player Personal Papers, Bennett College Archives. 85 be significantly relaxed. Women students also demanded that they be allowed to ride in automobiles, something that men students were permitted to do at their discretion. They also complained that campus police interfered with co-ed socializing on campus and suggested that the administration restrain them from interfering with, “couples engaged in healthy conversation or any other decent activity on campus.”106 They suggested that the student lounges in the library be made co-ed as well. A committee of administrators and students was formed to review the recommendations.

Student opinions were mixed on the recommended changes and they were divided between supportive and unsupportive of what was referred to as “radical change.” Many students wholeheartedly supported the idea that change was necessary and overdue, while others used historical evidence of how the campus community dealt with students demands in the past as evidence to caution for more gradual change. They questioned the ability of students to responsibly take on more lenient social privileges.107 The male A&T Register editor, Cary P.

Bell, gave a speech at a vespers service on February 23, stating that curfew hours, “are outdated and do encourage dependence upon enforced discipline rather than self-development.” Bell, however, followed this statement up with the question of, “Are we responsible?” He cited evidence from the fall 1963 quarter grade point averages and a perceived lack of interest in campus activities and organizations to suggest that perhaps many students were not responsible enough for new privileges.108 On the contrary, student Eula Battle argued that the rules for

106 “Students Present Resolutions on Rules for Campus Co-Eds,” A&T Register, January 31, 1964, 1,4.

107 Delores Webb, “A&T College in the “Quaint Old Days”,” A&T Register, March 20, 1964, 2.

108 Cary P. Bell, “Are We Responsible?” A&T Register, February 28, 1964, 2; “Student Editor Speaks at Vespers Service,” A&T Register, February 28, 1964, 3. 86 women were, “simply ridiculous,” and “complicated and confusing.”109 What is interesting about this debate is that even though the recommended changes were made by women students for women students, they were often couched as gender-less, universal, “student demands,” by those who argued for balance and/or rejection of the demands. Those who questioned “students” ability to take on more lenient privileges were actually questioning women’s ability to have the same or nearly the same privileges as men on campus.

When A&T women students demanded more privileges in late January, the thought of them gaining social privileges seemed to ignite anxieties among some of their male peers. One week after women students presented their ideas for change to President Proctor, Cary Bell also published an editorial called, “A Man’s World,” and asked, “Is A&T College slowly but surely losing its distinction of being a man’s world?”110 The answer, according to Bell’s evidence seemed to be, yes. The editorial reported that while men students still outnumbered women significantly, there had recently been a slight decrease in the number of men enrolled. The registrar’s office released a report that indicated that 41 fewer men enrolled for the winter 1964 quarter than the previous quarter while only twelve fewer women enrolled.111 This clearly alarmed the editor, who in a cautionary tone reported, “Even in the course of one quarter it decreased .02, Not a large decrease, but start adding those up and see how long it will tak[e].”

The editor also noted that women students, “have more than their share on the honor rolls

(unfortunately on the failing lists too) and more and more of them in other leadership roles.” A woman student was running for the position of student council president and the editor noted:

109 Eula Battle, Letter to the Editor, A&T Register, April 24, 1964, 2.

110 Cary Bell, “A Man’s World,” February 7, 1964, 2.

111 Ibid. 87

While the candidacy of Senator Margaret Chase Smith for the Presidency might amuse some, A&T males might look at it as writing on the wall. At the present rate, the time won’t be long before a women [sic] will again be president of the Student Council, editor of the REGISTER, and editor of the AYANTEE. Perhaps the only segment of which can breathe safely is the football team. And who knows? Perhaps even it might have to worry.112

The tongue and cheek tone and anxious performance of women as a threat garnered a response from Bennett College student Dorothy Wilkerson, who submitted a letter to the editor stating:

Taking into consideration that A&T is a co-educational institution I fail to see the importance of a majority of males or females. The decrease in the ratio of men to women indicates the desire of more women to receive higher education. Too often at a co-educational institution the full potential of women in leadership roles is smothered by apparent (?) male superiority. I should hope your senior class is none the worse by having a female president. I’m sure the student body of A&T chooses persons to fill the positions of president of the Student Council, editor of the Register, and editor of the Ayantee by their qualifications and willingness to get the job done, and not on the basis of tradition or sex of the individual. If the female members of the student body are qualified and willing to work, their sex should not be held against them. Surely we would invade the football field, but, then what would the male have? Today more and more facts indicate THIS IS A WOMAN’S WORLD?”113

In the end, women at A&T were successful in winning several of their demands and were excited to return to campus in the fall of 1964 with the new privileges set in place.114 Instead, they were shocked and disappointed when they returned to campus in the fall to find new, more rigid rules and regulations printed in their Residence Hall Manuals that were not in place before.

Students immediately organized a ten-woman delegation to confront the Dean of Women and

112 Ibid.

113 Dorothy Wilkerson, “A Woman’s World?,” A&T Register, March 20,1964, 2.

114 Teresa Jo Styles and Valerie Nieman, Mens Et Manus: A Pictorial History of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (Brookfield, Missouri: Donning Company Publishers, 2015), 124. 88 demanded an explanation. When women students won concessions to their demands in the spring of 1964, according to the A&T Register, students were told that changing these sorts of regulations required the approval of numerous individuals and, “students were informed upon the passage of these rules that in order for any changes or additions to be made, the change or addition would have to be through the same channels as the previous rules.”115 In other words, students were assured that their wins could not be undone with the whip of a pen or two, or because an individual administrator deemed it necessary. However, this promise was broken.

The organizing women did at A&T to secure what they believed were well-deserved privileges were hard won. A reporter for the A&T Register referred to them as, “strenuous efforts on the parts of many people.”116 Women students like Gloria Brooks expressed outrage and questioned the process for the passage of such regulations. They wanted to know who, what authority, approved these restrictions that among other things required women students to obtain a permission slip to attend on campus events, “which she was required to pay for at the beginning of the quarter” through student fees.117 Ten junior and senior students took the issue to the administration and met with the Dean of Women to bring forth a formal complaint. They asked about new rules that required women students to take “official leaves” when absent from the residence hall for more than one hour for social occasions, on or off campus. They also asked about a new section published in the handbook that stated women students were not allowed to take evening leaves lasting more than three hours without special permission. These rules were not only more strict than previous years, they were flagrant dismissals of the more lenient rules

115 “It Couldn’t Be Done,” A&T Register, September 25, 1964, 2.

116 Ibid.

117 Gloria Brooks, Letter to Editor, A&T Register, September 25, 1964, 2. 89 students had won in their negotiations during the previous school year. Since their negotiations, the College had hired a new President, Dr. Lewis C. Dowdy, and a new Dean of Students, J.E.

Dean. This change in leadership could explain the change in rules. However, A&T women were unwilling to accept anything less than what they had accepted the previous year regarding social privileges. By late September, they had won their privileges back. A Register editorial headline proclaimed, “Reactivated Regulations.” The editorial board proclaimed, “Today’s student body is fortunate to have some freedom of expression, along with a communication’s line which we hope, administrators will keep open and one which students will use.”118

As subsequent chapters illustrate, Black women students’ participation in the fight against in loco parentis continued at HBCUs throughout the next few decades. In seeking to undermine and protest what they believed were unduly restrictive, anti-intellectual, and paternalistic rules rooted in dated philosophies on what a Black woman could be and do, their resistance was central to the evolving character of student unrest that strengthened over the course of the 1960s. They participated in the Black Student Movement that rose to its height between 1968 and 1969, and as Black women their unique demands reflected both the rise of

Black Power politics and the coming of the women’s liberation movement.

Additionally, and as stated earlier, while these students ramped up organizing to destroy

Jim Crowism, many of them came into conflict with administrations at Black colleges for both their approach to and participation in civil rights organizing and for their critiques of the missionary paternalist model of education. As the next chapter reveals, the model of education embraced by HBCU administrations paralleled the model of organizing many prominent civil rights organizations utilized. Both were strategically drenched in respectability politics in an

118 “Reactivated Regulations,” A&T Register, October 2, 1964, 2. 90 effort to minimize the blow of white supremacy. The paternalistic ethos of HBCUs made an indelible mark on students’ organizing strategies. The next chapter reveals the impact of Bennett

College women on the student movement that developed in 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Much of the story of women’s involvement in this movement has been pushed to the sidelines of mainstream narratives of history. The politics of gender that influenced how they participated in the movement were enveloped in notions of respectable womanhood and traditional notions of femininity and masculinity. These politics and the local and national project of commemorating the 1960s sit-ins that continued to unfold decades after, created the perfect storm for the near erasure of Bennett College women from the narrative of the Greensboro sit-ins despite their centrality to developing and sustaining that movement.

III. “SEGREGATION…DIMINISHES OUR STATURE AS WOMEN”: BENNETT COLLEGE STUDENTS AND GREENSBORO’S BLACK FREEDOM STRUGGLE, 1957-1960.

Historians have constructed a narrative about the origins of the Greensboro sit-ins of

1960—an iconic event, credited with galvanizing Black students to rise up against Jim Crow— that leaves out crucial contributions of Black women. Though there were similar actions that took place prior, across the South, the popular narrative identifies the start of the movement as

February 1, 1960, when four young men from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical

College, now known as North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University (NC A&T), took seats at the local Woolworth’s lunch counter in defiance of segregation. Additionally, most histories recall that this action was not planned or affiliated with any prior political commitment or organization, but rather as an action that was spontaneous and merely talked through the night before. The first major historical study of the sit-ins described the four young men as, “typical southern black students of the time, politically unsophisticated and socially conventional.”1

However, members of the Bennett College community, a small historically Black college for women that sits within a two minute walk from North Carolina A&T, offer a very different account that challenges the notion that Ezell Blair, Jr. (Jibreel Khazan), Franklin McCain, Joseph

McNeil, and David Richmond were acting outside of any formally organized effort. In fact, many affiliated with Bennett College claim that Bennett women were the first proponents of local sit-ins in Greensboro, having met in the fall of 1959 to plot their actions. This chapter utilizes previously unexamined archival sources to reconcile these two competing narratives.

1 Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 9. 92

Even though no known written sources substantiate the oral history claims that Bennett women planned a sit-in before February 1, their active organizing history prior to this now famous day set the stage for the sit-in movement, no matter who planned the February 1, 1960 action. By extension they had a significant influence on the southern student movement that propelled the fight against segregation. Bennett women’s contributions to the larger movement for civil rights should be understood as political labor that spanned years, involved a variety of tactics they inherited from other politically active Black women who came before them, and sustained the local struggle throughout its entirety. This chapter illustrates how Bennett women’s political labor was marginalized in both the organizing of the late 1950s and early 1960s and in the historical narratives generated through the present day. I argue that acknowledging their political labor matters because doing so alters the traditional timeline of the southern student movement; adds to the historiography on gender and women’s roles in the civil rights movement; provides a strong example of a link in the genealogical chain of Black women’s politics; and is a rare example of an HBCU administration that fully supported student organizing against segregation despite the financial and political risks of doing so.

In 1958 Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at Bennett College. Retaliatory violence for welcoming King was a real possibility and made it difficult for the event organizing committee to convince a local institution to host the event. Despite the risks, Bennett’s President Dr. Willa

B. Player opened the doors of Annie Merner Pfeiffer Chapel to King and his comrades. “This is a liberal arts school where freedom rings,” she boldly declared, “so Martin Luther King can speak here.”2 Player’s choice to welcome King to campus sent a message to students and the local

2 Linda Brown, The Long Walk: The Story of The Presidency of Willa B. Player at Bennett College (Danville, VA: McCain Printing Company, Inc., 1998), 167.

93 community - that she was a politicized woman who modeled what it meant to embrace Black activism despite her position as a college administrator. She also happened to be the first Black woman to serve as President of a four year accredited institution of higher education. King’s visit to Bennett, while surely inspirational, was not the spark that inspired Bennett women to become organizers against segregation for the first time. Instead, the event served as a public announcement or reminder of sorts that Bennett College was a safe space for civil rights organizing and that the institution engaged students around the importance of such work. As

Jelani Favors writes, these actions of the civil rights era at Bennett and other Black colleges,

“were not anomalies that instantaneously developed overnight. They were the by-products and legacies of racialized spaces that emboldened black youth to think of themselves as powerful change agents within a larger society that devalued and dismissed their contributions.”3 Bennett students organized numerous political actions, demonstrations, and events prior to King’s visit, but many of these are not fully incorporated into the historiography of the Greensboro movement. Two examples that exemplify Bennett women’s commitment to challenging segregation occurred in 1937 and 1957. Both targeted segregated theatres in Greensboro.

In 1937 Bennett students organized pickets to challenge theater owners who censored film scenes that contained African American characters as equals to whites. Led by Francis

Jones, the daughter of Bennett president David Dallas Jones, students maintained a boycott of local theaters for several months until film studios put pressure on theater owners and forced them to cease this practice. Bennett women’s efforts were successful although theatre owners

3 Jelani M. Favors, “Race Women: New Negro Politics and the Flowering of Radicalism at Bennett College, 1900-1945,” The North Carolina Historical Review 94, no.4 (October 2017): 393.

94 conceded their loss as quietly as possible so not to damage business any further.4 Twenty years later, in the spring 1957 Bennett students organized a boycott of the segregation policy at the

Carolina Theatre. This effort did not succeed in desegregating the theatre; however, Bennett women honed their skills and rallied the community to support their effort to challenge segregation with this action. The momentum they built propelled them into the 1960s as they continued to target segregated public accommodations around the city.

In April 1957 an interracial group of ministers attended a screening of the film The Ten

Commandments. Reverend Melvin C. Swan, a local African American minister, was a member of this group. Swan attempted to sit in the white-only section of the theater with his fellow ministers but was denied entry. Bennett students caught word of what happened to Swan, and several were very upset by the incident. They wanted to take collective action and so they reported the incident to the experienced organizer and faculty member Edwin Edmunds.

Edmunds was a fairly new faculty member at Bennett who played a significant role in local

Black organizing for several years to come. Edmunds recommended the students consult with

Dr. Player regarding any potential plans for action. Dr. Player, being the supportive yet cautious mentor she was, advised the concerned and eager students to “feel out student opinion” about the potential for an organized effort to challenge the policy of the theatre. Additionally, she recommended they speak to young men students from NC A&T about the possibility of refraining from attending the theatre in support of their effort. She also directed them to contact

4 Brown, The Long Walk, 160-161; Jelani M. Favors, “Race Women,”: 404-408; “Meeting of Theater Owners Opens Today,” Greensboro Daily News, December 5, 1937; “Federal Regulation of Movies Opposed,” Greensboro Daily News, December 7, 1937; “Hill Addresses Theater Group,” Greensboro Record, December 7, 1937; “Resolution Adopted by Theater Owners,” Greensboro Daily News, December 8, 1937; Lorraine Ahearn, “’37 Boycott Was Ahead of Its Time,” Greensboro News and Record, February 4, 1994.

95 ministers in the community to gage their interest in such a cause. Before they knew it, students

Grace Dungee, Paula Edmunds, Ann Stewart, Delores Tonkins, Sonja Weldon, Yvonne Griffin,

Wilhemina Bundy, Janice Robinson, Joan Jenkins, and Sonja Louden were planning a boycott.6

Bennett students did as Dr. Player instructed and secured considerable community support for their effort. NC A&T students, local congregations, and the vast majority of their

Bennett sisters pledged to participate in a boycott of the Carolina Theatre. Bennett students utilized their standing in the community as Bennett women to engage with local church congregations. Their reputation preceded them in the community surrounding their campus.

They were regarded as respectable young women who attended an institution of Christian morals and high standards of behavior for women. The community characterized them as “ladies.” As such, they framed their own experiences of segregation in gendered and religious terms:

It is our purpose to develop within ourselves a greater sense of moral worth and human dignity by refusing to pay for humiliation and by refusing to accept second-class citizenship through attending segregated theaters. We believe that segregation in any form is a direct violation of Christian principles and diminishes our stature as women.7

They evoked Christianity, nodding to the fact that a group of ministers could not even attend a screening of a religious film together without Black members of the group facing discrimination.

They also leaned on their knowledge of Bennett as an institution that placed a special emphasis on respectable behavior, a perfectly coiffed feminine aesthetic, and an educational model that

6 Central Committee Meeting Minutes, April 17, 1957, Box 16, Folder: Central Committee, Willa B. Player Presidential Papers, Bennett College Archives.

7 Bennett Students’ Speech Given to Greensboro’s Church Congregations, April 1957, Box 16, Folder: Central Committee File, Willa B. Player Presidential Papers, Bennett College Archives, Greensboro, NC. 96 was deeply connected to the communal expectations of Black women as “uplifters” of their race to couch themselves as deserving of respect. They experienced segregation as a slap in the face to their accomplishments and their status within their community as women. But their usage of the feminine tropes of respectable Black womanhood did not indicate they were completely sold on the idea of exclusively being “ladies.” As the previous chapter illustrates, conversely, many students also saw codes of conduct that surveilled them on campus as entangled with the rhetoric of segregation. Women students especially believed the rules they were forced to abide by indicated administrators had absorbed racist stereotypes about young Black women and saw them as in need of molding.

In addition to assessing community support, Dr. Player had other advice for her students.

Though this campaign was indeed a boycott, she insisted that it not be labeled as such to protect students and the College. The committee decided to portray the effort as many similar efforts were categorized, as, “a passive Christian movement.”8 Most notably, Dr. Player emphasized the role Bennett women would play as leaders of this campaign. While many students envisioned the effort as a collective one with the labor and strategy shared among Black students and church people across the city, Dr. Player insisted that students see themselves as the leaders of this campaign because the community would in fact see them as such. “You are the leaders,” she replied to their concerns. “You must have something with which to go to the community.”9

Despite not identifying, many years later, any particular group or individual as the leader of the local movement and repeatedly downplaying her own leadership and impact on desegregation

8 Central Committee Meeting Minutes, April 17, 1957.

9 Ibid.

97 efforts, Player empowered her students to see themselves as worthy of and qualified for an identity as leaders in the movement and the community. She found it natural for Bennett women to lead and organize political activities given the type of education they were receiving at

Bennett. Regarding her students’ involvement in the sit-ins, she stated:

So when the protest came along, students were ready, you see. They weren’t afraid, and they weren’t backward about what to say to community people, or they weren’t unaccustomed to expressing their ideas to whites, you know. And so it was a kind of natural thing for them to join with the [North Carolina] A&T [State University] students in expressing what they had been told and learned in the classroom all the time, that this is the way that you are supposed to do as a citizen, you know. And so they were simply carrying out what they had learned.10

Dr. Player had confidence in her students’ abilities to engage in activism and expected their experience at Bennett to prepare them to continue to engage in community-based work when they left Bennett. While she still insisted that students live on campus in accordance to strict rules that governed their behavior and social lives, she gave them permission to be political when it came to segregation. While Bennett women could protest downtown, they were not allowed to stay out late at the venues they fought to desegregate, and they could not ride in a car with friends to get to the venues when they could attend. This may seem contradictory on the surface, but Player’s actions indicate she viewed the politicization of young Black women at Bennett as aligned with bourgeois gender roles, not incompatible. Player continually used nuanced language

10 Willa B. Player, interview by William Chafe, December 2, 1977, Henry Chafe Oral History Collection, accessed February 19, 2017, 2016.http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/CivilRights/id/764/rec/7.

98 to talk about their roles in the sit-ins and movement at large, while also deploying traditional gender tropes in ways that sought to transcend limitations set upon Black women’s possibilities.

Most Bennett students were not locals and this fact complicated their 1957 boycott plans.

Members of the Central Committee were concerned that students were scheduled to leave campus soon for the summer months. On April 17, 1957 it was recorded that:

The students expressed concern about the shortness of the time in which they would have to work. Dr. Player explained to them, in their first meeting with her, that we would have to disregard time, and we would have to decide whether we wanted to adopt this as a cause. It takes time to get community support. We could try to get our own students to stay away from segregated theaters. We must realize that we have only a little longer before school closes.11

Dr. Player and her students wanted to make sure that they stayed true to their commitment to their community. They wanted to act but knew that they must carefully consider all the variables as the leaders of such a campaign so not to leave their community without the support it needed to sustain the effort. Despite all their efforts, the Carolina Theatre remained segregated.

Perhaps this lack of success accounts for the scholarly neglect of this activist campaign, nonetheless it was a crucial stepping stone on the road to the lunch counter sit-ins. This 1957 campaign functioned as a moment of organizing practice, a warming up for the massive student movement that rose locally and then nationally in 1960 at lunch-counters across the South. Many

Bennett women who sat-in during 1960 and who continued to organize through the height of the

Greensboro movement in the years after cut their political teeth in the spring of 1957. So too did

NC A&T students and local community people who agreed to join Bennett students in their efforts. After 1960, the campus continued to be a space where various activist strategies for overthrowing Jim Crow were developed and turned into action. At the center of it all was Willa

11 Central Committee Meeting Minutes, April 17, 1957. 99

B. Player, guiding her students and ensuring that their actions were well-planned and thoughtfully carried out. While the exact nature of Bennett students’ planning roles in the

February sit-ins is unclear, they continued to hone their organizing skills. Dr. Player’s directive,

“you are the leaders,” clearly made a deep impression. That year, while still committed to downtown protests, they planned and successfully orchestrated a voter registration drive that had unprecedented results and set a standard for similar campaigns to come.

Early in 1959 the Homemaking Institute organizing committee decided that voting would be the theme of the 1960 Homemaking Institute at Bennett. These annual occasions welcomed well-known speakers to campus to give lectures on themes that ranged from “The Veteran

Returns to His Family,” (1945 Institute) to more abstract concerns like “Understanding Myself” and “Relating Myself to Others,” (1957 Institute).12 They started in 1927 soon after Bennett became a women’s college, and each Homemaking Institute placed a particular emphasis on the role of women in family and home life and in broader society. HBCU educators and administrators, representatives of the United Methodist Church, members of the Board of

Trustees, and civil rights leaders often served as guest speakers. Bennett’s campus was the site of workshops, panels, and interactive activities for an entire week. The organizers also designed this event to engage Greensboro’s wider Black community and white allies, encouraging people to come to campus for seminars, workshops and lectures on a variety of topics that focused on the home and community. The event challenged what Dr. Player called, “the separation of town and

12 “Bennett College Homemaking Institute Scrapbook,” accessed February 20, 2016, http://library.digitalnc.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/ncmemory/id/14149/rec/8; “Homemaking Institute Set: Dr. Mays to Speak At First Session,” The Bennett Banner, March 1957: 1.

100 gown.”13 As chapter one demonstrates, HBCU educational models called for students to behave in a certain manner and engage with the community for the purpose of “racial uplift.” As women,

Bennett students were expected to adhere to gender roles that were intended to mold them into images of respectability and serve their efforts to be socially mobile. Their success was then to be linked with their wider communities in service to the race. This had been the tradition since the Progressive Era.14

Local newspapers barely covered Operation Doorknock, but the impact was most certainly felt in the community. One can imagine Bennett students speaking to residents about the systems of racial and economic inequality they bore the brunt of, while encouraging them to register to vote. Or that they connected the demonstrations happening downtown with the conditions of the seventh precinct in conversations with their neighbors. The area was a mostly working-class Black community that bordered the College and NC A&T on Greensboro’s east side. Out of 2,700 eligible residents, only 736 in precinct seven were registered to vote.15 In the first three nights, Bennett students registered over one thousand new voters. To ensure that people received accurate information regarding registration and voting, students went door to door educating potential voters on the registration process and then directed them to the Ray

13 Willa B. Player, interview by William Chafe, December 2, 1977.

14 For more info on women’s roles in racial uplift, see: Stephanie J. Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of Chapel Hill Press, 1996).

15 Dorothy Ann Benjamin, “Part of Plight of Negro Laid to Poor Voting,” The Greensboro Record, April 4, 1960; “1,000 New Voters Put on Books in Greensboro, N.C.,” Atlanta Daily World, April 16, 1960.

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Warren Homes and Windsor Community Center to register. The organizers carefully selected these locations as registration sites because they were familiar to the residents of precinct seven and centrally located.16 Members of the Bennett community and other recruited volunteers met potential voters when they arrived at the registration sites and guided them through the process of voter registration. Interest was so high that the organizers extended the campaign dates in order to accommodate the large number of community members who stood in line to register to vote, many for the first time.

Some did recognize the mass impact of the voter registration campaign and just how controversial such organizing could be at that time, especially for young Black women. Civil rights activist and educator Septima Clark congratulated their efforts in a letter to Dr. Player.17

At the closing ceremony of Operation Doorknock, Dr. Benjamin Mays, President of Bennett’s brother institution Morehouse College, praised students for their efforts and couched their political labor as a Christian obligation, comparing their work to that of Jesus himself. Mays stated, “some people question whether Jesus was ahead of his time or whether the time was ripe for Him to do what He did. The time is always right to cry out against wrong. No man is ahead of his time.”18 In other words, Mays felt that by transforming the annual Homemaking Institute into a voter registration campaign, Bennett women were ahead of their time despite any criticism they may have faced. Mays’ characterization of Bennett women’s actions as rooted in Christian obligation parallels Bennett students’1957 characterization of segregation as “a direct violation

16 Willa B. Player, interview by William Chafe, December 2, 1977.

17 Septima Clark, Letter to Willa Player, April 26, 1960, Box 7, Folder: H, Player Presidential Papers, Bennett College Archives.

18 “Dr. B.E. Mays Is Speaker At Bennett,” Greensboro Daily News, April 11, 1960: A9. 102 of Christian principles.” Interestingly, Mays expressed similar sentiments about his mentee,

Martin Luther King, Jr., at King’s funeral in 1968. In the eulogy Mays declared, “No! He was not ahead of his time. No man is ahead of his time. Every man is within his star, each in his time.

Each man must respond to the call of God in his lifetime and not in somebody else’s time.”19

Though Black voting was not exactly a rarity in Greensboro as it was in more rural places in the

South, Operation Doorknock managed to significantly expand the number of working-class

Black voters just in time for the 1960 elections. As William Chafe demonstrates in Civilities and

Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom, despite potential backlash, African Americans in Greensboro made registering to vote a priority in the 1920s and

1930s.20 Not only did they vote, but unlike many other southern cities, African Americans in

Greensboro also ran for local office from the 1930s onward and led voter registration campaigns in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1951, efforts to register Black voters resulted in the successful election of Dr. William Hampton, the first Black Greensboro city council member.21

Chafe’s narrative highlights the important contributions of Black male leaders such as

Randolph Blackwell (a local organizer), Hobart Jarrett (a professor at Bennett), and William

Hampton (President of the Greensboro Citizens Association – GCA) as the driving forces behind

Operation Doorknock and the long history of Black voter registration in Greensboro.22 While

19 Bates College, “April 1968: Benjamin Mays ’20 Delivers Final Eulogy for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.,” accessed May 22, 2017, http://www.bates.edu/150- years/months/april/benjamin-mays-king-eulogy/.

20 William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 24.

21 Ibid., 27.

22 Ibid., 25-27. 103 these men, in particular Hobart Jarrett, were most certainly instrumental in motivating Black

Greensboroans to register to vote during Operation Doorknock, their contributions are only part of the story and serve as an invitation to rethink the youth phase of the Greensboro movement, especially leading up to and immediately after the sit-ins. It was no doubt the political labor of

Bennett women, both students and employees, that drove the registration campaign to its success in 1960.

The college embraced a community-driven educational model that encouraged students and faculty to organize campaigns like Operation Doorknock. This model was a defining feature of Bennett’s culture. Regarding this model of education, Dr. Player remarked:

….in terms of the philosophy of the school, we were not a college that imitated, that wanted to be a Chicago University [sic- University of Chicago] or a Vassar [College] or a Holyoke. We weren’t after that. What we were really after was a functional college where the students who came would be able to go back to their communities. So we had this community orientation from the very beginning, you know, and fanned out into the community to improve the homes, to improve- and this worked all up to voting, you see. And so this is how the students were comfortable moving out in the community, and so there was this community connection.23

Bennett students learned that earning the trust and respect of the local Black community was imperative and their alma mater taught them to return to their own communities with skills they honed at Bennett, to improve the lives of their people. Dr. Player was committed to this notion and took pride in an educational model that embraced interaction with the community, thus the model of Bennett’s Homemaking Institutes. This model was rooted in Black women’s traditions that dated back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

23 Willa B. Player, interview by William Chafe. 104

During the Progressive Era women spearheaded the Black church’s mass efforts to engage with Black social and political life. The church was in many respects, the center of southern Black communities and Black women served as the connection between the church and their respective communities. Church and club women raised money for food and other resources for the poor, the establishment of schools and institutions for the elderly, and many services that provided basic needs in Black communities. As Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham argues in

Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920:

women’s efforts were valiant attempts to navigate their people through the stifling and dangerous obstacle course of American racism…. [the women’s movement] gave to Black women an individual and group pride that resisted ideologies and institutions upholding gender subordination.24

Bennett College, as a Black women’s institution, worked in this tradition and the annual

Homemaking Institutes enabled Black women to both assert their power as women and provide a service to their community. This communal philosophy also drove the 1957 boycott into existence.

Operation Doorknock of 1960 was not an offspring of the sit-in movement. The organizing committee selected the theme of voter registration in 1959. Additionally, while politically active men are often credited with organizing the campaign, Louise Streat, Professor and Chair of Home Economics, chaired the Homemaking Institute Committee. Her remarks at the closing ceremony summarized the impact of their efforts and described how Operation

Doorknock came into fruition. Giving credit to the institution and the organizers of the campaign, she indicated that while the headlines of the sit-in movement and the anti-apartheid

24 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 1993), 18. 105 struggle in South Africa “made our theme come ALIVE with the pressures and demands of the times,” the committee selected the theme of voter registration well before February 1, 1960.25

Operation Doorknock was the College’s way of providing both a service to the community and an experience for students that followed in the tradition of Black women’s racial uplift work and the mission of HBCUs.

In her remarks, Street also described the communal nature of the relationship that existed between the campus and their neighbors. Her remarks clarified that Operation Doorknock was the outcome of a collective effort, not the brainchild of one, two, or even three men. Streat stated that, headlines, “could never recapture the feeling of oneness of a College and the Community, in which it is located, unless one might have seen the enthusiasm of ministers, school principals and community lay persons as they gave the Committee help in anticipating the nature of Precinct

#7.”26 The campaign drew from and strengthened relations between the College and the community, bridging a class divide that had often separated folks in both the day to day and in politics. In the late 1940s and early 1950s young Black organizers challenged the tradition of white politicians hiring Black “bosses” as a means to buy the Black vote in Greensboro.27

Registering working-class residents of the seventh precinct demonstrated the belief that voting should be a concern for all of Black Greensboro, not just middle-class professionals. With

25 Louise G. Streat, “Thirty-Fourth Annual Homemaking Institute: A Summary,” Box 7, Folder: Homemaking Institute, Player Presidential Papers, Bennett College Archives. 26 Ibid.

27 Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, 25-26. According to Chafe, white politicians hired Black “bosses” to pay voters and set up rallies in the Black community where white politicians, armed with beer, cigarettes, and food, would give campaign speeches. Local organizers such as Randolph Blackwell challenged this practice in an attempt to build a massive political base that made demands that benefitted working-class Black Greensboroans. Operation Doorknock built on the foundation young Black Greensboroans like Blackwell laid.

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Operation Doorknock, Bennett students continued this tradition through the help of the community. As Streat highlighted in her remarks, Bennett students picketed downtown businesses by day and registered Black voters by night, balancing both commitments with persistence. The students learned and utilized more than one organizing tactic in the spring semester of 1960. Their commitment to the community and the trust they gained through their active working partnerships to improve the surrounding neighborhoods, positioned Bennett women to be able to call on their fellow community members to support organizing efforts like that of the 1957 Carolina Theatre boycott and the 1960 voter registration campaign.

Knocking on doors proved to be so successful that the registration sites could not accommodate all those who wished to register within the originally scheduled dates of April 6 through 10, 1960. In order to accommodate everyone, the committee extended the campaign through April 12. In the end Operation Doorknock registered at least 1000 new voters.29 In 1960

African Americans made up a little over twenty-five percent of the population of Greensboro and accounted for over 30,000 of Greensboro’s approximately 120,000 residents.30 While there was a thriving Black middle class in Greensboro the vast majority of those 30,000 Black

Greensboroans were certainly working-class people. Bennett students’ political labor paid off in many ways as a significant portion of their surrounding community members stood in line to register. They more than doubled the number of registrants in precinct seven.

29 “Dr. B.E. Mays Is Speaker At Bennett,” Greensboro Daily News, April 11, 1960. Lists of voters registered are located in Box 12, Folder: Homemaking Institute, Player Presidential Papers, Bennett College Archives.

30 Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals By Race, 1790 to 1990, and By Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, For Large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States,” U.S. Census Bureau, accessed February 19, 2016, https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0076/twps0076.pdf.

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On April 12, 1960, Operation Doorknock ended. Exactly three days later a group of students met at Shaw University, in Raleigh, North Carolina, and formed the Student Nonviolent

Coordinating Committee (SNCC).31 Ella Baker served as a mentor to this newly formed group and she invited Bennett students to attend the meeting at Shaw. Her contact at Bennett was student leader Rosalyn Cheagle who trained at the Highlander Folk School, participated in the sit-ins, registered voters in Operation Doorknock, and was arrested for her political endeavors.

Students Jean Neff and Shirley Hawkins, also active in the local movement, attended as representatives from Bennett, taking their voter registration expertise and nonviolent direct- action strategies with them.32 SNCC went on to become a force to be reckoned with in the struggle for Black freedom. In October 1960, SNCC held a second conference in Atlanta, planned numerous actions including one that landed Martin Luther King, Jr., in jail, and then shifted their focus to organizing Freedom Rides with the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) before focusing on massive voter registration efforts in the deep South in 1962. By the time the first SNCC meeting was held in April 1960, Shaw, Bennett, NC A&T, Fisk University, Florida

A&M, and many other HBCUs were quickly becoming local hubs for student organizing against segregation. Though not widely recognized, Bennett women helped make HBCUs across the country a central driving force in the Black Freedom Movement. Bennett’s campus climate was particularly fertile for political organizing because faculty and administrators were supportive of

31 Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 240.

32 “Delegates to Youth Leadership Conference,” Folder: Conference, April 15-17, 1960, Box 25, SNCC Collection, King Center Archive. 108 student engagement unlike other HBCUs like Tennessee A&I, where administrators avidly punished students and faculty for involvement in direct action strategies.33

Though everyone who participated in the civil rights movement faced potentially serious threats of physical violence, Black women in particular faced sexual violence at the hands of white men. This experience often motivated how Black communities organized against discriminatory practices and institutions.34 Violent segregationists did not often spare women,

Black and white, from their public displays of violence. These volatile individuals and groups harmed women alongside men. This threat combined with traditional notions of gender within the organizing community itself, marginalized women from being visible on the front lines.

Several contributors to the sit-in efforts claim that women did not participate in the initial sit-in on February 1, 1960, because there was a sense that men should take the risk and spare women from potential physical attacks.35 Many organizers regarded Bennett women and women in general as liabilities. As alumna Esther Terry explains:

And Dr. [Hobart] Jarrett had said to them, “Well, you girls shouldn’t get engaged in doing that alone,” because, you know, this is the “girls must be protected,” right? So, they were encouraged to invite the A&T boys to sit with them and to plan this sit-in and what it

33 Many Black college administrations were particularly punitive toward student activists during the early phases of the civil rights movement. These included Alabama State College and Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial College, among others. Alabama State expelled students for participating in non-violent direct-action campaigns against segregated public accommodations in Montgomery, resulting in the landmark Dixon v. Alabama Board of Education case, as explained in Chapter One. Tennessee A&I’s administration infamously expelled students who participated in the 1961 Freedom Rides. Both did so at the demands of segregationist politicians who ran the state governments and oversaw Departments of Education.

34 For numerous examples of how the civil rights movement intersected with white supremacist sexual assault and rape of Black women, see: McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street.

35 “Pre-Sit-In Movement, Bennett’s Secret: Students Planned Sit-In in ’59,” Carolina Peacemaker, January 25-January 30, 1990.

109

would be, because, you see, we’re talking about something that could be very dangerous.36

Franklin McCain, one of the Greensboro Four, went so far as to claim that Bennett students “had no idea what we were going to do and neither did Dr. Player. We never once had a conversation with them. The only way Bennett got involved was after the UNCG girls.”37

However, due to their proximity to one another geographically and their shared experiences as

Black college students in Greensboro, Bennett women and NC A&T students existed as two schools in one community. Their political agendas overlapped and at times they planned and participated in actions together - as they did with the 1957 boycott of the Carolina Theatre.

McCain claims that even if Bennett students were aware of their plans, Dr. Player would not have allowed Bennett women to participate out of fear for their safety. The evidence of the 1957 boycott and Operation Doorknock present a different picture though. In fact, in 1957 Bennett students themselves identified their gendered experiences as a motivation for their choice to organize, not a hindrance, saying that the discrimination they endured at segregated facilities diminished their stature as women. McCain’s comments reflect both the gender dynamics of the movement and how those dynamics have impacted historical memory ever since.

The Intercollegiate Council for Racial Equality (the group that formed among various colleges in Greensboro after the initial sit-ins took place) was concerned with the issue of women’s safety while demonstrating. As result they charged young men to serve as protectors on picket lines. Their policies and procedures for picketing at local theaters in 1961 required that at

36 Esther Terry, interview by Joseph Mosnier, June, 7, 2011, accessed February 11, 2019, https://www.loc.gov/item/afc2010039_crhp0028/.

37 Franklin McCain, interview by Jim Schlosser, accessed February 20, 2016, http://sitins.com/mccain.shtml. 110 least one young man be present in case of trouble. Additionally, young women were forbidden from walking back to school at night, in both small groups or as individuals. One of the duties of the captain (presumably a young man) on scene was to secure rides for participants, especially for the “young ladies.”38

The opinion that activist women needed protection was not unique to young men at NC

A&T. Others took this view a step further and argued that women should not be involved in direct action at all because their safety could not be guaranteed. Robert T. Smith, III, editor of the Morehouse College student newspaper the Maroon Tiger, maintained that the picket line was no place for women. In a 1968 editorial, Smith stated:

Sure, the women should help fight this battle because it is for the improvement of the race, not the sexes; but I feel she should strengthen the home front with her brains and skills instead of the “front lines” with her blood….By subjecting women to frontline action, we endanger the existence of future generations…There is a big enough job for them in the “black movement” in secretarial and journalistic work, in the manufacture of equipment, in spreading propaganda, and in giving moral and spiritual support.39

While threats of violence against Black women were real and many women probably welcomed the protection of their male comrades, the masculine protector narrative served to suppress the memory of the multi-faceted contributions of Bennett women, and women in general, to the movement. Those with more patriarchal views couched this protection as the gendered political labor of men, and narrowly viewed women’s rightful roles in the movement as that of caregivers

38 “Intercollegiate Council for Racial Equality: Procedures and Rules for Picketing,” Box N, Folder: Civil Rights, Player Personal Papers, Bennett College Archives.

39 Robert T. Smith, III, “Let’s Keep Our Women at Home,” The Maroon Tiger, April 1968.

111 and supporters of male leadership during 1950s and 1960s. Similarly, with respect to the

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Ella Baker stated:

I was old enough to be the mother of the leadership. The combination of the basic attitude of men, and especially ministers, as to what the role of women in their church setups is – that of taking orders, not providing leadership – and the ego that is involved – the ego problems involved in having to feel that here is someone who had the capacity for leadership and, certainly, had more information about a lot of things than they possessed at that time – this would never had lent itself to my being a leader in the movement there.40

Echoing Baker’s description of SCLC, clergymen and Black male professionals held the vast majority of leadership positions in Greensboro’s Black political organizations. Bennett College, a women’s institution led by an unmarried woman, was the center of civil rights organizing for

Black Greensboroans of all classes. This fact directly challenged the values and practices of patriarchal organizing.

Regardless of where Bennett students were on the morning of February 1, 1960, or if they in fact planned the sit-ins in late 1959 as many claim, the prevailing male-centered narrative of the Greensboro movement is inaccurate. How this movement is often remembered is deeply reflective of the gender dynamics of the movement itself. Traditionalists couched men’s labor on the picket lines as a “double duty” of sorts. However, as the growing historiography of the Black freedom movement demonstrates, Black women often put their bodies on the line with or without the protection of men. Doing so had been a tradition at Bennett since at least the 1930s, when Bennett women organized the first boycott of the Carolina Theatre.

40 See Ella Baker Transcript, Civil Rights Documentation Project, 10, as cited in Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 94. 112

Ultimately it matters that Bennett women are adequately acknowledged in the history of the civil rights movement in Greensboro and the larger South, not simply to give credit where credit is due, but as their professor and supporter John Hatchett reminds us, as a matter of justice:

What occurred on February 1, 1960 was not the result of a casual dormitory conversation on the campus of A. and T. College. February 1, 1960 was the culminating point of an idea rigorously thought through, meticulously researched, and enthusiastically debated and refined by a handful of courageous young Black women on the campus of an all-women’s college where learning and social activism were inextricably intertwined and endorsed. It is not a matter of credit. It is a matter of fairness, justice, and truth.41

However, acknowledging their presence in the movement alters the narrative of Black organizing in this era in other important ways.

First, the evidence of early student campaigns including the boycott of the Carolina

Theater in 1957 and the voter registration drive known as Operation Doorknock expands the timeline of the Greensboro student movement and frames the local struggle as a movement that began earlier than many traditionally acknowledge. This evidence challenges the common notion that the southern student movement, that included SNCC at its center, began in 1960. Bennett women emerge in this new interpretation as highly skilled and trained organizers of a local struggle that made a national impact; not as inexperienced, apolitical students as the Greensboro

Four have been portrayed in the traditional narrative. In fact, it can be argued that the Greensboro

41 John Hatchett, “Hidden From History: Bennett College Women and the Greensboro Sit-ins,” Freedom Socialist 26 (February-March 2005), accessed May 17, 2017, http://www.socialism.com/drupal-6.8/?q=node/815. John Hatchett began working at Bennett as a professor of philosophy, religion, and social sciences in 1959. He was also the advisor to the campus chapter of the NAACP. Before coming to Bennett he served as a professor and campus Chaplain at Alabama A&M College, where he in his own words, “was instrumental in helping the student body mount a successful campus boycott against the repressive social and intellectual atmosphere which prevailed on this campus.” Hatchett was an avid support of student resistance to both paternalistic administrations and Jim Crow. 113

HBCU community in general was very well-informed of and trained in such matters. Movements like the one Greensboro saw were singlehandedly motivated by a spontaneous act that occurred in a vacuum. Rather, the student-led movement in Greensboro was influenced by a larger political culture that was shaped by a variety of antecedents, many of which were planned. This is not to say that random unplanned acts should not be taken seriously as legitimate sources of social and political change. However, the story of what happened on February 1, 1960, has a backstory that should be included in the narrative of Greensboro and the southern student movement as a whole.

Second, understanding Bennett students’ leadership reinforces a revisionist historiography on gender and the role of women within the southern civil rights movement.

Similar to Rosa Parks, Jo Ann Robinson and the masses of Black women affiliated with the

Women’s Political Council of Montgomery, Bennett students and their supportive president,

Willa B. Player, provided leadership and kept the local movement afloat throughout the early

1960s. During the movement, when Black women’s political labor stretched beyond the bounds of traditional gender roles, patriarchy hushed their brilliance to the pew, to the type writer, to the kitchen, and to the shadows of the men they were working with. Because many of their comrades did not appreciate or publicly acknowledge women’s leadership during the movement, the narrative was starved of complete representations of Black women for many years.42 The male leadership of Montgomery publicly characterized Rosa Parks as a humble, quiet victim, not an outspoken, experienced organizer. Similarly, Bennett students’ comrades have often characterized them as liabilities who were late to participating in the movement out of fear of physical attack. The difference being that Bennett women were much younger than Rosa Parks

42 McGuire, At The Dark End of the Street, 84-89. 114 when they organized the boycott in 1957. Their comrades and historians could not easily portray them as “tired” or as “mothers” of a movement. Instead, the masculine protector narrative, the emphasis on the Greensboro Four, and one single day in February of 1960 have erased their labor.

In a third contribution, Bennett students’ participation in the movement serves as an example of how the collective experiences of Black women, as racialized and gendered subjects living in the Jim Crow South, were often the experiences that galvanized Black communities and influenced how they organized. The threat of white men’s assault of Black women, sexual or otherwise, was particularly motivating. Instead of continuing to frame the Montgomery Bus

Boycott as the event that launched Martin Luther King, Jr.’s activist career, or as the first event that sparked the civil rights movement, historians now argue that the threat whites, in particular white men, posed to Black women in public spaces motivated the community to organize. White riders, bus drivers, and the police regularly harassed Black women domestics who rode public transportation to get to their jobs. It was a frequent occurrence.43 Rosa Parks’ experience and the experience of all Black women on the buses motivated the boycott. When Bennett women articulated the public humiliation they faced at a segregated theater, they expressed their humiliation as a slight to Black women specifically. They stated that segregation “diminishes our stature as women.” Their experiences, like that of Rosa Parks on a Montgomery Bus, were both insulting to their race and their status as respected women in their community, though they were also fighting to redefine the “Bennett Ideal” at the same time. The examples of Bennett College, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and so many others, illustrates that Jim Crow and the movement

43 For more information on Black women’s experiences on Montgomery buses, see: Danielle McGuire, “Walking in Pride and Dignity,” At the Dark End of the Street, 69-110. 115 that fought to destroy it were not merely motivated by race; rather, Jim Crow was a system that depended on sexual and gender violence to maintain the social order. Many campaigns of the civil rights movement were often motivated by the experiences of those most vulnerable to such violence.

Additionally, Bennett women’s actions, just like those of the women of Montgomery, represent a link in the genealogical chain of Black women’s politics, and national Black politics in general. Bennett College’s historical legacy embodies African American women’s participation in what historians call the long civil rights movement; defined by historian

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall as a movement, “that took root in the liberal and radical milieu of the late

1930s, was intimately tied to the “rise and fall of the New Deal Order,” accelerated during World

War II, stretched far beyond the South, was continuously and ferociously contested, and in the

1960s and 1970s inspired a “movement of movements” that “def[ies] any narrative of collapse.”44 The examples of political labor documented in this chapter were rooted in organizing traditions dating back to the Progressive Era. Yet Bennett women’s activism in this era hinted at the approach many Black women would take regarding racism and sexism less than two decades later and was intimately tied to their resistance to campus rules and regulations. While this earlier phase of organizing was coated in perfectly pressed clothing, flawlessly coiffed hair, and the occasional strand of pearls, it foreshadowed the rise of radical Black feminism that would come in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During Dr. Player’s presidency, Bennett’s image shifted drastically from that of a “finishing school” to that of a liberal arts institution that prepared Black

44 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History, 91 no. 4 (2005): 1235.

116 women for professional careers in a variety of fields.45 This shift, and Player’s commitment to integrating community activism into the fabric of the institution, made Bennett a space where the legacy of Black political organizing was carried on through both the traditional and innovative organizing tactics of young Black women and their comrades. While many HBCUs claimed similar educational models, Bennett stood out with its uniquely supportive administration that did not aim to squelch student organizing against Jim Crow. The combination of these things created an exceptional environment for young Black women to thrive politically and educationally and also created a space where the southern student movement took root. Including the political organizing of Bennett women in the narrative of the local Greensboro movement and the southern civil rights movement generally, contextualizes how HBCU administrations reacted to student organizing, the impact of HBCUs on the movement in general, and allows us to imagine the possibilities had this outlier of support been the normative approach to student participation in the movement.

45 Brown, The Long Walk, 108. 117

IV. “We No Longer Want to be ‘Lily-White Young Ladies,’ But We Want to be “Black Souls Sisters”: Black Women and Activism at HBCUs, 1965-1975.

In 1965, Gretta Middleton, a junior from Charleston, South Carolina, at Bennett College made requests and suggestions for Black studies curriculum. In a handwritten letter to President

Player, Middleton expressed in a very polite and respectful tone that she and her Bennett sisters were, “not being taught the full truth,” in their U.S. history course. She requested the administration consider what she termed, “Negro Supplementary texts,” and offered to publish essays about Black history and culture to circulate on campus amongst her fellow students.

Middleton wrote:

Bennett instills many and varied things in our hearts but there is one area in which she falls short – Negro Culture. I think that Bennett in service to Negro women should seek to serve fully by instilling race pride or at least an awareness of our Negro heritage. This pride or awareness would make us better individuals and we in turn would be more representative of Bennett.1

Middleton drew an ideological connection between the “finishing school” elements of the culture of Bennett and the lack of Black-centered curriculum, yet she was careful not to convey her desires in a manner that would be deemed disrespectful, or even radical; almost presenting the agenda of Black-centered curriculum as parallel with or complementary to the educational model that existed already. HBCU students like Middleton understood that the educational models administrations believed in and practiced were tightly interwoven with racial uplift ideology and practices (as explained in chapter one). Notwithstanding the careful selection of language and tone, Middleton’s requests were cutting edge in early 1965 - the year historians have marked as the earliest phase of the Black student movement.

1 Gretta Middleton, Letter to Willa B. Player, February 10, 1965, Player Presidential Papers, Box 5, Folder: 256, Bennett College Archives. 118

As a growing body of historical literature demonstrates, the Black student movement of the 1960s and early 1970s had long-lasting effects in higher education that can still be seen today. Historian Ibram Rogers writes:

It is not an understatement to say that nearly every element of blackness – from people to programs to courses – in American higher education in the twenty first century owes its existence to thousands of black students who were suspended, expelled, arrested, imprisoned, exiled, injured, and/or killed waging the Black Campus Movement.2

At colleges and universities across the country, the Black student movement reached its height between 1968 and 1969, though it began around 1965 and declined by 1973. As participants of this movement, HBCU students demanded a range of things including but not limited to inclusion in campus governance, the development of Black studies departments and curriculum taught by Black faculty, a final end to in loco parentis, more resources, and an end to white control over HBCUs at the board, administrative, and classroom levels. The Black student movement, in step with society in general and in particular with Black nationalist politics that dominated Black liberation circles at the time, was heteropatriarchal to its core. Men dominated leadership positions on campuses across the country and debates ensued about the role of women in the movement. While men were the face of the leadership, Black women students participated in the movement to the same degree as their male comrades. They were often expected to be helpmates to young men and their political labor was often overshadowed by charismatic male leadership, just as Black women’s labor had been overshadowed in the civil rights movement during the decade prior. This movement also happened on the eve of a tremendous upsurge in feminist organizing associated with the women’s liberation movement.

2 Ibram Rogers, “On the American Black Campus,” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 21, no.4 (2009): 464. 119

HBCU student newspapers were often the spaces where students expressed their most detailed opinions of the Black student and feminist movements, gender roles and norms, and sexuality. Between 1965 and 1975 some of the intracommunal issues students wrote about existed at the intersection of the Black student movement (and Black nationalism largely speaking) and the feminist movement. Students wrote about rape and sexual assault cases, state- sanctioned forced sterilization, contraception, abortion, and what they often argued were obsolete and paternalistic policies that continued at HBCUs well past major legal, grassroots-organized, and individual acts of resistance to in loco parentis throughout the first half of the 1960s.

Additionally, at times students went beyond expressing their frustration in writing and organized for change on and off their campuses, directing their energies at challenging both college administrative and state power. Using these student newspapers, oral histories, and administrative records, this chapter explains both administrative and student stances on issues relevant to feminism and women’s rights and shows how these issues interplayed with the politics of the Black student movement. The vast majority of students at HBCUs did not openly identify with the women’s liberation movement in its early years, in fact many were outright anti-feminist in their political analysis. However, political and social issues specifically relevant to the lives of Black women were percolating at HBCUs during this decade. In some cases, women’s issues were embedded within the demands made by the organizers of the Black student movement. Even as women participants of said movement were overshadowed by their male comrades on the surface, they inserted their own demands and put forth agendas that were about their needs and desires as women, though they were not in the majority. This was particularly true at Bennett and Spelman Colleges, the two women’s HBCUs. 120

This chapter analyzes administrative and student sentiments and actions taken in response to three concerns during this time, focusing in particular on the experiences, opinions, and actions of Black women: 1.) the dismantling of lingering vestiges of the “missionary paternalist” model of education that policed students along lines of gender and sexual normativity well-past major challenges to in loco parentis nationally. 2.) reproductive rights and justice including a grassroots movement to fight forced sterilization, and 3). a series of rapes and sexual assaults at the Atlanta University Center in 1973. Beyond compensating Black women for their political labor by highlighting their voices and experiences, focusing on Black women students’ responses to these issues helps further develop the historical understanding of how the Black student movement and the women’s liberation movement played out at HBCUs simultaneously and further develops the picture of Black politics nationally between 1965 and 1975, as they overlapped and conflicted with feminist politics.

During this decade administrative and student activist visions of Black liberation at

HBCUs were overwhelmingly dominated by political articulations that deemed heterosexuality and traditional gender roles as ideal characteristics of campus citizenship and Black identity.

Student codes of conduct were saturated with rules that attempted to force students to adhere to this ideal heteronormative idea of citizenship. This was not unique to Black Colleges, yet the impact it had on fostering student unrest cannot be ignored. Women continued to be unduly restricted by conservative rules that men were not required to obey. Additionally, some institutions, like Morehouse College, outrighted banned homosexuality in writing. While the demands of Black nationalists on campus were often developed in defiance of middle-class objectives associated with Black college administrations, normative notions of Black manhood and womanhood embedded in the politics of respectability more than often went unchallenged. 121

As the era of the Moynihan Report, debates about the proper roles of Black women and men within their communities and family life raged at HBCUs, just as they did in national media outlets and political circles. This chapter surveys this normative discourse and identifies feminist issues that were central to debates about student freedoms during the decade of 1965-1975.

Issues Black women took up as causes were not often labeled “feminist” yet their choice to focus on them as issues they were disproportionally impacted by due to their gender, speaks to the political nature of the issues. While race and racism were central to all political organizing at

HBCUs during this era, little has been written about how gender politics were sources of contention between students and administrations and how gender politics influenced the Black student movement as well. This historiographic gap exists despite the fact that this was also the decade that saw the rapid development of the second wave of the feminist movement and was a critical moment in the advancement of radical Black feminism.

While most students did not directly identify as Black feminists or with the broader feminist movement, many students drew attention to and occasionally organized around issues that were undeniably feminist of color in political persuasion. There was no massive upsurge in

Black feminist politics or organizing at HBCUs during this era, in fact the vast majority of the campus communities in this chapter were spaces where feminism was not predominantly or explicitly embraced as a political lens or activist cause. Rather, there were moments when a limited number of students took a stance on issues related to student freedoms and Black women’s freedoms beyond the confines of HBCU campuses using various proto-feminist and feminist lenses. The discourse pro-feminist students used and the anti-feminist discourse they combatted were reflections of what was happening on a national scale as Black feminists and women of color feminists were becoming more visible within and outside the women’s liberation 122 movement and Black nationalist circles. The politics of gender and stances on feminism ranged from wholly anti-feminist, to liberal feminist, to radical feminist.

Many of the publicly outspoken anti-feminist students at HBCUs judged the growing women’s liberation movement and its agenda as anti-male and anti-Black. Mostly, these sentiments were expressed by men students who saw the women’s liberation movement as a distraction or a plot against the Black liberation movement. For example Fisk Forum editor

Ferdinand Mehlinger, III, wrote:

The women’s liberation struggle in America is more derivative of carnal emotionalism than spiritual directiveness. For this reason it is particular only to the Western hemisphere and proves to be an added burden on an already weakened colonial empire whose international respect dwindles, whose army falters and whose technology cannot rescue it from its own destruction.” The basic appeal was of course stolen from the emotional formats of the Black leaders of the sixties…men desperate to reconstruct a denied history as a link to modern pride.3

While the internal bias of white middle-class feminism needs to be accounted for in the history of the women’s liberation movement, it should also be acknowledged that analysis like

Mehlinger’s both erased Black and third world women as participants in the women’s movement while simultaneously framing the Black freedom struggle as a movement led by and for Black men. As stated previously, and shown in chapter two, this sort of masculinist narrative both marginalized Black women within the movement itself and influenced how the historical narratives were spun after the fact. Additionally, Mehlinger used sexist tropes about feminine emotionalism and homophobic hints to indict the women’s movement. He charged that in

3 Ferdinand Mehlinger, “From the Editor: On Women’s Liberation,” Fisk Forum, February 5, 1975, 2, Fisk Forum Collection, Fisk University Archives. 123 comparison to the first wave of the feminist movement, the intentions of the women’s liberation movement:

were far more serious and perverted in nature than any movement in recent times witnessed inside this country. Pursuing momentum through such movements as the Gay Liberation Front, which advocates the freedom of homosexuality, these same women seek to become activists in black liberation ranks with only the intentions of a “divide and conquer” mentality.4

Black feminist scholar Beverly Guy-Sheftall has expressed that as an outspoken unapologetic

Black feminist, she has been forced to regularly confront members of the HBCU community who view her work and herself as suspect. The suspicions of her work, she claims, are rooted in the idea that she and all women associated with the women’s movement are lesbians and lesbianism is seen as a threat to Black men and Black liberation, or as Mehlinger articulated above, “a divide and conquer mentality.”5

To be sure, Black men did not own a lion’s share of sexism or homophobia launched at the women’s movement or the Gay Liberation Front, though they owned their share. The view of the women’s movement as suspect through any real or perceived association with queerness and the LGBTQ movement was a common trope used to disparage it outside of Black communities as well. Additionally, Black women participated in heavy handed critiques of the women’s movement, as did white women. While many Black women presented valid critiques of the movement in relation to personal experiences as a participant within it, others sided with men like Mehlinger using similar tropes. Race nor gender identity guaranteed a person’s political

4 Ibid.

5 Beverly Guy-Sheftall, interview with author, December 13, 2016; See also: Johnetta B. Cole and Beverly-Guy Sheftall, The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003). 124 stance on women’s or LGBTQ liberation. Additionally, traditional views of men’s and women’s roles in movement building, socially, and interpersonally, were common. Furthermore, queerness was not socially acceptable in mainstream society and illegal in many cases, and HBCUs generally did not waiver from that position. Disdain for the Gay Liberation Front, as expressed in

Mehlinger’s comments, aligned with rules and regulations regarding homosexuality and with campus cultures across the country. HBCUs were no exception. For example, Morehouse

College banned homosexuality in their 1975-1976 student handbook, citing it as one of four

“offenses, if proven, subject the student to automatic dismissal from the college.”6 While not all

HBCU handbooks outright banned homosexuality, queerness certainly did not fit within the images of heteronormative respectability the institutions embraced. The other offenses that could result in automatic dismissal at Morehouse at the time were, “Carrying a member of the opposite sex into a dormitory room for immoral purposes,” drunkenness on two or more occasions, and theft. These four “offenses” illustrate that Morehouse aimed to regulate the sexual lives of its students and their public behavior. But some students resisted anti-feminist stances and the homophobia that was embedded within them, taking queues from Black feminist and women of color politics that were growing in strength around the country.

For example, in 1975 a rally in support of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was held in Atlanta, Georgia, and Spelman College senior Avis Topps was an organizer of the event through her work as a member of the Ad Hoc Committee for the ERA. When interviewed about the ERA and the rally, Topps expressed what scholars would today call an intersectional feminist analysis of power and identity. She and the student journalist who interviewed her, Shirley O.

6 Morehouse College Student Handbook, 1975-1976, 18, Morehouse College Printed Materials Collection, Robert Woodruff Library Research Center, Atlanta University Center.

125

Henderson, saw various systemic oppressions as linked and expressed them as such in relation to what they saw as the advantages of the ERA for Black women specifically. Henderson wrote,

“The passage of the E.R.A. would be a meaningful act for Black women who suffer from triple discrimination as Blacks, women and workers.” Topps was quoted as saying, “As soon as Black women realize that we are fighting a two fold enemy, racism and sexism, we can become more progressive individuals in society.” She also detailed a laundry list of perceived benefits the ERA could possibly win for Black women and Spelman women in particular. These included: affordable child care, access to GI Bill benefits if women wished to join the military (though she believed a draft of women was unlikely), legal aid to combat discrimination in the workplace, a fair chance at law and medical school entrance, and scholarships for higher education. Beyond these very specific benefits, she also believed the ERA made possible, “the uniting of all oppressed people to throw off the yoke of oppression and rise together with each movement working to advance itself and thereby advancing the cause of all the people.” Topps further explained, “Black women must stop looking at the ERA as an issue that doesn’t concern them and realize that it will help them most because they are the most oppressed.”7 Topps views on the

ERA in 1975 were aligned in a theoretical sense with the political analysis of Black feminism.

While some of the particulars of her ideas about the ERA were more liberal leaning, in particular considering access to the military as a benefit to women, her and Henderson’s analysis aligned with Black feminist organizations like the National Black Feminist Organization and radical

Black feminist organizations like the Combahee River Collective, all of whom expressed power dynamics in society as highly influenced by an interlocking system of various oppressions that

7 Shirley O. Henderson, “E.R.A.,” Spelman Spotlight, February 1975, 1, Spelman Spotlight Collection, Spelman College Archives. 126 harmed Black women to the highest degree. While most Black women HBCU students did not express this sort of intersectional feminist analysis and were not active in feminist organizing that used this lens as a framework, there was growing dissent on HBCU campuses amongst women students who challenged administrations as participants in the Black student movement, as individuals, and as budding women’s rights activists with feminist and proto-feminist politics.

Students were influenced by Black feminist speakers who visited campuses and talked about women’s issues as they related specifically to Black women. In 1974 Nan Bailey from the

National Abortion Action Coalition and the Young Socialist Alliance visited Fisk and spoke out in support of Black women’s liberation. She explained the movement for Black women as integral to the Black liberation movement. She said, “more and more black women are seeing the necessity to become involved in both the women’s liberation movement and the black liberation movement because they realize they must fight a battle against racism and sexism.” As a socialist she also encouraged Black women to connect with the socialist workers movement. She stated,

“The overriding factor which is causing racism and sexism in this country, is that there is a capitalistic class which provides the economic basis for the oppression of women, blacks and the working class in general.”8 However, students at HBCUs were also influenced by speakers like

Effie Miller, wife of Bennett College President Isaac Miller, who claimed she was not, “an active advocate of Women’s Lib, but practices a certain kind of practical liberation of her own.”9 Miller preferred to serve her community through volunteer and charity work with Black middle-class organizations like Links and Jack and Jill. Her volunteerism and philanthropy worked in the

8 Shelia Ford, “Bailey Speaks on Black Women’s Liberation,” Fisk Forum, November 27, 1974, 4, Fisk University Archives.

9 “Mrs. I.H. Miller, Jr.: A Liberated Woman?” Bennett Banner, November 18, 1971, 4, Bennett Banner Collection, Bennett College Archives. 127 tradition of racial uplift and maintained the optics of respectability politics as opposed to Nan

Bailey, who was an unapologetic radical Black socialist feminist. There were far more Effie

Millers for students to emulate at HBCUs than Nan Baileys.

After 1965, Black colleges still chose to maintain strict codes of conduct that were intended to promote gender and sexual normativity through the regulation of students’ behavior and social lives. As chapter one shows, this mission of HBCUs was rooted in racial uplift ideology and the need to protect and prepare students for a hostile anti-Black world. This held true even though HBCUs were ground zero for both legal and grassroots challenges to in loco parentis in the decade prior. While Black colleges did loosen the reigns a bit, women students were still highly surveilled by campus authorities, particularly at the two HBCUs for women,

Bennett and Spelman Colleges, and were expected to abide by detailed and lengthy codes of conduct that were not required of male students and were often more lax for white women at

PWIs. Students did not always fight against these rules or request they be changed, but many did through individual acts of resistance and through organized group efforts that worked both within and outside the protocols for requesting change to policy. For instance, in 1965 students at

Bennett College, led by their student senate, made an appeal to the administration for significant changes to several rules that regulated their social lives. They submitted written requests to the administration concerning riding in cars, overnight visits, attending off-campus movies, and reducing the number of required chapel services.

Being forbidden to ride in cars was a particularly frustrating restriction for students at

Bennett. Still in 1965, under the administration of Willa B. Player, students were not allowed to ride in cars unless special permission was granted by the president herself, and such 128 circumstances were rare.10 This car riding ban was a much more conservative policy than the one maintained at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), just across town from

Bennett. At UNCG, men and women seniors were allowed to have a car on campus to use at their discretion as long as they registered it properly and abided by campus curfews.

Additionally, all students could ride in cars no matter their classification. Automobile usage was a considerable point of contention between students and university administrations across the country. As Chapter One demonstrates, women students were often restricted from riding in cars throughout the early 1960s because administrators viewed cars as an outlet to promiscuity. As

Roderick Ferguson points out, policies about automobiles at U.S. colleges and universities were,

“part of ensuring the gender propriety of women as well.”11 Students were aware of this and requested the administration consider allowing juniors and seniors to “ride in cars with their dates or classmates when attending a dance, game, off-campus social functions and to dine at a distant approved restaurant.”12 They also requested that resident students be allowed to make over-night visits at non-residence students’ homes.

Debating with administrators regarding student privileges did not come without risks.

Students were expected to follow college-approved protocols and published procedures to address their grievances. Any tactic that veered from the approved process for filing grievances and recommendations with the administration could result in severe punishment, including

10 Willa B. Player, Letter to Parent, August 31, 1961, Player Presidential Papers, Box 7, Folder: Students, Bennett College Archives.

11 Roderick Ferguson, We Demand: The University and Student Protests (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 30.

12 Letter from Student Senate to Central Administration Committee, Player Presidential Papers, Box 5, Folder: Students, Bennett College Archives. 129 suspension or expulsion. Additionally, to be sure, the outlined procedures for filing such complaints were structured in a way that allowed administrations to have ultimate control over decision-making. Students could politely voice their opinions, as they did in 1965 at Bennett, but there was no assurance change would come. Administrations often dragged their feet on changing rules to be laxer leaving students feeling forced to resort to different measures to have their voices heard and their grievances fully considered. Additionally, in response to student unrest, administrations continued to promote the idea that receiving an education at the college level was, as President Isaac Miller put it in a 1970, “a privilege and not a right.”13

Despite this, Bennett students were not completely unsuccessful in their attempts to gain social privileges in 1965. Their efforts were heard, at least to a degree, and policies that policed curfew, riding in cars, and off-campus visitation, were slightly changed to accommodate their requests. By 1967 all seniors could ride in cars “with drivers of her choice at her discretion returning by the dormitory’s closing time.” Juniors and sophomores were granted “limited permission to ride in cars on special occasions and with out-of-town guests.” Freshmen could still only ride in cars “during the second semester on special occasions and with another Bennett student.”14 This progress was certainly the result of student requests, not administrative initiative.

Through working the proper administrative channels, Bennett students were granted a little more autonomy. They continued to push the administration toward gradual change throughout the late

1960s and into the 1970s, yet there were mixed feelings among the student body regarding the significance of a gradual loosening of the social restrictions they faced. Many were unconvinced

13 Isaac Miller, Jr., “Does it Come Too Cheap?” Bennett Banner, October 17, 1970, 2. Bennett Banner Collection, Bennett College Archives.

14 Bennett Student Handbook, 1967-1968, Isaac Miller Papers, Box 20, Holgate Library, Bennett College. 130 that the administration genuinely cared about student concerns over their personal autonomy or even believed students were worthy of such basic freedoms.

In November 1968, two years into the presidency of Isaac Miller, students challenged the already modified regulations on curfew they had negotiated under the previous administration.

According to student newspaper coverage, they attempted to go through the proper channels as students had done in the past. However, they grew tired of what were described as, “yards and yards of red tape,” and “came to the startling conclusion that they were utilizing a means for which there appeared to be no end.”15 As result, they organized an action. On November 15 at

12:30AM, students left their dormitories and staged an all-night sit-in in the student union building. The next morning, they marched to the President’s house on campus and protested on the front lawn. After this protest on the president’s lawn, they continued marching across campus chanting and voicing their concerns about campus life, curfew in particular. According to student

Hattie Carwell, these actions, “caused the administration to sit-up and take notice of the sincerity of the students. The students’ actions forged an opportunity to bridge the long existing gap between student and faculty.”16 Their efforts were successful, and curfew was extended.

Drawing from this organizing experience and her participation in the Black Student

Movement as Bennett’s Student Organization for Black Unity (SOBU) Coordinator, Gladys

Ashe,17 encouraged Bennett women to stick together in their demands and framed their struggle

15 “Protest in Retrospect,” The Bennett Banner, February 27, 1969, 4, Bennett Banner Collection, Bennett College Archives.

16 Hattie Carwell, “Unrest Breeds Change Diversity-Unity,” Bennett Banner, February 27, 1969, 5, Bennett Banner Collection, Bennett College Archives.

17 Originally from Columbus, Georgia, Gladys Ashe Robinson became a long-time member of the Greensboro community. She later went on to become Executive Director of the Piedmont Health Services and Sickle Cell Agency in 1982 and since 2010 has served as democratic senator 131 as a fight against an administration that was attempting to mold them into models of respectability that mimicked white womanhood. In a Bennett Banner article Ashe stated, “As sisters at Bennett, we need to talk among ourselves, understand what each other thinks and resolve that we will unify for a common purpose. We no longer want to be “lily-white young ladies,” but we want to be “black soul sisters.”18

Ashe had recently attended the “Towards a Black Student Movement,” conference in

Salisbury, North Carolina, hosted by SOBU, and was inspired and impressed by the all-male line up of speakers who spoke on, among other things related to the Black student movement, the

Orangeburg Massacre and various student actions at Black colleges across the region. Having an all-male speaker line up was not unusual given the gender politics of the era, though, as Martha

Biondi points out, there were tensions amongst students within the Black student movement regarding what they believed women’s roles were and should be.19 It was a major transition moment when women, who were actually bearing a large percentage of the labor of the movement, were on the cusp on forcing a shift in political spaces of various kinds with respect to how their involvement was viewed and appreciated. Ashe reported that speakers included, among others, Cleveland Sellars, a SNCC leader who was jailed for actions in conjunction with the Orangeburg Massacre, and Howard Fuller, a prominent Black liberation activist based in

North Carolina and co-founder of Malcolm X Liberation University. Fuller stated, “there are

for the 28th district of North Carolina. She is also currently the Chairman of the Bennett College Board of Trustees.

18 Gladys Ashe, “A Black Sister Speaks,” Bennett Banner, February 27, 1969, 5, Bennett Banner Collection, Bennett College Archives.

19 Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 27,20,49. 132 really no Black universities. Sure, there are black students and black administrations, but most of these people have ‘white minds.’” Referencing several ideas Fuller shared at the conference,

Ashe critiqued the administrations of Black colleges, agreeing with the men’s analysis. She stated, “They are still, like Bennett, trying to produce “white society ladies and gentlemen” instead of Black sisters and BLACK brothers who believe in each other and who are willing to liberate themselves from white oppression.”

While Ashe seemed awestruck by male leaders like Fuller, even referring to them as

“fine” in an attempt to entice Bennett students to continue reading, she also believed that Black women at Bennett were capable of being leaders in the Black student movement, especially on

Bennett’s campus, and called for unity among Black women that extended beyond a shallow united reverence for Black revolutionary men. She stated:

Let us not only talk and exhibit unity by applause to every black brother, although we defy it by applauding even louder for the savage white man, but let us show unity when we have to take a stand, as Bennett students, for our liberation. For us, freedom must start at Bennett and then spread throughout America. Remember that, we must be unified as students in order to achieve our ends.20

For Ashe it was important for Bennett women to be unified in their demands. She wanted, in her own words, for Bennett to be, “a prime example of Black womanhood,” not a “whitewashed” school that aimed to transform her and her sisters into imitations of “white society ladies.” To successfully push back against the middle-class ethos of the administration, Ashe believed unity amongst Bennett women was necessary.

We don’t need to go to white schools either to become “whitewashed” – this is what they’re doing to us in our own schools. As a matter of fact, Bennett, which should be a prime example of Black womanhood, is steadily trying to make us white. But before

20 Ashe, “A Black Sister Speaks.” 133

we can liberate ourselves, we have to think BLACK and start believing in ourselves.21

Ashe saw radical potential in her Bennett sisters and wanted them to develop their own sense of identity that revolved around revolutionary politics instead of respectability. She, and students like her who were drawn to the Black student movement, believed they should be allowed to define themselves for themselves, as “Black soul sisters.” While she certainly did not claim a feminist stance or identity, Ashe saw her sisters as capable, smart, and deserving of respect.

It is now time for us to learn something about ourselves and learn to respect what is really ours as black people. We should be proud people and identify with our own habits, customs, and ideas. Don’t let anyone tell you that you are barbarian, for, as Bro. Fuller said, “it is the white man who is savage and does all of the killing,” We are the civilized people and he, the white man, is the beast who kills and tramples over us and then tells us that we are inferior savages.22

While Ashe clearly championed Black nationalist rhetoric about whiteness and white people as the decisive culprits of white supremacy, her message also struck a chord with critiques of Black college administrations and their perceptions of students as young people who needed to be trained into the ways of the middle-class. Calling whiteness and white people uncivilized was not only a critique of whites directly but was also made in defiance of what Ashe and many other students believed their college administrations attempted to impose on their lives. Students who participated in the Black student movement made ideological connections between white racist perceptions of Black people and the manner Black students were expected to behave in reaction to said racism, and any other discriminatory obstacle they faced. For Bennett students, as

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid. 134 women, this model of respectability was gendered in a particular way and framed as the “Bennett

Ideal,” as defined in Chapter One.

Bennett women like Ashe and Darwin Prioleau, a junior from New York who served as the features editor for the student newspaper, were excited that students seemed to be redefining the Bennett Ideal according to their own desires. They believed the new Bennett Ideal promoted unity among Black women that extended beyond the gates of Bennett and into their surrounding communities. Prioleau stated, “She does not enclose her sisterhood to just her Bennett sisters, but to black sisters everywhere.” And:

It is a woman who is not discriminatory towards her own. A sister with a natural and a dashiki who discriminates against another sister who has none, is just as bad as a fair sister discriminating against her darker sister. These are ideals of the past, they can no longer exist in a true black woman’s mind.23

Here Prioleau creates an analogy for her readers that uses colorism and the historical connections between a proximity to whiteness and privilege afforded through skin color, with that of the educational access of “Black soul sisters” that included a Black-centered analysis, a position

Prioleau couches as a privileged position. Mother Bennett, as students affectionately referred to the institution, had long instilled a sense of pride and refinement in the young women who graced the campus and students like Prioleau felt privileged to be there. However, their visions of the nature of Black women’s empowerment shifted significantly during this era and their ideas and analyses of power were reflective of a larger political shift that was happening nationally. As

Prioleau stated:

The Bennett woman was always refined, cultured, and proud; but now she is a woman of black refinement, black cultured, and black

23 Darwin Prioleau, “Meet the New Bennett Ideal,” Bennett Banner, 4 November 1969, 4, Bennett Banner Collection, Bennett College Archives. 135

proudness. The “Bennett Ideal” can be stated in two words “black womanhood.” Black womanhood is a state of mind. It is a state of mind that can relate to the times. The Bennett Ideal is a black woman who is interested in what goes on around her especially concerning her people. It is a black woman who is curious about her background. It is a black woman who can realize the power of her people and their achievements. It is a woman who can hold her head up and say “I am black,” and truly mean it...The new Bennett Ideal is an ideal which will enable every Bennett graduate to enter the society without confusion or disillusions. The Bennett woman will contribute to the proudness of her people. She will stand high in this society but she will be herself.24

Inspired by the success of their protest to demand an extension of curfew hours, student leaders like Gladys Ashe and Darwin Prioleau called for unity amongst Bennett women in their quest to remake the Bennett Ideal. But the results of the 1968 protest left other members of the student body wondering just how monumental their success really was.

Student leader from Burlington, North Carolina, and reporter for the Bennett Banner,

Mary Shanks, distinguished between humble changes to social privileges and a fundamental shift in how administrations viewed and treated students:

Wherein does the significance lie? In terms of student enrichment, there is no significance. It was a finite, concrete change in time and nothing more. We were either duped into believing that we were finally being looked upon as responsible women or we realized that the settlement was more an appeasement than a change in attitude. The manacles of maternalism are just as binding as ever.25

Shanks articulated a desire to be allowed to prove her maturity and to show that she and her peers were responsible young adults capable of handling freedoms. Shanks went on to critique the Miller administration’s approach to regulating student behavior and suggested that there were

24 Darwin Prioleau, “Meet the New Bennett Ideal,” Bennett Banner, November 4, 1969, 4, Bennett Banner Collection, Bennett College Archives.

25 Shanks, “Protest in Retrospect.” 136 deeply problematic reasons rooted in stereotypes of Black women that guided the college’s attitude toward student freedoms:

In all probability this pathetic maternalistic attitude stems from a black inferiority complex. By virtue of the fact that we are black women, it is inconceivable that our parents had the ability to foster mature women.26

Shanks’ interpretation of the rationale for strict rules and regulations at Bennett was a critique of the racial uplift politics that were embedded in the institution’s founding and continued to dominate the model of education the administration imposed. Though Bennett, under the leadership of Dr. Player, was more supportive of student organizing in the civil rights movement than other Black colleges, the school still operated under the assumption that young Black students, particularly those from a working-class background, needed to be molded into idyllic models of citizenship. As Shanks points out, there was an assumption made that many students who matriculated into Bennett did not come already prepared to embody the Bennett Ideal because they came from backgrounds that had not afforded them access to middle-class ways of being in the world. While Shanks points to Blackness and race as markers that made students at

Bennett targets for uplift politics, there is a class and gender analysis in her commentary as well.

Instead of calling the administration “paternalist,” Shanks calls “Mother Bennett” maternalist in a critical manner. Despite being a women’s college and presumably a sanctuary where young

Black women were given the space to feel and be empowered, the rules and regulations indicated to Shanks that the administration believed young Black women were untrustworthy, immature, and underprepared for the world they faced. She believed the administration thought students needed to be surveilled at Bennett lest they not learn how to handle the societal challenges they

26 Ibid. 137 faced without the “proper” perspective and social training. This analysis was particularly poignant given the fact that many Bennett students were from working class families who, in the mind of those who still believed in racial uplift, were not fully capable of preparing their daughters for adulthood. Shanks’ critique extended to the broader community of Greensboro, saying that:

In all fairness, however, this pathetic attitude is not limited to the college campus. Many members of the city have expressed their opinion that student protest is self destructive, that we should “take advantage of this fine finishing school.27

While it is unclear if Shanks was referring to white or Black Greensboroans, or both, the opinion

Shanks critiqued was symptomatic of a long-standing popular assumption that Black parents sent their daughters to Bennett to be molded into refined and poised young ladies eligible for marriage and more traditionally gendered professions, not to become radicalized. As Shanks stated, student protest, whether on or off campus, garnered flabbergasted reactions from white and Black Greensboroans who saw Bennett as an opportunity for working-class Black women to be transformed into models of respectability. Whether it was on the picket line in front of the local Woolworth’s downtown, or on the front lawn of the President’s house, Bennett students were couched as ungrateful recipients of refinement that could improve their class status as

Black women if they just went along with the rules. But Shanks and others saw it differently:

In the final analysis, one must consider education, the hopeful end product of any institution of higher learning. Education which essentially means to lead out of oneself is not purely academics. Despite what most pedantic academicians may think, education is not limited to the classroom. In fact the most valuable aspect of one’s education is gained through social exchange and dialectic…Our restriction, though modified following the November protest movement, are still antiquated. We are still

27 Ibid. 138

hindered from leading out of ourselves, from acquiring a good education.28

Like Nikki Giovanni argued in 1960-61 at Fisk and as allied faculty and students argued at

Spelman around the same time (see chapter one), Mary Shanks labeled the restrictions Bennett women were under as anti-intellectual and counterproductive. Despite mixed opinions on the impact of the 1968 protest, students continued to make demands and organize actions for change on campus. Their actions were a part of the Black student movement, but the details of their demands were unique to their experience as women at a conservative women’s institution. The particulars of their participation in the Black student movement mirrored what was happening nationally – moments of convergence and separation within and across different movements along lines of identity and personal experience. On the eve of the height of the women’s liberation movement Bennett students’ demands were tailored to their treatment as both racialized and gendered subjects. Bennett women had carried a great portion of the labor that propelled the student sit-in movement forward and maintained the continuation of direct actions against segregation through the first half of the 1960s. They, like many Black women in the movement at that time, were seen as helpmates to men whose presence dominated the face of the movement. As the Black student movement came to fruition, Bennett women worked in conjunction with charismatic young men like Nelson Johnson, Howard Fuller, and Cleveland

Sellars and at times, in their writing, seemed to maintain an air of reverence for certain young men. However, as women students their experiences differed and many of their demands were feminist in nature, though not called that. Being allowed to socialize on their own terms and being allowed to wear pants in public were examples of such demands.

28 Ibid. 139

Many of the regulations enforced at Bennett and other HBCUs were clear attempts to restrict dating and repress the possibility of sexual contact between students and others. As chapter one shows, women students were burdened by more rules than men students at HBCUs and white women at PWIs. This continued into the late 1960s. As explained in Chapter One, the extra layers of restriction Black women experienced were meant to counter racist narratives that

Black women were sexually promiscuous. In 1969 a series of chain gates was used to block traffic from coming onto Bennett’s campus after business hours. Many found this odd and a reporter for the campus newspaper polled students for their opinion on the matter. Sandra Neely, a freshman from Piedmont, South Carolina, who would go on to become the president of

Bennett’s student government, a community organizer, and tragically a martyr in the Greensboro

Massacre, stated, “Bennett is alright but the chains are up entirely too early.”29 As student

Carolyn Everette from Portsmouth, Virginia, noted in a letter to the editor of the student newspaper, the administration claimed the chains were there to regulate the flow of traffic on

Union Drive, the main entrance to campus and thoroughfare in front of the dormitories.

However, in Everette’s estimation the chains were more specifically there to keep young men off campus and away from the residence halls. She saw the chains as symbolic of the administration’s attempts to enforce the rules that molded students into the old vision of the

Bennett Ideal. She stated, “putting the chain up will not restore the traditional Bennett Belle image. So please, let us take our chances with the heavy traffic. We really don’t mind.”30 A staff writer for the Bennett Banner also questioned the administration’s explanation for the chained

29 Sandra Neeley, “Comments to the Roving Reporter,” Bennett Banner, November 4, 1969, 5, Bennett Banner Collection, Bennett College Archives.

30 Carolyn Everette, Letter to the Editor, Bennett Banner, November 4, 1969, 5, Bennett Banner Collection, Bennett College Archives. 140 gate. Adjacent to this tongue in cheek article was a cartoon of a chained gate with a sign on one side of the gate that reads “campus” and a giant globe on the other side of the gate that represents

“the world.” She stated, “The problem is a seemingly ever present barrier set up between the

Bennett campus and the world beyond the rear of the chapel.” The author responded to President

Miller’s explanation of the chain as a traffic control measure, with:

Really, now. Perhaps that is an effort of consideration for the campus and students but, its’ a well known fact that there is only one driveway through the “residential” area of the campus...The reason for locked chains couldn’t possibly lie in the idea of keeping out fast moving traffic because the “speed breakers” on the drive have mastered that possible problem.31

Alumnae who remember this issue of the chained gate recounted with a sense of humor how students finally handled the situation after the administration ignored repetitive requests to change this policy. Taking the matter into their own hands, a group of students sat on the chain gate, rocked it back and forth, and caused it to collapse to the ground. Alumnae who witnessed this act of defiance claim that campus security officers were beside themselves, not expecting

Bennett women to commit an act of vandalism. One alumna said she believed they, “called the

Greensboro Police to report the incident.”32 The crash of the gate on Bennett’s campus was not symbolic of a demand for sexual revolution, rather it was emblematic of students reclaiming and redefining the Bennett Ideal for themselves – a woman who was both respected in her community but who was also in charge of her own social and dating life, was steeped in Black culture, and well-integrated into the ways of the outside world.

31 “Why Locked Chains?” Bennett Banner, November 4, 1969, 4, Bennett Banner Collection, Bennett College Archives.

32 Anonymous Interview of Two Bennett Alumnae, interview by author, October 4, 2012, Greensboro, North Carolina. 141

In the fall of 1969, students submitted numerous requests beyond the removal of the chains at the main entrance and they grew tired of the administration ignoring their inquiries.

Student leadership conferences were held in the spring and fall semesters of 1969 and they were hopeful that their voices would be heard. However, they reported, “When the official notice of the decisions was given by the Dean of Instruction, our optimism and enthusiasm quickly dwindled. The meager compensations we had been given only scratched the surface of our basic problems.” In addition to rules that regulated the presence of men on campus and student’s social lives, Bennett women also demanded change regarding the dress code. Dress codes, as seen in

Chapter One, were woven into the cultural fabric of HBCUs, and much time and effort was spent regulating each student’s bodily appearance at both ceremonial events and in the everyday.

During the Player years (1955-1966), students were not allowed to wear pants outside the dormitories. They were also given detailed instructions concerning “What to Wear When.”

Students were told, in writing, to bring simple reserved outfits to campus when they arrived each fall. Some of the clothing items required included a simple black dress, a white dress, flesh-tone stockings, and black heels.33 By the late 1960s, students found the “no pants” rule outdated, old fashioned, and just plain out of touch with the times. When asked about her first impression of

Bennett, an anonymous freshman commented to the student newspaper, “I’ve never heard of not wearing pants downtown…Curfew hours are ridiculous.”34 Alumna Ruth Dennis Phillips remembers organizing a protest during the 1969-1970 school year that specifically targeted the dress code policy that prohibited Bennett women from wearing pants off campus. Having

33 Bennett Student Handbook, 1967-1968, Isaac Miller Papers, Box 20, Bennett College Archives.

34 Diane Dawson, “The Roveing Reporter,” Bennett Banner, November 4, 1969, 5, Bennett Banner Collection, Bennett College Archives. 142 accomplished some measure of success in 1968, students took to the Student Union building once again and staged a lock-in. “Dr. Miller sent over doughnuts and coffee to us. And we sent them back.”35 While President Miller may have made this gesture with sincere intentions, students were not persuaded or impressed with his small token of goodwill. Their standoff ended with a change in the dress code. By the 1970-1971 school year they were allowed to wear pants at their discretion except for ceremonial functions and special events hosted by the college, when strict guides on “what to wear when” were to be followed. As students at a women’s institution that was an active site in the Black student movement, their demands challenged not only assumptions about their ability and needs as Black women students, but their demands reflected a broader shift in Black politics and in women’s politics nationally. As modern Black feminist political formations that were critical of the women’s liberation and Black power movements came into fruition in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bennett women, drawing from their legacy as sustainers of local movement building, made demands that reflected a wave of change in

Black women’s political circles. To these young women, the imagery of respectable Black womanhood no longer required hats, gloves, and pearls, rather their vision of respectable Black womanhood was a liberated woman who wore pants, socialized as she pleased, excelled academically and intellectually, and believed in Black people and their fight for liberation. Their demands did not stop with the decline of the Black student movement after 1969.

In 1973, while the Black student movement was quietening down on other campuses and the women’s liberation movement was in full swing, Bennett students made more demands that reflected their needs and desires as Black women. They claimed that the administration made a promise for an extended curfew that was never fulfilled and showed signs that tensions were

35 Ruth Dennis Phillips, interview by author, October 1, 2012. 143 growing between them and administrators. In particular they voiced concerns over newly appointed Dean Harold Bragg’s approach to handling student grievances. Dr. Bragg would remain a controversial figure at Bennett for the remainder of his tenure.36 They stated:

Students were promised a change of curfew which was supposed to be effective October 1, 1972. This promise has not been met. The Dean of Student Affairs is consistently making promises that aren’t being kept. The students feel promises made that can’t be kept deserve at least an explanation of why, or a progress report of efforts made toward the said promises.37

In addition to demands for more social freedom and demands that were more typical of the Black student movement like the frequent yet important demand for more qualified Black faculty, Bennett students also demanded that information regarding family planning be made available at the student health center on campus. This belief was not founded in radical ideas about sexual liberation so much as it was the byproduct of basic needs and the desire to have options as maturing adults. As other historians have documented, access to birth control and contraceptives in general did not come to the masses of U.S. women because of an immense increase in radical feminist demands for sexual liberation and contraceptive access, rather it became available to the masses through social welfare programs embedded in Lyndon B.

Johnson’s Great Society Programs and the movement against population growth that, in historian

Beth Bailey’s words, “reached near panic proportions in the United States during the 1960s and early 1970s.”38 Anti-population growth and reproductive health organizations often solicited the

36 Student Senate: Revision and Modification of Proposed Grievances, January 1973, Isaac Miller Papers, Box 51, Folder: Students’ Grievance Committee, Bennett College Archives.

37 Student Senate List of Proposed Grievances, January 1973, Isaac Miller Papers, Box 51, Folder: Students’ Grievance Committee, Bennett College Archives.

38 Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999): 107. 144 support of HBCU presidents throughout the 1960s and early 1970s.39 Students at HBCUs took political stances on reproductive issues during this era both as a demographic that felt the impact of access (or lack thereof) and as a community that had historically been targeted by the eugenics movement, which had a relationship with many of the organizations of the population growth movement. Because of this complex history and the popularity of Black nationalist politics which often couched birth control as genocide, students varied in their opinions on reproductive issues.

Very little literature exists on the history of reproductive rights and the dominant political views on sex and reproduction, both administratively and communally, at HBCUs. The scholarship that does exist focuses nearly exclusively on primarily white institutions. Beth

Bailey’s Sex in the Heartland is probably the most well-known history dedicated to the topic, yet focuses on the University of Kansas, a public PWI.40 While it is true that during the 1960s reproductive rights were a heavily debated topic that mobilized women and their allies into action at white women’s colleges and PWIs generally speaking, Black Colleges were also sites where reproductive freedoms were taken up as political issues for public debate and sometimes action. In many ways the publicly expressed views on these issues paralleled those found at white institutions and society in general. Like their white counterparts, members of the HBCU community were divided on the issues including the usage of contraception, mainly the birth

39 While conducting archival research for this project I came across numerous communications from Planned Parenthood World Population to Black college presidents. They asked administrators to circulate information related to world population control and family planning on their campuses. Additionally, Presidents like Willa B. Player were solicited for their services as board members. For example, see: Mrs. Frances Breed, Letter to Willa Player, February 6, 1964, Player Presidential Papers, Box 6, Folder: B, Bennett College Archives.

40 Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland. 145 control pill, and abortion. Students tended to vary from one end of the political spectrum to the other on all the major issues related to reproduction. What made the divide around reproductive rights more complex at Black colleges was the fact that, unlike white students and faculty allies at PWIs, African Americans were also faced with racism that permeated the possibilities of their reproductive lives. Race as a point of analysis and as a tool of oppression could not be wrung out of the debates at hand.

What is notable is that instead of framing debates on reproductive freedom within a rights-based political framework solely, many HBCU students utilized a political framework that we now recognize as “reproductive justice,” though that term was not formally used yet. This framework offered space for serious consideration of how poverty and race factored into a person’s ability to access reproductive care. It often posited the state as an entity that prevented poor people and people of color from reproductive access, through the creation and support of structural violence. While opinions varied on the use of abortion and birth control methods,

HBCU students tended to frame their arguments not within a liberal rights-based framework, but within the context of their experiences as African Americans and in comradeship with poor and working-class communities who were targeted by forced sterilization efforts. Students often used and identified with the Black nationalist discourse of abortion, birth control, and forced sterilization as state sponsored genocide, but there was also a contingent of feminist-minded individuals who argued for choice using the language of mainstream feminist discourse. For example, the students of Bennett College experimented with the notion that they should be able to make reproductive decisions for themselves and demanded that information relevant to reproductive choice be made available on campus.41

41 “Student Senate: Revision and Modification of Proposed Grievances.” 146

Before abortion was made legal at the federal level through the Roe v. Wade Supreme

Court case, the staff of the Bennett Banner published ads in their pages for abortion services.

They received considerable pushback on this decision in 1971. Bennett Banner editors Janee

Blue and Myra Davis, both seniors from Charlotte, North Carolina, wrote:

Campuses across the nation are setting up referral services or health centers to help their own. Just having someone to confer with could save the life of a desperate student. It does not take much money to offer a little guidance, comfort, or advice. The Banner staff was attacked for running abortion ads in its paper, not by students who benefitted from the information, but by faculty members and trustees. Why? Can it be attributed to close-mindedness – Victorian ideas? Must our students seek help out in the streets? Must they turn to butchers in dark rooms or to suicide?42

Blue and Davis couched this response from conservative faculty, board members, and alumnae as an attempt to maintain an air of respectability regarding Bennett women.

Drugs, Pregnancies, venereal diseases, and alcoholism are realities! This is not a scare. These problems exist throughout the country. Students on campus know the seriousness of the “New Morality.” They have faced up to the realities. But faculty, parents, and alumnae have not. They would rather see these problems discussed behind closed doors. “Bennett College has no such problems.” They have persuaded the more idealistic students to believe that all is well on campus. Our college, small as it is, has its share of students who need help that cannot be obtained from the classroom. No one is saying that Bennett students condone drugs, illicit sex, or alcohol. But services should be made available to those who want them, if it’s only two.43

The Bennett student newspaper was not the only HBCU newspaper to publish abortion service provider ads in their pages before and after the Roe decision. During the early 1970s, abortion

42 Janee Blue and Myra Davis, “From The Editors Desk,” Bennett Banner, November 18, 1971, 2, Bennett Banner Collection, Bennett College Archives.

43 Ibid. 147 ads were prominent in HBCU student newspapers at various schools in Nashville, Atlanta, and

Greensboro. While accessing abortion services in these southern cities was not legal in most cases, students published ads in their newspapers that offered abortion services and care from

New York, California, and other states where abortion was legal prior to the landmark Supreme

Court case in 1973. One ad, published in the December 1970 issue of the Fisk Forum stated,

“Abortions up to 24 weeks of pregnancy are now legal in New York State. There are no residency restrictions at cooperating hospitals and clinics. Only the consent of the patient and the performing physician is required.”44 This ad urged readers to get help early because “early abortions are simpler and safer.” Additionally, an address and telephone number were offered at the readers’ service. Another ad promised to save those seeking abortion from “quacks and inept butchers.” These ads often used the rhetoric of medical professionals who were supportive of legalizing abortion at the federal level. They used horrifying stories of underground illegal abortions to advocate for women to contact their organizations to arrange “safe, legal” abortions in states where it was not illegal if performed by a medical professional in a hospital environment. A 1970 National Abortion Council for Therapeutic Abortions and Family Planning ad in the Fisk Forum claimed that in 1969:

some 700,000 illegal abortions were performed in the United States. Almost without exception exorbitant prices were charged, hospital facilities were not available and a complete medical staff was not present to cope with emergencies. Some of those girls died unnecessarily. Others suffered severe infections. Still others will never again be able to bear a child due to incompetent treatment.45

44 Abortion Ad, Fisk Forum, December 1970, 6, Fisk Forum Collection, Fisk University Archives.

45 Ibid. 148

Students continued to publish abortion ads in their newspapers at HBCUs after it was made legal nationally. They were not the only members of the HBCU community concerned with the issue.

One of the most well-known Black abortion rights advocates of the era, Dr. Dorothy Brown attended, taught at, and served as a board of trustee member at HBCUs.

Brown educated many HBCU students on issues related to sex and reproduction and served as a consultant to many HBCU administrations on matters related to health services.

Students took queues from Brown regarding the importance of access to reproductive care. In

1966 she became the first African American woman to serve as a state legislator in Tennessee and pushed for an expanded abortion rights law that would permit abortion in cases of rape and incest. At that time abortion was only legal in Tennessee if the pregnant woman’s life was in danger.46 Though she was an open supporter of sex education and reproductive rights for women, she also believed that reproductive care should be performed in the safest environment possible or as she stated, “a well-staffed and equipped hospital facility.” 47 She advised HBCU administrations to refrain from providing medical care that involved any significant risk. For example, she advised the Miller administration of Bennett College to avoid involving itself in: contraceptive care, yearly pelvic exams, routine pap smears, and elective D and C procedures, among other things. In Dr. Brown’s opinion those procedures, “should be taken care of prior to admission for the school year.”48 Dr. Brown also recommended that all new students be required

46 U.S. National Library of Medicine, “Changing the Face of Medicine: Celebrating America’s Women Physicians,” accessed September 1, 2012, http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_46.html.

47 Dorothy Brown, “Suggestions for Student Health Services- Bennett College,” Folder: Student Health Services Recommendations/Report Dr. Dorothy Brown, Box 20, Isaac Miller Papers, Bennett College Archives.

48 Ibid. 149 to submit documentation of an in-depth health examination, and that all returning students be required to submit documentation of a renewed health examination that included a complete blood count test, urinalysis, blood pressure measures, and a pregnancy test.49 Brown’s recommendations concerning health services were not conservative in comparison to those at other colleges and universities across the nation. In fact, they were the norm. As Beth Bailey’s work Sex in the Heartland reveals, “in 1970, fifty three percent of American college health services, offered no gynecological care to women students, and seventy two percent did not prescribe contraceptives to single or married students.”50

In 1971, Brown spoke to a group at Fisk and explained that the earliest anti-abortion laws were passed by “male legislators in an effort to control women’s actions.” Brown was familiar with these sorts because she fought them in the Tennessee legislature. In addition to the outright patriarchal anti-feminist law-makers, Brown named “moralists and the church” as her enemies in the fight for abortion access. Furthermore, she was a medical doctor, and like ads in the student newspaper, Brown cited underground abortionists as the major enemy in the struggle to legalize abortion at the state and federal levels. Brown explained to students that the business of illegal abortions was a lucrative one and that poor and Black women were often the targets of abortionists who charged hundreds and even thousands of dollars for the procedure in states where it was still illegal. Inspired by her talk, an unidentified student journalist wrote,

“Hopefully, Dr. Dorothy Brown will be successful in her next attempt to repeal the present abortion bill, and free our black women from the tentacles of money-eager unclean

49 Ibid.

50 Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland, 124. 150 abortionists.”51 The Fisk student journalist clearly admired Brown’s commitment to the struggle for women’s access. They stated, “Dr. Brown works for the people. She sends eight to ten women to New York to get a legal abortion each week. On Tuesdays abortions are free in New

York; so all that is needed is the money for transportation.”52 Brown was appreciated as a source of knowledge as she provided answers to student questions like: “Does the pill make you sterile?” and “Is it true that quinine tablets are an effective method for abortion?” Students also clearly respected her as an activist who was fighting for Black women’s rights.

In addition to including abortion care ads and coverage of Brown’s work, students wrote extensively about the personal politics of abortion and birth control. Pro-feminist stances were often taken, but so were anti-feminist stances, usually by men students who claimed that birth control and abortion were weapons in white supremacist attempts at Black genocide. For example, a male student in the Atlanta University Center stated in the Spelman student newspaper, “Genocide is real. It is coming at Black people in two major forms. The first includes subtle tactics such as birth control, using mass media to kill our minds and flooding our communities with drugs.”53 However, in 1975, when Boston doctor Kenneth C. Edelin was convicted of manslaughter for performing an abortion on a seventeen-year-old after twenty weeks gestation, Fisk student Jacqueline Styles advocated for reproductive choice. She did so in a justice-based framework stating:

Poor and minority women are more likely to have late term abortions. And if abortions are made more difficult to obtain after

51 “Dr. Brown Speaks,” Fisk Forum, November 13, 1972, 3, 8, Fisk Forum Collection, Fisk Archives.

52 Ibid.

53 Kojo M. Owusu, “The Reality of Black Genocide,” October 1975, Spelman Spotlight, 3, Spelman Spotlight Collection, Spelman Archives. 151

specified weeks many women may resort to terminating unwanted pregnancies through butchery and unprofessional aide. This must not be allowed to happen. Professional medical attention regarding abortions is the wisest and safest method to maintain the mother’s health and terminate unwanted existing pregnancies.54

This stance was common among many members of the HBCU community, but others were more hesitant to wholeheartedly embrace birth control and abortion. Kathy Johnson, associate editor of the Spelman Spotlight in 1973, presented the issues of birth control and abortion as a problem the

Black community had to face, not as liberating tools for Black women. She stated:

“Take a look around you- basically, the birth control clinics are located in or near the Black community. Why? Maybe its another one of the White Man’s attempts to program us into performing desired actions. Abortion and birth control – eventual genocide, or population control? Don’t check it out, check into it.”55

Johnson also surveyed students across the AUC and found that men were more hesitant to embrace birth control and abortion than women students. However, support for and rejection of birth control and abortion did not always fall along lines of gender. Clifton McKight, a

Morehouse student stated that he believed, “It has its genocidal tendencies, but it could be a good thing because it is something that people need to use. I wouldn’t tell a chic not to use it…”56

While birth control and abortion divided students, forced sterilization was an issue they were able to unite around.

In the 1960s and early 1970s legislators around the country proposed sterilization laws that would force women receiving welfare benefits to be sterilized after birthing a certain number

54 Jacqueline Styles, “Commentary,” Fisk Forum, April 2, 1975, 2, Fisk Forum Collection, Fisk University Archives.

55 Kathy Johnson, “Comment on Abortion,” Spelman Spotlight, January 1973, 2, 6, Spelman Spotlight Collection, Spelman Archives.

56 Ibid. 152 of children. Thirteen states considered punitive sterilization laws during this time: California,

Tennessee, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi,

Ohio, South Carolina, and Virginia.57 In 1971, Tennessee House Bill 20 was proposed. It called for women receiving Aid for Dependent Children (AFDC) to be sterilized if they had more than one “illegitimate” child. HBCU students allied themselves with the leaders of the National

Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) and feminist organizations that called for HB 20 to be struck down. At Fisk University, students kept their campus community informed about the bill and its potential impact on Black people. They wrote about the proposed bill in their student newspaper repetitively, surveyed their study body regarding their opinion on the bill, and protested with welfare rights organizers at the state capitol.

Generally speaking, the campus community was outraged at what the bill proposed.

Student Catherine Goodin was quoted in the Fisk Forum as saying, “I think that the Tennessee legislature would be out of their god-damn mind to pass the sterilization bill.”58 Student Boneita

Jones stated, “I feel Representative Larry Bates proposed bill on sterilization and welfare is outrageous. Here is another initial attempt at mass genocide, and an attempt to carry out the concept of “Divide and conquer” of Our Black masses.”59 As many other African Americans across the country argued, Fisk students saw the bill as a racist population control tactic.

Students called the Tennessee legislators’ motives into question. They probed politicians’ insistence that welfare rolls were straining the state and federal budgets and pointed to the

57 Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2003): 68-69.

58 “Campus Rap!” Fisk Forum, March 19, 1971, 5, Fisk Forum Collection, Fisk University Archives.

59 Ibid. 153 bloated defense budget pouring into the Vietnam War as the culprit of financial deprivation.60

While this bill clearly targeted women, gender discrimination was not couched as the sole or main issue at hand; rather, race and class were central to arguments made by Fisk student writers and others. This stance on the sterilization bill was reflective of the views of the movement for reproductive justice (though it was not termed this at the time) and the welfare rights movement, two politically connected movements led by women of color. Black liberation organizations such as the Black Panther Party (BPP) also joined forces with these organizations to defeat sterilization bills. The BPP covered Tennessee HB 20 and bills proposed in other states extensively in their publication The Black Panther and supported women of color led efforts to stop forced sterilization.61 While forced sterilization united students and the campus communities of Nashville in 1971, not all students believed they were united across genders.

In a 1973 opinion piece penned by Lorenzo Benn, Jr., a student in the AUC, articulated a preference for a gender binary and expressed gender as a natural construct, not a social one. This was not uncommon for the era:

As I look around me, I see too much conflict between the men and women of the A.U. Center. We should be enjoying each other. We should not be against one another but working together…I think once we start living in accordance with our rightful role as men and women, we will find that we will become worthy of this respect. We are college students in pursuit of an education. A very vital and significant part of our college endeavors should be to find within ourselves a realization of what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman. The attainment of this particular aspect of our education could very well be the most outstanding factor of college education in relation to our success in life.62

60“Ibid.

61 The Black Panther, May 1, 1971.

62 Lorenzo Benn, Jr., “Essence of Male and Female,” Spelman Spotlight, November 1973, Spelman Spotlight Collection, Spelman Archives. 154

Benn’s opinion was not out of line with the ethos of campus rules and regulations that delineated what was deemed appropriate for a woman student and what was allowed for a man. His commentary hints at the belief that tensions existed because students failed to take on what he deemed to be acceptable gender roles. In the spring of the same year, the Women’s Political

Caucus at Fisk expressed that they were dissatisfied with the all-male line-up of candidates’ responses to women’s interests on campus, showing that Fisk women did not believe, like Benn and others, that the root of the gender divide at Fisk resided in their failure to adhere to any binary notion of gender and gender roles. Instead, they expressed a divide rooted in their belief that women’s interests were, “overlooked, omitted, and blatantly ignored.” In their opinion, they had the power to sway the vote and intended to use this power to make demands of candidates.

They stated, “We the political power base; Black women have taken the initiative to seize election time to express our demands to candidates.” They stated there was in fact a divide between men and women on campus, but that a non-chauvinistic response was needed. They urged, “Black women, make a serious assessment of the candidates in view of past accomplishment, seriousness, business like attitude, and the respect these candidates have shown us. Do not lower yourselves to dealing in a game of personalities. We seek the perpetuation of our interest and the victory of our ideals.”63

Not coincidentally, Benn’s piece about tensions within the AUC across gender was published at time when the entire community was on edge about a series of sexual assaults that targeted women students. On September 6, 1973, at 11:55PM, Spelman student Sheree Jackson reported to her resident director, Ms. Lillie Harris, that she had been raped at gun point by four

63 “Women’s Political Caucus,” Fisk Forum, April 13, 1973, 4, Fisk Forum Collection, Fisk University Archives. 155 young men one hour prior. Jackson was, in Harris’ words, “accosted by these men outside of

Spelman’s Campus at Greensferry and Chestnut Streets and forced to accompany them to an area near Morris Brown College.” The following day, Ms. Harris reported the rape to Dean of

Student Life, Barbara King. The intersection where the four men captured Jackson was at the entrance to Spelman’s campus. According to notes taken by Harris and/or King, Jackson tried to avoid the men by crossing the street, but they confronted her. The rape of Sheree Jackson was but one serious incident that embroiled the AUC in debate over campus security in the fall of

1973. Several incidents of violence rocked the AUC, and directly impacted students at

Morehouse and Spelman Colleges in particular. Robberies and gun violence were serious concerns, but rape and sexual assault were the acts of violence that concerned the Spelman family the most as it was often Spelman students who were the targets of this violence in particular. There were at least two incidents of rape and one incident of attempted rape of

Spelman students that occurred during the early weeks of the fall 1973 semester and quite possibly more that went unreported or ignored. In response to these attacks, students attended a meeting in a freshman dormitory in early September and many informed their parents of the recent acts of violence in and around Spelman’s campus and the broader Atlanta University

Center.

In response to learning about these rapes and other acts of violence, many parents immediately made contact with the Spelman administration out of concern for their children.

One day prior to the rape of Sheree Jackson, one parent wrote Spelman’s Dean of Students and asked about a shooting of a young man at the nearby Dairy Queen and the rape of an unnamed young woman, presumably a Spelman student. This rape occurred on the Morehouse campus just a few days prior to the rape of Sheree Jackson. She stated that even though she and her family 156 were New Yorkers and were not completely unfamiliar with crime, “When we visited your campus in May, I was not aware that Spelman was located in a ghetto area since we did not know anything about Atlanta.”64 Despite the fact that the rape occurred on the Morehouse campus, the insinuation from this statement, and several others like it, was that the perpetrators were more than likely locals who lived in the surrounding neighborhoods of the West End, not college students within the AUC.

In another incident of violence, during October 1973, Morehouse student Benson Cooke was wounded by a gunshot while on a date with Spelman student Mary Lynne Diggs. Digg’s father wrote President Albert Manley in response to the Benson shooting and general safety concerns stating, “It is my sincere hope that all necessary steps will be taken to assure that the young women and men in the Center are safe from would be attackers. Taking such approaches is definitely incumbent upon the several administrators.”65 Parents called for the protection of their children from what they often assumed was violence perpetrated by outsiders and asked,

“Are plans being stepped up in relation to security in the neighborhood of the Atlanta complex?”

One parent, Louise Sloan, asked directly if the rapes were committed by “college boys or outsiders?” She, unlike most parents who responded to the violence at the AUC, did not rule out any suspects including male students from Morehouse or the co-ed AUC institutions. Mrs. Sloan also added that she was concerned about, “the mental hospital for sex perverts located near the campus—were these patients allowed to go about without escorts?”66

64 Marilyn L. LaMarr, Letter to Naomi R. Chivers, September 5, 1973, Albert Manley Collection, Box 118, Folder: Letters to Parents, Spelman College Archives.

65 Letter to Albert Manley from William P. Diggs, October 24, 1973.

66 Louise Sloan, Letter to Albert Manley, September 14, 1973, Albert Manley Collection, Box 118, Folder: Letters to Parents, Spelman College Archives.

157

Beyond requesting the city of Atlanta to increase police patrols on the streets near the campus at night and increasing Spelman security guard foot patrols, Spelman’s administrative response to sexual violence, and safety in general, was directed at the individual behavior of women students, not the behavior of those who committed acts of sexual violence, toxic masculinity, or what is now referred to as rape culture. Student Affairs staff responded by telling

Spelmanites how to behave in order to avoid rape. While President Manley did not deny that rapes occurred and did not excuse the violence, he pointed to students’ behaviors and choices that he believed led to the attacks. In a letter to parents, he stated that the students who were raped, “clearly ignored the guidance, advice, and admonition they had been given by the Dean and her staff.” In order to allay their concerns about safety on campus, Manley revealed to parents and alumnae that none of the three incidents of rape or attempted rape that were reported, occurred on the campus of Spelman College proper. “The fact is that there have been no rapes on the Spelman campus...One girl got into a car with strangers; another was off campus alone at night; the third was off campus with her date in a remote area of an adjoining campus late at night.” According to this logic, being abducted at gun point at the main entrance to Spelman’s campus and taken down the street to be raped, as Sheree Jackson was, did not qualify as occurring “on the Spelman campus.” Manley and other administrative staff clearly believed that rape could be avoided if students followed the rules of the institution and heeded the advice of administrators regarding personal safety. In particular, they should not be out alone at night.

Additionally, his recollection of the facts about the rapes did not take into account that there were quite possibly additional rapes that went unreported at Spelman, as his language and tone projected the assumption that all rapes and attempted rapes had been reported and that he and the rest of the college administration were completely aware of all violent incidents. 158

Many Spelman students also centered individual behaviors of women students in rape cases and focused on the surrounding West End neighborhood as the main source of danger for students, especially women. Reporting the details of the three incidents of rape and attempted rape, Spelman Spotlight reporter Amelia Hamilton not only covered a perceived lack of security on campus, but also stated that it was up to women students to protect themselves. She argued that they must be conscious of what they wore and how they carried themselves, by travelling in groups and by being highly selective when it came to the company they surrounded themselves with. Hamilton warned, “We must realize, though, that everyone who chooses to socialize, or whatever, among us here is not always a student nor necessarily a person of character.” Hamilton also warned students of individuals she called, “undesirable characters” and “vultures” that she believed resided in the surrounding West End community.67 Hamilton closed by saying that self- protection was the way to begin showing real concern for their own safety. She was not the only advocate for women students being “proactive” through their dress or ability to defend themselves.

In what was presumably viewed as a proactive and practical response to the threat of attack, Dean of Students Barbara King provided an outlet for self-defense classes for Spelman students in the form of Judo and Karate classes. Student Deborah Jeffries was in charge of organizing the classes, “Sisters, “Come Out and Help Yourselves Protect Yourselves. The Life

You Save May Be Your Own!!,” was the rallying call printed in the student newspaper. “With the steadily increasing crime rate and different forms of violence being practiced, all young

67 Amelia Hamilton, “Who Takes the Blame?” Spelman Spotlight, October 1973, 2, 7, Spelman Spotlight Collection, Spelman College Archives.

159 ladies need to be knowledgeable of some method of “Self Defense,” a student journalist wrote.68

While this response to rape and sexual assault was aimed at empowering young women and did not directly presume guilt on the part of survivors, ultimately the onerous was still on women to solve the problem. Students had to pay a small fee and take classes in order to learn how to physically defend themselves.

On November 15, 1973, a forum was held at Clark College for public dialogue regarding campus crime. The series of rapes and attempted rapes were central to the conversation. The forum’s panel consisted of three men: Stan Denton, Editor-in-Chief of the Morehouse student newspaper, The Maroon Tiger, Brother Amechi, a graduate student at Atlanta University and alumni of Morehouse, and Colonel Brisco, the head of AUC security. Briscoe cited tension in the

West End community surrounding the AUC and “inadequate dressing apparel worn by the female students of the A.U. Center.” He also victim-blamed survivors by describing two reported rapes as “invited” and maintained that security officers were responsible for protecting

AUC property, not students. Denton and Amechi suggested that work study students replace hired campus security officers to, “eliminate the profit gain motive inherent in any position that offers financial enrichment while simultaneously deleting a cohesive type of base that would be more than likely to exist among student workers.” A debate about the presence of Atlanta City

Police on the campus of Spelman ensued due to a charge that Atlanta PD was making illegitimate arrests. For many students and community members, the invitation of patrol units from the Atlanta Police Department into the AUC brought unwanted attention and a different safety risk to the campus community and the surrounding neighborhood, which was

68 “Defend Yourself,” Spelman Spotlight, October 1973, 1, 4, Spelman Spotlight Collection, Spelman Archives. 160 predominantly Black. In addition to the increase in foot patrols at the invitation of Spelman’s administration, AUC institutions also installed new street lights with the presumed intent of making campus well-lit at night and thus making it safer for students to walk across their respective campuses.69

As scholars like Roderick Ferguson have shown, an increased police presence on college campuses, like the one described here, and the institutionalization of campus police departments was on the rise in the early 1970s. This building up of security apparatuses on college campuses was a direct reaction to actions of the student movement and was not generated to protect students as administrative officials often couched it. In fact, the rise of institutionalized campus policing came at the urging of the Nixon administration in the document, The Report of the

President’s Commission on Campus Unrest. While the Nixon administration claimed the commission and their report was done in response to the killings of Kent and Jackson State students, the commission and its findings were used to make recommendations for the surveillance and punishment of students who were couched as threats to democracy due to their political demands. Essentially, the establishment of campus police in the post-1960s era was an attempt to squelch student movement building and to protect the property of the university.70

When AUC campus security chief Briscoe made the comment that it was not his duty to protect students, he was essentially correct. His duty was, in fact, to protect the property of Atlanta

University Center institutions.

69 Debbi Newton, “Forum On Campus,” Spelman Spotlight, December 1973, Spelman Spotlight Collection, Spelman Archives.

70 Roderick Ferguson, We Demand. 161

Coverage of these rape cases dwindled as the school year went on. By the spring semester student newspaper coverage of the assaults ceased at Spelman. As Beverly Guy-Sheftall commented, “it would be hard to imagine that it was poor men in the neighborhood,” who raped

Spelman women in 1973, yet, the West End neighborhood would continue to be seen as the source of danger to AUC students, while campus was viewed as a safety zone free from interpersonal violence, particularly Spelman’s campus. While students clearly feared for their own safety, the administrations, security forces, and many students themselves, were convinced that if women students simply maintained appropriate behavior, including but not limited to their physical mobility off campus and at night, their dress, and their choices in friends and acquaintances, they would be able to avoid rape and sexual assault. The response to these cases demonstrates the limits of feminism at Spelman and on college campuses in general during this era. Still today, despite many decades of feminist organizing, sexual assault on college campuses is still an issue students are actively fighting against. As student demands and support for reproductive rights and advocacy for reproductive justice grew into the 1970s, Spelmanites continued to turn their attention more and more inward. As the next chapter shows, while the vast majority did not identify as feminists explicitly, they were empowered by a growing sense of Black feminist politics and organized their most daring action yet in 1976, to demand that a

Black woman be president of their institution. 162

V. “WE ARE WILLING TO GO TO THE LAST EXTREME”: SPELMAN COLLEGE AND THE FIGHT FOR A BLACK WOMAN PRESIDENT, 1975-1976.

In April 1975 President Albert Manley announced to the Spelman community that he intended to retire at the conclusion of the academic year. This announcement sent the campus community into a year-long battle with a group of students, faculty, staff, and alumnae pitted against the Spelman Board of Trustees in a struggle over who would become the sixth President of the College. Many members of the Spelman community expected a Black woman to replace

Albert Manley in 1976. To them it seemed long overdue for Spelman to be led by a Black woman. After all, there was certainly a qualified pool of Black women who could do the job and

Spelman was a testament to the existence of that pool. Spelman’s Director of Public Relations

Nora McNiven declared to a reporter from Jet, “Dr. Manley has been dedicated to training young women for leadership…and this school has been here for 95 years. To say there are no qualified

Black women to be president, well, you might as well close us down.”1 Despite being, from its founding in 1881, dedicated explicitly to the education of Black women, the Board of Trustees had never selected a Black woman to lead the institution. So, naturally there was widespread sentiment that it was well past time for them to do so. When students arrived to campus in the fall semester of 1975 there was much talk about who would be the final candidate. When members of the campus community realized the Board refused to make their intentions clear on the matter, students initiated a response and joined allied faculty, staff, and alumnae in leading a a twenty-six-hour lock-in of the Board of Trustees on April 22, 1976. This chapter details the long and intense battle between the Spelman Board of Trustees and the Ad-Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family over who would become President that year.

1 “Held as Hostages, Trustees Yield to Angry Spelmanites,” Jet, May 13, 1976, 22-23. 163

The lock-in did not result in the hiring of a Black woman for the position. That would not come until 1987 with the arrival of Johnetta B. Cole, affectionally called Spelman’s “Sister

President.” However, the lock in was the most militant action Spelman had experienced in its 95- year history and it left a permanent impact on the campus. Beverly Guy-Sheftall declares, “That was the first really serious gender issue that took place at Spelman.”2 While Guy-Sheftall may have been, according to her own recollection, a quiet student at Spelman, upon her return as a faculty member she quickly became an outspoken member of the campus community. She participated in the lock-in with students and colleagues and went on to found and direct the

Women’s Research and Resource Center at Spelman just a few years later. While Guy-Sheftall certainly identified as a Black feminist in the 1970s, most students did not identify similarly. Nor did the majority of faculty and staff. This would continue to be the case even as radical Black feminism took shape in the form of the Combahee River Collective and many other similar formations in the mid-to-late 1970s. However, as a women’s institution dedicated to, as Norah

McNiven phrased it, “training young women,” many Spelmanites were empowered to make demands of their administration and the Board of Trustees.

This Black woman power ethos also grew out of a long tradition of campus organizing against in loco parentis and white supremacy. Just as Spelmanites of the late 1950s and early

1960s were empowered to critique the Manley administration, Spelmanites of the 1970s were willing to make demands and take action. Like their fore sisters’ analysis of the parallels between segregation’s racialized rhetoric and strict campus codes of conduct, Spelman women drew ideological connections between the Presidential Search Committee’s inability or outright reluctance to find a qualified Black woman, and structural racism and sexism in larger society.

2 Beverly Guy-Sheftall, interview with author, December 13, 2016. 164

Spelman’s campus culture was certainly still inundated with gender normative traditions in the mid-1970s, yet despite a wide variety of gender and class politics represented within the Ad-Hoc

Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family, all agreed that Black women were overdue the opportunity to lead. With this as the basis for their organizing they made two initial demands in

1975: 1.) that they be included in the process of selecting their president in a meaningful way and

2.) that their president be a Black woman. Seniors Jeta Edwards, Debbie Newton, Margaret Lee, and Zinora Mitchell were instrumental in making these demands. All four of these young women were easily identified as leaders on campus, serving in student government positions and as writers and editors of the student newspaper, which during this time was very outspoken regarding social and political issues.3

After Manley announced his retirement in 1975 many people expressed to him personally their desire to see a Black woman get the job. For example, activist and Episcopal Priest Pauli

Murray wrote to Albert Manley in September 1975:

Since you have welcomed me as part of the Spelman Family, I make bold with a suggestion. Spelman could continue to have your wisdom and experience available to it if you became President Emeritus and Dr. Audrey F. Manley were appointed as the next President. Would you be kind enough to pass this suggestion along to the Search Committee? It seems to me that it is in line with International Women’s Year to find a qualified woman as the next president of Spelman, and certainly Dr. Audrey should be considered along with others.4

3 Angela Pendergrass, “Spelman SGA,” Spelman Spotlight, October 1975, 2, Spelman Spotlight Collection, Spelman College Archives.

4 Pauli Murray, Letter to Albert Manley, September 2, 1975, Spelman College Board of Trustees Collection, Box 1, Folder: June –December 1975, Spelman College Archives.

165

Manley did as Murray requested and forwarded a copy of the letter to search committee co-chair

Marian Wright Edelman, stating that he was “sending this suggestion from Pauli Murray as I have sent all recommendations I have received,” making it clear that he was not attempting to influence the search process by selectively forwarding only certain recommendations.5 Even still,

Manley secretly agreed with Murray’s opinion that a Black woman should take the reins and his desire to see that happen would be made more public as the year progressed.

During the summer months the Board of Trustees formed a search committee to locate candidates to replace Manley. Beyond expecting the next leader of Spelman to be a Black woman, many students were also grappling with the fact that they did not have meaningful representation on the Board of Trustees. When they returned to campus from summer break in the fall of 1975, student leaders begin to organize around a demand for a student representative on the Board. Journalists with the Spelman Spotlight, led by Editor-in-Chief Debbie Newton, did their research about student involvement with Boards of Trustees. They learned they were the only undergraduate student body in the Atlanta University Center (AUC) that did not have a student representative on their respective Board. 6 Students did not have a representative on the newly formed Presidential Search Committee either. This committee was created without the input of faculty or students. The Board selected trustees Mrs. Laura Spelman Rockefeller Chasin,

Mr. Francis Day Rogers, Mrs. Asa Yancey, and Mr. W. Gerald Davenport as members of the

5 Albert Manley, Letter to Marian Wright Edelman, September 8, 1975, Spelman College Board of Trustees Collection, Box 1, Folder: June –December 1975, Spelman College Archives.

6 Deborah Newton, “A Position Statement on the Student Vote on the College Board of Trustees,” Spelman Spotlight, April 1976, 3, Spelman Spotlight Collection, Spelman College Archives; Spelman Student Government Association Executive Cabinet, Letter to Spelman Board of Trustees, April 5, 1976, Albert Manley Collection, Box 19, Folder: Materials Concerning the Next President, Spelman College Archives. 166 search committee, and appointed alumna Marian Wright Edelman and Harvard Professor Eoin

W. Trevelyn to co-chair the committee. Upon learning that a search committee formed over the summer, faculty passed a resolution and, along with students and alumnae, requested seats on the committee with voting privileges. On October 14, the search committee sent a letter in response to this request and denied faculty, students, and alumnae voting positions on the committee.

Instead of voting privileges, the search committee maintained that they made adequate provisions for these constituencies’ input in other forms. They defined input as providing feedback on the following three issues: “(1) the major tasks facing Spelman over the next five to ten years; (2) the principal characteristics required of the next Spelman president (and the names of any persons that representatives would care to submit for consideration by the Committee); and (3) further ways in which the faculty might contribute to the successful search for Spelman’s next president.”7 At the request of the committee, and despite being disappointed and suspicious that their voices would not be heard, students, faculty, and alumnae selected representatives to meet with the committee regarding the selection process. After the November 1975 Board of

Trustees meeting the search committee asked faculty, alumnae, and students to select five representatives from their respective constituencies to interview candidates for the position.

While this represented progress in the Board’s view of faculty and student input, the extent of the progress was limited. Administrative staff members were not asked to select representatives for the interview process. Instead, members of the search committee appointed two academic deans

7 Ad Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family, Speech Given to Board of Trustees Chair Francis Day Rogers and Board of Trustees, Albert Manley Collection, Box 19, Folder: Trustee Lock-In April 22, 1976, Spelman College Archives.

167 and a business manager to these posts. More importantly, no voting power was granted to faculty, staff, students, or alumnae.8

Four months later, in February 1976, three candidates were brought to campus for interviews. Students, faculty, and alumnae participated in these interviews and were informed that two additional candidates would be brought to campus soon at which point they would have the opportunity to interview them. Much to their dismay, additional candidates never arrived.

Instead, during the month of March candidate Donald Stewart and his family were, as concerned

Spelman community members put it, “highly visible on the campus.” Stewart was an up-and- coming Black administrator who had one year prior earned his doctorate in Public

Administration. He was Ivy League educated and impressed the search committee with a resume that included philanthropic, administrative, and international experience. During a March 22 visit to campus, Stewart was, according to members of the Ad-Hoc Committee of the Concerned

Spelman Family, “accompanied by a member of the Search Committee who had previously arranged meetings with various Spelman administrators.”9 It is likely this unnamed representative from the search committee was Marian Wright Edelman.10 Rumors began to spread that the search committee had already unofficially selected Stewart as the candidate for the position. People wondered if Stewart’s connection to the Ford Foundation, as a former employee, motivated the search committee to select him in hopes that he would bring about

8 Ibid.

9 Ad Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family, Speech Given to Board.

10 Guy-Sheftall, interview.

168 substantial financial support from Ford.11 People on campus who believed a Black woman should be selected were shocked. Stewart’s return to campus prompted immediate responses from students, including a group of twenty-five freshmen who met to discuss about their concerns. Senior Jeta Edwards quickly fell into a leadership position within the group, boldly agreeing to chair what students named the Executive Committee of Concerned Students for a

Black Woman President. Edwards, a philosophy major from New Haven, Connecticut, and

Social Chairman of the Spelman Student Government Association submitted a statement on the committee’s behalf. Copies were mailed to members of the search committee and circulated around campus stating:

We the undersigned believe that the essence of Spelman College is Black womanhood and that the future of the college depends on loyalty to this concept. Hence, we believe that the leadership position of college president should be centered in the personage of a Black female. To go against this precept is to be false to the values that Spelman has embedded in its student body over the past ninety- five years. We are willing to go to the last extreme to stand behind our firm convictions.12

By April 1, 1976, the students who were active in the circulation of this letter called on the

Spelman Student Government Association (SSGA) to lead the student body in a collective response regarding the matter. On April 2, the SSGA executive cabinet met and decided to take

11 Albert Manley, Speech to Campus Community, May 4, 1976, Albert Manley Collection, Box 19, Folder: Materials Concerning the Next President, Spelman College Archives.

12 Jeta Edwards, Letter to Eoin W. Trevelyan, March 26, 1976, Albert Manley Collection, Box 19, Folder: Materials Concerning the Next President, Spelman College Archives.

169 on the responsibility of leading the student body in demanding that a Black woman be selected for the job.13

By this point administrators across campus were undoubtedly feeling the mounting tension. Students had been expressing numerous grievances for some time, including the fact that they believed they should have a seat on the Board of Trustees. Many also believed that the administration did not take their complaints seriously. Unexpectedly, the college administration invited the SSGA to meet with them on April 4, 1976, to hear their latest grievances. It was a strangely-timed invitation according to some students who believed the administration extended the invite out of fear of potential action around the presidential search process. Writing for the

Spelman Spotlight Jeta Edwards and Spelman ex-oficio student government member, AUC

Student Council Co-Chair, and Political Editor Margaret Lee wrote, “Ironically, it was not until the students began to organize and demand that the next president of Spelman College be a Black woman, that the Administration became so genuinely concerned and eager to take action on student concerns.”14 At the meeting SSGA members presented position statements demanding a

Black woman president and a voting seat on the Board of Trustees. Margaret Lee prepared one of the statements:

For ninety-five years Spelman College has educated black women and none are qualified to assume the position of president?...Women of Spelman College feel that it is a total insult to black womanhood to question that there exists no black woman across the breath and length of this nation who can assume this position. We demand that if this is the case, that the Spelman student government association

13 Margaret Lee and Jeta Edwards, “Students Petition for a Black Woman President: A First For Spelman If Efforts Are Successful,” Spelman Spotlight, April 1976:1,19, Spelman College Archives.

14 Ibid.

170

and concerned Spelmanites for a black woman president be allowed to view the credentials of all applicants.15

This meeting between college administrators and Spelman students drew the line in the sand.

Lee and Edwards summed up the students’ message: “The imperative was that nothing less than a Black woman would be accepted by the Spelman student body.”16

The Student Government Association also presented a statement penned by Editor-in-

Chief of the Spelman Spotlight, and senior political science major Debbi Newton titled, “A

Position Statement on the Student Vote on the College Board of Trustees.”17 In this statement,

Newton argued that participating on the Board of Trustees aligned with the mission of the

College. “In the Spelman College statement of purpose, it is maintained that Spelman College offers signal opportunities for leadership for black women.” Newton maintained that allowing a student representative on the Board would open opportunities for Spelman students to “develop, among other competencies, an awareness of the social, economic, political, moral and religious changes that are taking place in contemporary life.” Newton concluded her statement with strong words for the Board:

Finally, the question arises, what is representation in a voting body? Representation in a voting body means a vote. It means that we, the students, we the school, have determined that it is out right that we become a voting member on the body that governs the

15 Margaret Lee, Position Statement on the Next President of Spelman College, Spelman Spotlight, April 1976, 1; Copy also found in Albert Manley Collection, Box 19, Folder: Materials Concerning the Next President, Spelman College Archives.

16 Lee and Edwards, “Students Petition for a Black Woman President.”

17 Deborah Newton, “A Position Statement on the Student Vote on the College Board of Trustees,” Spelman Spotlight, April 1976, 3, Spelman Spotlight Collection, Spelman College Archives.

171

school. And it is a right that we demand, for seldom are due rights coerced in any less fashion.18

Faculty were supportive of student efforts to demand a Black woman president and to gain a seat on the Board. They formed their own ad-hoc committee and aligned themselves with the student committee. On April 9, they sent both a petition signed by seventy-five faculty members and a report to President Manley and members of the Board. Their eleven-page report detailed research and statistics that supported their belief that a Black woman should lead Spelman. They made it clear that:

Given the attitudes of many Spelman students and faculty, a president who is not a Black woman can expect to face extreme difficulties in establishing effective communication and working relationships with the members of the college community within the campus setting. Thus, even if the Search Committee members do not fully share the views articulately above, they should acknowledge the need to choose a Black woman, if the President is to carry out important internal duties with respect to faculty and student interaction. The importance of collaboration between the President and faculty, staff, and students cannot be over- emphasized, although external functions of the President are, of course, also important.19

They also stated, “Faculty members at Spelman, particularly the students and the female faculty members, Black and white, are especially sensitive to Spelman’s unique position as a Black woman’s college.” Like students, faculty also warned the Board of Trustees that if a Black woman was not selected, they were prepared to take action. They stated they would not only support students in the “disruption of formal ceremonies,” but they were also prepared to join

18 Newton, “Position Statement on the College Trustee Board.”

19 “A Qualified Black Woman Must Be the Next President of Spelman College,” April 9, 1976, 4, Albert Manley Collection, Box 19, Folder: Materials Concerning the Next President, Spelman College Archives.

172 them in planning and carrying out such actions.20 Graduation was right around the corner and there was ample opportunity for disruption given all the formal ceremonies planned.

These strongly worded statements from students and faculty that demanded student power on the Board and a Black woman president combined with a series of organizing meetings that occurred on April 6 and 8, precipitated an emergency visit by members of the presidential search committee. They were clearly anxious that a rebellion of sorts was on the horizon given the mood on campus among not only students, but also faculty and staff. On April 11, four members of the committee arrived at Spelman in what was described as, “an unexpected and hastily planned visit.” During this visit at least one of these four search committee members made a statement that they had reached a conclusion and were prepared to make one of the final candidates an offer. Students and faculty were outraged once again. To them, this statement confirmed their suspicions about the nature of the search process. Student representatives demanded that members of the Board hold an open meeting the following day. The next day,

April 12, a five-hour meeting ensued in Sisters Chapel and in the opinion of concerned faculty and students, “served only to increase the doubt and dissatisfaction on campus.”21 They believed the invitation for them to participate in the selection process, “had been meaningless and an exercise in futility.” The search committee had not even made time or space for students, faculty, and alumnae to give reports on the interviews they conducted of candidates, including

Stewart, a few months prior.22

20 Ibid.

21 Ad Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family, Speech Given to Board.

22 Ibid. 173

Members of the Ad-Hoc Committee expressed that the search committee, dominated by members of the Board of Trustees, was not seriously considering qualified Black women who applied for the job and were not taking the initiative to actively seek additional Black women candidates. On April 14, after learning for certain that Stewart’s name would be presented to the

Board for a vote, students, faculty, staff, and alumnae joined forces and became one committee.

They penned a collective statement outlining their position on the matter. They titled the document “Spelman Family Position Statement.” They forwarded the statement widely and asked members of the Spelman community to send a letter or telegram in support of their efforts to Frank Rogers, Chairman of the Board, if they agreed with their stance. They included his Park

Avenue address in New York City for their convenience. Members of the Ad-Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family, Ernestine Brazeal, Director of Alumnae Affairs, and Judy

Gebre-Hiwet, Lecturer of English, also forwarded a copy of their statement to President Manley.

The position statement argued that due to both racism and sexism, qualified Black women were not often found in traditional pools of applications for such positions, at least not in multitude.

They believed that the board had a very narrow, traditional notion of what “qualified” looked like and placed too much emphasis on fundraising and administrative experience, both areas men and whites conventionally dominated due to structural oppressions, instead of other areas of expertise. Additionally, during the selection process the sexual orientation of candidates became a topic of conversation. In a handwritten note, Albert Manley wrote, “Rejecting Pres. Candidates who were women – should have given all reasons and not just that they were Lesbians.”23 In

23 Albert Manley, Handwritten Note from Meeting with Spelman Board of Trustees, Albert Manley Collection, Box 19, Folder: Materials Concerning the Next President, Spelman College Archives.

174 response to any suspicions that the search committee rejected candidates based on their marginalized identities, the Ad-Hoc Committee declared, “We oppose the use of criteria such as marital status, sexual preference, age, and religious orientation, the use of which is unlawful.”

Beyond arguing that the Board did not understand the need to actively seek out Black women, the Spelman Family was generally suspicious of how the search committee carried out the entire process from start to finish. They undoubtedly believed personal affiliations and preferences for certain candidates influenced their final choice. In their own language, the Spelman Family had

“questions…. concerning the manner in which applicants were approached and the reasons for the rejection of some of the candidates.”24

Their concerns and suspicions regarding the nature of the process and why the Board selected the candidate they did were not unfounded. The committee, led by Board of Trustees member, Spelman alumna, and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund Marian Wright Edelman, and Harvard Professor Eoin W. Trevelyn, favored candidate Donald Stewart, despite him being a very recent doctoral graduate and having no experience with Black colleges.25 To be fair, before coming to Spelman, Stewart held several administrative positions at the University of

Pennsylvania, including Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Director of the

College of General Studies, and Counselor to the Provost. This experience, though relevant to the job at hand, was not the only kind of experience the Spelman Family believed qualified

24 “Spelman Family Position Statement,” 1, Albert Manley Collection, Box 19, Folder: Trustee Lock-In April 22, 1976, Spelman College Archives.

25 Stewart earned a Doctorate in Public Administration from Harvard University in 1975, just one year prior to being selected as President of Spelman College. He did not attend historically Black colleges or universities as a student, nor did he work at an HBCU prior to his position at Spelman.

175 someone to become the next President of the College. They were not impressed with Stewart’s

Ivy League work experience as it pertained to his ability to guide and lead Spelman, a small liberal arts college for Black women that faced particular needs and challenges that were different from those faced by the University of Pennsylvania and primarily white institutions in general. Regarding what they viewed as Stewart’s lack of relevant experience, they wrote:

Representatives of the faculty divisions have serious questions about the final candidate’s understanding of the nature of Black higher education, particularly as it applies to Black women. His lack of experience with Black colleges, either as a student or as a professional, is extremely disturbing, given the need for strong leadership to ensure the survival, autonomy, and continued growth of Spelman College.”26

The Spelman Family voiced concerns about the transparency of the hiring process and demanded, once again, that they be allowed to participate in a meaningful way in order to ensure their opinions and recommendations were accounted for before a candidate was finally confirmed. They called for adequate representation on the presidential search committee and wrote, “A moral question is raised when four members of a Search Committee are members of a nine-member Trustee Executive Committee. This practically assures both agreement on criteria and final approval of the Search Committee’s recommendation.”27 However, the Board of

Trustees moved forward with the search committee’s decision. Donald Stewart’s name would be presented to the Board of Trustees for a vote on April 22, 1976, at the next Board meeting.

Unbeknownst to the Ad-Hoc Committee of the Spelman Family, campus security and the

Atlanta Police Department (APD) were informed of the possibility of a demonstration of some

26 “Spelman Family Position Statement,” 2.

27 Ibid., 1.

176 kind related to the presidential search. Albert Manley likely communicated this to campus security because of his insider’s knowledge of such plans and because students and faculty had openly threatened action in their statements to the Board. However, it seems Manley did this not to risk student and employee arrests, but to work with security to develop a plan to keep APD and other law enforcement off campus. He had been warned that faculty and students were prepared to risk Spelman’s reputation and he took such warnings seriously, though he clearly did not want police on campus. On April 19 the Acting Director of Spelman Campus Security Berle

S. Brereton reported the possibility of an action on campus to APD and the Georgia State Police.

On April 20 Brereton met with Dr. Manley and two administrative staff, Benn Williams and

Robert Flannigan, to build a plan of action in case students and/or employees chose to act. It was determined at that meeting that campus security was to focus on four things if any action occurred: (1) Control outsiders on campus. (2) Control the response of Police on campus. (3)

Control overreaction by security personnel. (4) Insure against any property damage. This agenda made it clear that Manley both knew an action was eminent and hoped to avoid a police invasion.28 He was President of Spelman during the era of the Black student movement and had dealt with unrest in the Atlanta University Center before. His colleagues at other HBCUs had experienced and/or invited police onto their campuses to squelch student rebellion. Many of those incidents had not ended well, with students injured or killed. Manley certainly did not want to leave his twenty-three-year tenure as President forever remembered as the leader unable or unwilling to prevent violence on campus. His interactions with campus security leading up to the

28 Berle S. Brereton, Security Report, April 28, 1976, Albert Manley Collection, Box 19, Folder: Materials Concerning the Next President, Spelman College Archives.

177 lock-in indicate that he aimed to prevent any police presence on campus both as a way to protect members of the Spelman family and to prevent Spelman’s reputation in the media.

That same day Manley met with security, representatives of the Ad-Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family met with members of the Board, including Board Chair Frank

Rogers. They came prepared with a well-argued statement that reiterated their concerns about how the selection process was organized and made demands regarding how the Board should proceed. They stated that while the character and social awareness of individual members of the

Board were not being called into question, “the process established by the Board is, for it has proved inadequate to ensure the support and confidence of the Spelman community.”29 They argued that it was not too late to rectify the situation, however, and that the Board should table the search committee’s recommendation of Donald Stewart. They also demanded that a new committee be formed that was representative of the various constituents of the campus community. The committee was to be made up of two members of the Board of Trustees, “one student from each class, one faculty member from each division, two nonteaching faculty, one staff member, two alumnae, the incumbent president, all of whom are among the persons most familiar with the internal operations of the college.”30 This committee would redesign the search process and submit their findings to the Board of Trustees for approval. The representatives that met with the Board that day also requested that the Board meet with the entire campus community the next day in Sister’s Chapel so that all constituencies could hear firsthand the

29 Ad Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family, Speech Given to Board.

30 Ibid.

178 outcome of the meeting.31 Representatives of the Spelman Family who met with the Board on

April 20 left them with these words:

It is paradoxical that persons entrusted with the responsibility of training young black women are not allowed to exercise their leadership capabilities and make judgmental decisions. This recent experience with the Search Committee for the new president of Spelman is an acutely embarrassing example of a lack of trust and confidence in the capabilities of the faculty, staff, students, and alumnae of Spelman. The long historical relationship between the members of the Board and the campus community is acknowledged and recognized, but the time has come for the campus community to assume responsibility for managing its own destiny. It can best begin by searching for and selecting the person who will lead in this endeavor.32

The following day, April, 21, President Manley issued a statement to Frank Rogers, Chair of the

Board of Trustees, and Laura Chasin, Board and search committee member. In this memo

Manley took a neutral stance in the conflict between the Board and the Spelman Family. “I say again that my position in this matter is one of neutrality; it must be that way. In the voting for the new president, I shall not take a position one way or another.”33 While Manley clearly expressed a stance of neutrality on paper, his allegiance to the Spelman Family would soon outperform his commitment to neutrality the following day, April 22, 1976, when the Spelman Family took matters into their own hands.

The Board of Trustees meeting started off as any typically did. The Chair of the Board called the meeting to order in the Lawrence MacGregor Room of the Albert E. Manley College

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Albert E. Manley, Memo to Mr. Frank Rogers and Mrs. Laura Chasin, “Re: Position Statement Reporting Selection of Next President of Spelman College,” Manley Collection, Box 19, Folder: Trustee Lock-In April 22, 1976, Spelman College Archives. 179

Center and roll was called. Eighteen members of the board were present as well as fifteen invited guests who were there to make reports or fulfill other duties at the Board’s request. Three of the eighteen board members present were Laura R. Chasin, Marian Wright Edelman, and Eoin W.

Trevelyan. Chasin, Edelman, and Trevelyan were all on the search committee and played a significant role in selecting Donald Stewart as their candidate of choice to be presented to the

Board that day. Edelman, famous for her organization the Children’s Defense Fund and civil rights work, was an alumna of Spelman College and would soon become the first alumna chair of the Board of Trustees. Chasin was a fourth-generation member of the Rockefeller family. Her great grandparents were oil business tycoon John D. Rockefeller and Laura Spelman Rockefeller, whose abolitionist parents the College was named after. Trevelyan was a professor of business administration at Harvard University who had previously worked at Spelman in a foundation sponsored program position. While in this position he secured considerable funding from the federal government for Spelman and several other Black colleges. He and his research team of

Harvard graduate students were deeply appreciated in the Spelman community and at other

HBCUs. Their discovery that Spelman and other Black colleges were not requesting or receiving the maximum amount of federal funding was at one point called, “one of the most important things to happen to black colleges.”34 In short, these three members of the Board of Trustees had long histories with the College and maintained, through their familial and individual connections to Spelman, a considerable amount of power within the institution. This did not dissuade the

Spelman Family from challenging their decision. After roll was taken Board Chair Rogers made a brief statement acknowledging the significance of the vote that would take place later during

34 Eoin W. Trevelyan Biographical Sketch, Spelman Board of Trustees Collection, Folder: Board of Trustees Correspondence, January-July 1976, 1 of 2, Spelman College Archives.

180 the meeting with regard to the search committee’s findings and recommendations. He stated that,

“regardless of the vote, there will be new circumstances that the Board will have to face.

Whatever they are he had no fears because he felt that he was surrounded by strong people who can help solve the issues.”35 He clearly had no idea what was soon to come.

Later on, in the meeting Albert Manley gave the President’s Report to the Board. One can imagine that Manley was nervous in anticipation while giving his report given he likely knew an action was looming. Though he maintained that he was neutral in the selection process for the next president and the conflict that had resulted, his remarks were clearly supportive of faculty and students. He did not address the issue at hand directly, rather while reflecting on his twenty- three years at Spelman, he took the opportunity to praise students and faculty for challenging him and the institution. During his report he uplifted the students, calling them the brightest of any

HBCU students. He stated, “Whenever there is a large percentage of bright students, be they black or white, more problems should be expected, more questions, and more issues that would be the case if students didn’t rank at certain levels.” He went on to credit the students with his success at Spelman. He said that students, “kept him alive because of the issues that they have raised and that’s true of the faculty members that are controversial – and institutions should have these.”36 Manley had clearly evolved on his stance regarding student unrest since the 1960s, when he avidly squelched dissent as seen in Chapter One. He also reminded the Board that while he thought it good that they wanted more and more involvement in campus affairs, they should,

“also keep in mind that there is a difference between fashioning policy and administering that

35 Board of Trustees Meeting Minutes, April 1976, Spelman Board of Trustees Collection, Box 17, Folder: Board of Trustees Correspondence, January-July 1976, 1 of 2, Spelman College Archives.

36 Ibid. 181 policy.”37 Again, while Manley never directly addressed the controversy surrounding the presidential search committee and the selection of Donald Stewart, his comments were certainly a show of support for students and faculty. Despite this show of support, things remained amicable during the Board meeting. However, Manley’s verbal show of support for the desires and actions of students and faculty became even clearer over the next twenty-four hours and

Board members would eventually grow frustrated with him as tensions mounted to an all-time high. Soon after Manley gave his report, the Board considered the issue of faculty and student representation on the Board. Manley gave a summary of a meeting of the Four-Way Committee held the day before and recommended that students and faculty be granted a voting seat on the

Board of Trustees with three-year terms.38 There was discussion about the particulars of these two recommendations before both passed with the overwhelming majority of voting members of the Board agreeing with Manley’s recommendation. He had solidified a win for the students.

The Board also passed a non-discrimination policy that day. The policy included, “race, color, national and ethnic origin,” and included language about admissions and student affairs, but not employment. This statement also did not include any language about gender, marital status, or sexuality, which were all concerns faculty voiced with regard to the Search

Committee’s selection process. Immediately following the vote on the non-discrimination policy, the Board adjourned at 1:05PM for a break and returned to the Board Room at 2:15PM.

While the Board was out, an individual allied with the Ad-Hoc Committee for the Concerned

Spelman Family came into the meeting room and took a portion of Trustee Marian Wright

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

182

Edelman’s notes, specifically ones pertaining to the search committee process.39 While the

Board of Trustees never identified who took Edelman’s notes in their correspondence or in their written recollections of what happened that week at Spelman, it was rumored that it was an administrative assistant from Dr. Manley’s office. 40

When they returned from lunch, the Board heard reports from the faculty representative

Marguerite Simon, student representative Yolanda Herron, followed by the search committee report. Trevelyan and Edelman gave this final report. Trevelyan stated that there were 220 applicants and seventeen were candidates the search committee seriously considered. He claimed that five thousand letters were sent to alumnae, faculty, and students the previous October, asking them for their input. He also mentioned the meeting that occurred in October between members of the search committee and faculty, student, and alumnae representatives, and stated that he felt the search committee had done a respectable job despite the hard feelings of some members of the Spelman community. He shared that the search committee had completed the vast majority of their work by the end of January.41 The Spelman Family was correct in their suspicion that the search committee never intended to use their interview findings from February in a significant way; thus, why representatives were never asked to present their findings.

Edelman’s contribution to the search committee report revealed that nine faculty members nominated candidates for the job: seven women and two men. Alumnae nominated twenty women and nine men, and students nominated two women. Edelman also stated that the search committee spent the vast majority of its time searching for qualified women candidates.

39 Ibid.

40 Beverly Guy-Sheftall, interview.

41 Board of Trustees Meeting Minutes, April 1976. 183

She remarked that out of the seventeen finalists, fifteen were women. The committee carried out several stages of the interview process, eliminating candidates as they went. A few candidates dropped out of the applicant pool as well. Two candidates were Spelman alumnae, according to

Edelman, and one was a faculty member. Two women they were seriously considering did not submit to the final interview process. “We lost both of them,” Edelman stated. “One took a position out west, the other one decided that she did not want to leave her position.”42 Edelman stated that two women and one man, Donald Stewart, were the final candidates. According to

Edelman, one of the two women, they learned, was not seriously interested in the job after all. At this point, Edelman stated, the committee went back to the drawing board and interviewed a few more candidates for the job to ensure that, “no one was overlooked.” The individuals they interviewed did not impress them enough to add them to the final pool; therefore, their final two candidates were Donald Stewart and Dr. Jewell Plummer Cobb. According to Edelman’s report, when the Committee contacted her about her position as a finalist, she indicated that she had taken another position. “We were then left with our best candidate – Dr. Donald Stewart,

Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He is well educated and experienced in higher education,” said Edelman. She acknowledged that Stewart was not a

Southerner and had no experience with HBCUs. However, Edelman believed that he was the person for the job. She stated:

He has broad contacts with black and white communities. He respects people, students and faculty, and is a very warm and open person. He comes with no perceived notions about what black women or black college students cannot do and cannot be expected to do. He feels that we as Spelman women can and must do what any other college can do.43

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid. 184

After Edelman finished her contribution to the Search Committee Report, Chairman of the Board

Rogers thanked the entire committee for their labor and for their report. Rogers asked that all persons in the room who were not members of the Executive Committee to exit so the Board could go into Executive Session and take a vote on the nomination of Donald Stewart. Those people left the room and at 4:00PM the Board went into Executive Session. Board members were unaware, but students were waiting outside the Board Room at this time. Supported by faculty, staff, and alumnae, these students acted swiftly and in a bold action, tying ropes around the

Board Room doors, locking the Executive Committee Board members inside.44 According to

Security Officer Brereton, when he arrived to the Manley Center about fifty to sixty people were present and aiding in the locking in of the trustees. They had secured the four doors of the board room, “by ropes which were tied to adjacent doors across the hall and to desks and doors,” of an adjoining office.45

“Reverend Rates bought the rope,” according to Beverly Guy-Sheftall, member of the

Ad-Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family.46 Reverend Rates was Dr. Norman

Rates, the College Minister and eventually Dean Emeritus of Sisters Chapel at Spelman. Rates was a part of the Ad-Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family as well. He was also a trusted friend of Albert Manley. Well-respected Rates was not the only minister who involved themselves in the matter. Just as Board members were determining who was in charge of the campus while Manley was locked inside, the voice of Martin Luther King, Sr., interrupted their

44 Ibid.

45 Berle S. Brereton, Security Report.

46 Beverly Guy Sheftall, Interview. 185 conversation. From outside the Board Room, King proclaimed to the Board members locked inside that the students wanted the decision to hire Donald Stewart tabled. Board members, led by Board Vice-Chair Marion Wright Edelman (Chair Frank Rogers was released from the room early on due to medical reasons) responded to King in the negative. After this negative response, students sent a note through the door stating they would allow the release of Albert Manley and

Trustee Sally McAlpin for health reasons, not for concessions. Board members attempted to post messages to be relayed to their family members and others on the windows of the Board Room.

Students put up cardboard posters to block staff member Enid C. Baird from reading and relaying the messages.

The Trustees debated whether or not to approve Stewart’s nomination for some time, though no members of the Board seemed to support the outright rejection of the search committee’s decision, nor did any members suggest a full reopening of the search to locate additional candidates. However, Trustee Eleanor Franklin, who was actually a candidate for the position herself, expressed that despite not calling for a reopening of the search, she was disappointed that the search committee did not select a Black woman. She eloquently stated:

I am, however, very deeply saddened that the Committee must report that there is not one woman, one black woman in all the land, who is both acceptably qualified and available to be recommended for the position of Chief Executive Officer for Spelman College...I have a deeper conviction that there is, somewhere, a woman, a black woman, who meets both the criteria of experience and availability to assume the duties of Spelman’s president. I must reject as fact that the report of the Committee that there is no one…. perhaps the committee did not find her. And because I feel so strongly that at this time in her history, Spelman College who symbolizes black woman leadership, should have such a person at her helm, I shall cast my vote on the strength of that conviction. Inasmuch as I have been requested to absent myself from all previous discussions of the recommendation, and have had no opportunities to meet or discuss the qualifications of 186

the candidate, my rejection is not for the person of Dr. Stewart…. I know nothing about him.47

Like members of the Ad-Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family, Franklin noticeably believed that her opinion, too, had been disregarded in the search process. Presumably the entire ordeal placed Franklin, then a Dean at Howard University’s Medical College, in a rather uncomfortable position. Despite this, she expressed that she had no intention of resigning from the Board.48 Eleanor Franklin cast the lone “nay,” vote for Donald Stewart’s nomination. Albert

Manley abstained from the vote. The trustees wrote the outcome of the vote on paper and held it to the window for Enid Baird to see. Baird called Stewart, letting him know that his nomination had been approved. She soon returned with the message that Stewart accepted the position.49

Members of the Board asked President Manley who he believed could, “relate to the students who were keeping the trustees locked in? – and what could be done to obtain release?”50

It was determined that once released, Manley and Sally McAlpin would go get Frank Rogers, who had been released for health reasons, from Reynolds Cottage and all three of them would return to the Manley Center where Rogers would announce the decision to accept the nomination of Donald Stewart to the campus community. Dr. Manley informed the trustees that he intended to give a statement of neutrality to the campus community at that time. This puzzled and even angered some members of the Board. Trustee Elizabeth McCormick spoke up and, “informed

47 Board of Trustees Meeting Minutes, April 1976.

48Ibid.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid.

187 him that he could not be neutral, but had the obligation to back the Board and its decision.”51

Manley and McAlpin were released. They gathered Rogers from nearby Reynolds Cottage and took him back to the Manley Center for the announcement. Naturally, the student body did not agree with the announcement and according to Board minutes, “The reaction of the demonstrating students’ indignation could be heard through the doors.” Additionally, despite being advised otherwise, when Rogers made the decision of the Board known to the campus community, Manley followed with a statement of neutrality, going against the locked-in Board members’ wishes.52 Their frustration with Manley grew throughout the lock-in. At this point it was probably beginning to become clear whose side Manley was really on.

That night, the locked-in trustees attempted to sleep, but students would not let them rest.

The New York Times shared that students took turns watching the Board in four-hour shifts.53

They climbed to the ceiling in an adjacent office and removed a Celotex square in order to peer down at the Board. They utilized flashlights and floodlights to keep the Board members awake and monitored them to ensure they did not attempt to escape the room somehow. The trustees struggled to use a two-way radio to communicate with their allies outside the Board Room.

When students discovered the two-way radio system, they utilized bullhorns to interrupt conversations, making communication with the outside world very difficult for the trustees.

According to notes prepared by Board Members, “A bit of verbal harassment took place, but there was no physical abuse save the lack of food, sleeping facilities and bedding, and the

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.

53 “Students Free 14 Trustees Held at a College for Black Women,” New York Times, April 24, 1976, 20.

188 makeshift wastebasket toilet with only a sheet for privacy. The situation was clearly exhausting and humiliating.”54 Throughout the night, students passed notes to the trustees under the door of the Board Room, advising them to delay their decision to hire Donald Stewart or rescind it altogether.55 According to the New York Times, outside of board room, an estimated five hundred to six hundred students camped out on the floors of the Manley Center in support of the lock- in.56 According to Officer Brereton it was 150 to 200.57

At 4:00AM, on April 23, approximately twelve hours into the lock-in, Dr. Manley unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the students to allow him back into the board room. A few hours later, a campus-wide memo was disseminated announcing classes would be cancelled for the day, “In view of present circumstances.”58 Using the two-way radio, Manley sent a message to the locked-in Board members, telling them that he would make contact at 8:00AM. Around that time, Dr. Asa Yancey, husband to search committee member Carolyn “Marge” Yancey, advised faculty member and leader of the Ad-Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family,

Millicent Jordan, that the locked-in trustees should be given water to avoid serious illness. In response, at 9:00AM, students passed milk and cornflakes, as well as water and crushed ice, through the opening they had created in the ceiling from an adjacent office space. At 9:30AM it was reported on the two-way radio that Dr. Manley was meeting with the Ad-Hoc Committee of

54 Board of Trustees Meeting Minutes, April 1976.

55 Ibid.

56 “Students Free 14 Trustees,” New York Times.

57 Berle S. Brereton, Security Report.

58 “Untitled Memorandum,” Manley Collection, Box 19, Folder: Trustee Lock-In April 22, 1976.

189 the Concerned Spelman Family and that “the subject of discussion was some Search Comm.

Minutes taken at the time of the session the previous day in Chapel.” These were the notes allegedly taken by Manley’s administrative assistant and given to the Ad-Hoc Committee of the

Concerned Spelman Family when the Board of Trustees took a break from the Board Room the day before to attend Chapel.59 These notes were also passed along to Attorney Isabel Webster, who was advising the organizers of the lock-in. Other attorneys were involved in the events as well. Trustee and Attorney Donald Hollowell spoke with Chairman of the Board Rogers on the two-way radio about what to do in order to end the lock-in. Their conversation centered on

Manley, what they believed his responsibilities were as the President of the College, and what the Board advised him to do, given his position as President. Hollowell told Rogers that Manley should insist on re-entering the board room to speak with the trustees locked inside. He also stated that Manley should warn students, verbally and in writing, that their actions were illegal and could carry consequences. Hollowell told Manley to assemble all faculty and staff and remind them of their responsibilities. Manley sent word that he was prepared to carry out this mandate. The Board also recommended that Manley suggest that release time be set for

11:00AM. Hollowell also informed Rogers that some of the Board members also desperately needed to visit a restroom. Hollowell then passed a note to students outside requesting to see Dr.

Manley and Mr. Rogers immediately. Soon after, student leader Jeta Edwards announced that they were being advised by attorney Isabel Webster. Edwards asked students to remain nonviolent. “We have been humane; the trustees were given cereal, milk, and water this morning.”60

11:00AM came and went and the Trustees were not released. The New York Times quoted

59 Board of Trustees Meeting Minutes, April 1976.

60Ibid. 190

Edwards as saying, “We're going to make the trustees believe that Spelman women mean business.”61

At 12:45PM a three-member negotiating committee made up of Congressman Andrew

Young, Attorney Carl Horton, and Attorney Isabel Webster, came to the wall of the board room in an attempt to mediate the situation. In response, Marian Wright Edelman demanded that they be allowed to see Rogers and Manley to discuss the matter at hand and confer with their own legal counsel. Manley and Rogers were allowed to perch over the opening in the ceiling at which point Edelman and the other trustees demanded that they be allowed to eat and visit the restroom to refresh themselves. They conveyed to Manley and Rogers that they wished to meet with them in private and “would be willing to meet with the student council, student representatives, and representatives of other constituent groups in a comfortable, private setting which would include access to comfort facilities.” The board members also requested that only two representatives from each constituency of the Ad-Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family be sent to meet with them. Rogers informed the board members that an attorney had been contacted and that an injunction was being prepared on their behalf. Upon hearing this, the trustees wrote out a meeting agreement to be distributed to the campus community, stipulating their permanent release immediately.62

As he was perched over the opening in the ceiling, Marion Wright Edelman asked

Manley, “if he had addressed himself to the fact that the decision had been made and that the college community would have to accept it.” Dr. Manley responded, “Do you mean that I have to do what the trustees say even if I disagree with them?” The trustees locked inside responded with

61 “Students Free 14 Trustees,” New York Times.

62 Board of Trustees Meeting Minutes, April 1976. 191 a resounding, “Yes.” Talk began to fill the board room concerning Manley’s role in the whole affair and if he, “could have been more effective in breaking up the “lock-in.” The Board members noted to Manley that students were heard cheering his name when he was released the day prior, “confirming their affection for him.” Trustee Elizabeth McCormick suggested that

Manley have his staff go through the crowd of students and take names of participants, while informing them that locking the trustees in was an illegal act. It was clear that the trustees believed that if Manley wanted to, he could help end the entire ordeal. Around this time, the board members learned that members of the Ad-Hoc Committee contacted Donald Stewart via telephone and asked him to withdraw his name and not accept the offer to become President.

Stewart informed them that he had not yet resigned from the University of Pennsylvania. Beverly

Guy-Sheftall made that phone call. She says, “He told me he would be the last one,” meaning that Stewart believed he would be the last man to serve as Spelman’s president.63 Stewart also informed Frank Rogers of this conversation and said that he was willing to wait one week while the board reconsidered their decision. He, however, had no intention of withdrawing his name from their consideration.64

Mainstream, African American, and student newspapers covered the lock-in at Spelman and word spread quickly across the country about what was happening at the College. The story appeared on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Local CBS affiliate Bruce Hall reported that campus security kept news cameras from the Albert Manley Center, as the lock-in took place. Hall also reported that Andrew Young was a mediator in the negotiations between students and the Board of Trustees and that Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., and other public

63 Beverly Guy-Sheftall, interview.

64 Board of Trustees Meeting Minutes, April 1976. 192 figures came to campus in support of the students. Hall noted that the Atlanta Police Department had not been called in to handle the dispute at the advisement of the “Public Safety

Commissioner.”65 Working with the Director of Public Safety, Manley was successful in avoiding arrests. He was certainly aware of police violence on college campuses that occurred throughout the 1960s and early 1970s and did everything he could to avoid such a scene on

Spelman’s campus.

Beyond being upset with students, the trustees grew more and more frustrated with Dr.

Manley, as well as faculty and staff members who were involved in the lock-in. They began to question what could be done to force particular individuals to work in the interest of the Board and end the lock-in. They obviously saw that Manley was, though claiming to be neutral, not acting in the Board’s expressed interest. They explored the possibility of requesting the resignation of employees who were participating in the coordination of the lock-in. Board Chair

Frank Rogers characterized the leaders of the action, who were mostly Black women, as irrational in their refusal to compromise. He made the statement that, “talking with the opposition is like dealing with a stone wall- it is beyond any possibility of reason.”66 Despite being viewed as unreasonable, their demands never changed and they remained steadfast in their actions. The board members locked inside took a particular interest in the possibility of reprimanding Millicent Jordan, Professor of English, because she was discernibly the faculty ringleader of the action. Beyond being a part of the action around the board room, Jordan also served as spokesperson for the Ad-Hoc Committee in the days following the lock-in, giving

65 “Spelman College Protest,” CBS Evening News, April 23, 1976, Vanderbilt News Archive, accessed February 17, 2019, https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/broadcasts/245570.

66 Board of Trustees Meeting Minutes, April 1976. 193 statements to the media.67 In Jet, she was reported to have physically helped students tie the ropes around the doors of the Board Room and commented that the action was a, “gratifying and heart-warming,” experience.68 When Marian Wright Edelman asked, “if anybody had said to

Mrs. Jordan that she is acting illegally and is liable to dismissal,” Trustee Phoebe Franklin made the statement, “it will be difficult to deal with Mrs. Jordan properly as she is so prominent. She is one of six sisters who graduated from Spelman College, is aunt of Atlanta’s mayor, and an active lady in Atlanta’s civic affairs.”69 Franklin was right; targeting Jordan would have created a public relations nightmare given her political and familial connections in Atlanta and beyond, which were also noted in the media.70 The board members turned their attention back to Manley, reaching the conclusion that he would either break up the action or resign from his position as

President. Trustee Charles Davis asked Manley to, “gather power to exercise goodwill and order for the salvation of the college.” He stated, “The welfare and very existence of the college is at stake.” Trustee Donald Hollowell persuaded the group to meet with the constituents of the

Spelman Family, “in the name of decency, peace, and goodwill.”71

At 5:50PM on April 23, 1976, after twenty-six hours of what was repeatedly described as

“incarceration,” by many of the trustees and their allies, an agreement was reached with the leaders of the Ad-Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family and they were released

67 “Students Free 14 Trustees Held,” New York Times.

68 “Trustees Yield to Angry Spelmanites,” Jet.

69 Board of Trustees Meeting Minutes, April 1976.

70 “Trustees Yield to Angry Spelmanites,” Jet.

71 Board of Trustees Meeting Minutes, April 1976.

194 from the board room. It took a court ordered injunction with the threat of criminal charges to motivate them to free the Trustees. As they exited, the trustees were forced to navigate around outstretched legs, locked arms, and singing voices. A large, overflowing crowd of students, faculty, and staff, conducted a massive sit-in on the floor of the Manley Center concourse, singing “We Shall Overcome,” in solidarity with the Ad-Hoc Committee’s actions. The Atlanta

Daily World reported that, “Five of the male trustees, who got into a car, were rushed by about

500 students shouting, “you are not going to go,’” until one of the student leaders informed them that they had come to an agreement.72 Trustees were led to a guest house on campus to refresh themselves. A few attempted to slip out the back door of the house when they were spotted.

Students quickly surrounded their vehicles to prevent them from leaving campus. The trustees returned to the guest house and planned to meet with representatives of the Ad-Hoc Committee that evening.73

Student leaders Debbie Newton, Jeta Edwards, Margaret Lee, and Zenora Mitchell represented the student body at this meeting. Darlene Killian and Pearl C. Lomax represented the alumnae. Diana Axelson and Vicki Williams represented the faculty and Dean Sadie Allen and

Jane Browning represented the administrative staff. This group of all women representatives did not waiver in their demands despite the fact that the lock-in had ended. During this meeting the

Board agreed to meet on their own within ten days to consider the demands once more. They also agreed to send a written report to Beverly Guy-Sheftall, co-chair of the Ad Hoc Committee

72 Yvonne Shinhoster, “Spelman Trustees Agree to Talk with Students After 26 Hour Imprisonment: Talks Center on Status of Newly Chosen Prexy,” Atlanta Daily World (April 25, 1976), 1.

73 Berle S. Brereton, Security Report.

195 of the Concerned Spelman Family, and to Isabel Gates, one of their three attorneys. After the meeting, the Spelman Family continued to organize toward having their demands met. In a final push, they sent out notices to members of the Spelman community requesting that they write

Donald Stewart personally. They stated:

Stewart must be informed that the time has come for Spelman to have a black woman president. Stewart must also be informed that inadequate selection procedures suggest that a complete and representative search has not been conducted.74

The notice concluded with Stewart’s personal mailing address. This last-minute attempt to impact the final decision of the Board was countered by the leadership of the North Eastern

Spelman Alumnae Chapter, Virginia Turner Dowell and Doris R. Van Putten. They urged all five hundred chapter members to write Trustees Edelman and Rogers personally before April 30, and advocate for them to remain steadfast in their decision to hire Donald Stewart. “We cannot condone this irresponsible behavior, nor do we feel that this type of leadership is in keeping with the tradition of Spelman College or any other institution of higher education.”75

Though there was support for the Ad-Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman

Family’s demand that a Black woman become president, not all members of the Spelman community were on the same page and many were quite shocked to learn of the details of the lock-in, disagreeing with the tactic altogether. Several alumnae wrote Albert Manley in particular, calling the lock-in criminal, violent, barbaric and characterized it as an act of torture.

One alumna wrote, “When we cease to communicate and use Brute force, tearing down that

74 Ad Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family, Untitled Memo, April 14, 1976, Albert Manley Collection, Box 19, Folder: Trustee Lock-in April 22, 1976.

75 North Eastern Alumnae Chapter, letter to Spelman alumnae, April 26, 1976, Albert Manley Collection, Box 19, Folder: Trustee Lock-in April 22, 1976.

196 which our fore parents built with sweat and Blood and tears, We are no more than animals who know nothing but Brute force to survive.76 These alumnae worried that students had sullied the reputation of their beloved institution through their actions that were being broadcast and written about in national news sources. Alumna Juanita Reddick Hill from East Elmhurst, New York, was concerned with these news reports and telegrammed Dr. Manley on April 25. She demanded that he personally, “take whatever action necessary to correct these conditions and save our school. Spelman has a rich heritage which must be preserved.”77 Some alumnae believed the students disregarded the legacy of Spelman’s founders, Sophia Packard and Harriett

Giles, and were concerned for the reputation of Spelman. In their letters to Manley, alumnae mentioned the founders and other white women benefactors by name and in high praise. One alumna wrote:

the irrational violent behavior, of those perpetrators on Spelman College Campus viewed and heard via national news media prime time is deeply regretted. Their cruelty and inhumanity are unpardonable sins. Miss Giles, Miss Packard, Mrs. Laura Spelman Rockefeller and Miss Lucy Spelman must have been disturbed in their resting places. Spelman College was founded on unimpeachable integrity.78

Some members of the Spelman community found Donald Stewart’s credentials to be more than adequate and were not bound to the notion that only Black women should be considered for the job. Many had faith in the Board of Trustees to make the right decision and were not willing to

76 Mrs. S.W. Gordon, letter to Albert Manley, April 22, 1976. Albert Manley Collection, Box 19, Folder: Trustee Lock-in April 22, 1976.

77 Juanita Reddick Hill, telegram to Albert Manley, April 25, 1976, Albert Manley Collection, Box 19, Folder: Trustee Lock-in April 22, 1976.

78 Mary Louise Stamper Gordon, letter to Albert Manley, May 6, 1976, Albert Manley Collection, Box 19, Folder: Trustee Lock-in April 22, 1976. 197 challenge the hierarchy at Spelman in the name of such a cause. They were confident in the relationships the institution had with long-time board members who donated a significant amount of money and/or time to the College throughout its history, like the Rockefeller family, who was, at the time, represented by trustee Laura Chasin. Certainly, they were afraid of potential damage to these kinds of long-standing charitable relationships. Mrs. S.W. Gordon, an Atlanta-based alumna had strong feelings regarding what she believed was disrespectful behavior towards white benefactors. She indicated to Manley:

If your administration can use your heads and try to vision a better Spelman and to realize that Spelman was founded by some very Benevolent White Women and that many Grants were given by White Women and men. Be grateful, be tactful and last but not least Be tolerant. Please try not to destroy Spelman College!79

Additionally, Mrs. Gordon expressed frustration with students who, she thought did not identify with the history of the institution and the white women who founded it:

Dr. Manley, perhaps, the Student body is not aware of the History of Spelman, how it was started by two White Women who saw the need for a Women’s College, who trained many, many women (Black) to help train these students who are protesting and holding hostages, holding out for a Black president.80

This expression of endearment for the white founders and benefactors of Spelman stood in stark contrast to the views of the Ad-Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family who stated that, “The long historical relationship between members of the Board and the campus community is acknowledged and recognized, but the time has come for the campus community to assume

79 Mrs. S.W. Gordon, Letter to Albert Manley.

80 Ibid.

198 responsibility for managing its own destiny.”81 The position of white faculty member Diana

Axelsen, a leader in the lock-in, also diverged from the expressions of endearment for white benefactors. In the March 1976 issue of the Spelman Spotlight Axelsen wrote:

I hope that Black women will have both the power and the desire to make ultimate decisions on these questions, as the institution responds to societal changes. So, although I shall express some of my own hopes for Spelman, I must emphasize that to me they are suggestions offered in a context where I feel the leadership role of Black women should predominate.82

The trustees who were locked in on April 22 discussed the division within the Spelman community regarding the matter. Honorary Trustee Sally McAlpin revealed that many administrators and faculty who spoke with her urged advancing with the decision. Trustee Marge

Yancey claimed that faculty members also contacted her in support of the selection of Stewart and made claims that they had been intimidated by other Spelman employees to sign a petition to the contrary. According to notes taken during the lock-in, several members of the Student

Government Association Executive Committee conveyed that they were comfortable with the search committee’s nomination of Stewart, but felt obligated to sign the student petition. When this was discussed, Albert Manley voiced that he believed that as student representative to the

Board, the SGA president, Yolande Herron, should sign the petition, even if she personally disagreed.83

81 Ad Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family, Speech Given to Board.

82 Diana Axelsen, “Black Higher Education,” Spelman Spotlight, February/March 1976, 1, Spelman Spotlight Collection, Spelman College Archives.

83 “Notes on Locked-In Period of Board of Trustees,” April 22, 1976, Board of Trustees Collection, Folder: Board of Trustees Correspondence, January- July 1976, 1of 2, Spelman College Archives. 199

Several alumnae wrote Albert Manley in support of the fight to have a Black woman as

President. For example, Alumna Mary Louise Stamper Powell, class of 1941, empathized with the students’ who organized the lock-in. In early May, shortly after the event, she wrote to

President Manley to express her opinion on the matter. She praised Manley, his wife Audrey, his deceased wife Dorothy, and their contributions to the College. She acknowledged the fact that he was the choice of former Spelman President Florence Read upon her retirement. However,

Stamper Powell also admitted that she found it “a rather awkward situation having a man as

President of a women’s college.84 She wrote that while “there is no doubt about the qualifications of the person selected….that it is time for a black female or black woman to head Spelman

College because there is the urgent need that black women have an educated, as well as dedicated woman to emulate. A man president does not afford this distinction that is so.”85 To the dismay of the Concerned Spelman Family, the Board did not withdraw Donald Stewart’s appointment and did not move to reopen the search for the sixth president.

On May 6, 1976, Jewell Plummer Cobb, the finalist the search committee lost to another job, wrote to Dr. Manley regarding her impression of the search committee’s interview process.

In this letter, Plummer Cobb expressed praise for the committee and named Marian Wright

Edelman and Eoin Trevelyan specifically:

I was impressed with the hundreds of hours of intensive work they performed during the past months on the task. It was clear that they had developed a team of dedicated top persons concerned deeply

84 Powell, Letter to Albert Manley.

85 Ibid.

200

about the future of Spelman. Their only flaw, if any, was in the deliberateness and the lengthiness of the entire process.86

While it is unknown if she wrote this letter at the urging of a member of the Board or Manley himself, the letter was forwarded to Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Co-Chair of the Ad-Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family, and members of the Board of Trustees, in particular Marian

Wright Edelman.

No students or employees of Spelman were punished for their participation in the lock-in and senior leaders were allowed to graduate at the end of the spring 1976 term. The support the

Ad-Hoc Committee had from Black elites protected them from punishment. Additionally, Albert

Manley became even more open about his support for their actions. He gave an exclusive interview to Jet Magazine which reported that he was leaving Spelman, “with a feeling beating inside him that his successor should be a Black woman.” He stated, “I think because of the interest shown by the alumni, faculty, and students that it would have been a great or significant step forward if a Black woman had been selected.” Accompanying the article in Jet was a picture of Manley handing Jeta Edwards her diploma as she walked across the stage at the 1976 commencement.87

One week into the job, Donald Stewart wrote trustee Laura Chasin, who was on vacation with Marion Wright Edelman and her family. He expressed, “There are nice people here and in

86 Jewell Plummer Cobb, letter to Albert Manley, May 6, 1976, Board of Trustees Collection, Folder: Board of Trustees Correspondence, January- July 1976, 1of 2, Spelman College Archives.

87 “President Manley Says Black Woman Should Succeed Him,” Jet, June 3, 1976, 14.

201 spite of its current image, this is a nice place.”88 Spelman Spotlight Editor-In-Chief Lei Charlton and Associate Editor Stephanie Nelson, interviewed Donald Stewart for the October 1976 issue of the student newspaper.89 These student journalists did not tip toe around the elephant in the room: that many people on Spelman’s campus did not approve of the Board’s decision to hire

Stewart as the president of their institution. They asked him directly for his perception of the situation. He explained that he respected the opinions that a man should not be president and did not seek to pacify those individuals.

I am aware and deeply respect the disappointment but I’m not going to overtly seek to pacify. I would think that would be me trying to manipulate genuine feelings and I’m not going to do that, I respect those feelings, I just hope by example to show that I have come to Spelman to make a contribution to the best of my ability and carry on from there.90

The students asked him to explain what made him qualified for the position. Stewart drew attention to his experience in philanthropy and higher education to explain why he believed he was qualified. He stated:

I know the question has been raised many times about the fact that I have not attended a predominately Black institute of higher education nor am I a woman and as president at a predominantly black women’s college, there might be some inconsistency there….At the same time, the problems and possibilities and opportunities that are in abundance here, especially the opportunities for Spelman are those I do have a great deal of familiarity with: academic programming, services to students, experience dealing with Trustees. All of these are the kinds of skills

88 Donald Stewart, letter to Laura Chasin, August 9, 1976, Spelman Board of Trustees Collection, August-December 1976, Box 1, Folder: Business Correspondence, Spelman College Archives.

89 Lei Charlton and Stephanie Nelson, “An Exclusive Interview With Dr. Stewart,” Spelman Spotlight, October 1976, 1, Spelman Spotlight Collection, Spelman College Archives.

90 Ibid.

202

that a president needs to have wherever acquired, however acquired and so they’re of a general nature that have little to do with race, in terms of institutions, and sex and I hope they’ll be of strength to this college.91

Stewart also expressed his opinion regarding student representation on the Board of Trustees.

He differentiated between a member and a representative, saying that a representative had the responsibility of taking all student opinions into consideration, whereas Board members simply

“don’t consider themselves representative; they think about the whole.” He stated that for a student, he believed, “it’s an impossible job.” Stewart also explained that the Board was an

“outside interest,” and he was concerned that student and faculty representation on the Board could muddle the waters when it came to decisions that were supposed to be made by the faculty senate or the student government.92

In his analysis of student protest in the 1960s and early 1970s, Rod Ferguson notes,

“Plainly put, when students challenged the university, they were calling for a new social and intellectual makeup of the university and for a new social order in the nation at large.”93 To the

Ad-Hoc Committee of the Concerned Spelman Family and those who supported their actions,

Spelman was not separate from society at large. While Spelman was certainly couched as a safe haven for Black women in many respects, it was also viewed as a space that perpetuated the oppressions of Black women through its traditions and campus culture. The Board’s failure to hire a Black woman reflected this belief. As the sole dissenting trustee, Eleanor Franklin, expressed:

91 Ibid.

92 Ibid.

93 Roderick Ferguson, We Demand: The University and Student Protests (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 9. 203

I believe deeply in the principle of the democratic society in which we live, but find that it is a tragic comment on the system which continues to deny opportunity for certain members of the society to demonstrate their capabilities to conduct complex affairs in leadership roles, and then penalizes them for lacking such experience.94

Though the group’s politics were varied from person to person, the 1976 lock-in and the campaign to hire a Black woman president reflected the Black feminist politics that Beverly

Guy-Sheftall was familiar with from her involvement in the women’s movement and her personal network of Black feminists who created women’s centers, curricula, and women’s studies programs in the northeastern U.S. These politics were “in the air” so to speak. Spelman students had been articulating proto-feminist and feminist politics for some time in the student newspaper, though like Beverly they too were the minority on campus. In 1987, eleven years after the Board of Trustees was locked in, Spelman got a Black woman president. Johnetta B.

Cole, who the campus community lovingly called their “Sister President,” was intellectually and politically supportive of Black women’s studies. For many years, Spelman students had expressed their desires to see the locus of power shift at Spelman. For many years they fought in loco parentis and administrative policies. They participated in the Atlanta Student Movement and the wider civil rights movement. They had also been a part of the Black student movement and intertwined their needs and desires as Black women into movement demands. Having a

Black woman president did not automatically mean that Spelman would become a wholly feminist campus but having a Black woman in that position mattered to Spelman women as they continued to push for change on their campus.

94 Board of Trustees Meeting Minutes, April 1976. 204

VI. CONCLUSION

Beverly Guy-Sheftall maintains that the founding of the Women’s Research and

Resource Center did not come from widespread faculty interest in women’s studies or an administrative push for a center to be established; rather, it came from her experience with similar spaces at other women’s colleges led by Black feminists. In the late 1970s and early

1980s, Guy-Sheftall traveled to various institutions, particularly in the Northeastern United

States, where women’s centers were being developed and decided that Spelman would benefit from such a space. “I had been very much impacted by the Brave1 editors and Pat Bell Scott who was directing a program at the Wellesley Center for Research on Women, which was probably one of the oldest.”2 Guy-Sheftall spoke with Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith, who was teaching at Simmons College during that time and decided to approach newly-appointed

President Donald Stewart about creating a similar center at Spelman. “So I came back and decided that’s what I wanted to do. And Donald Stewart said no, because we were already a women’s college and we didn’t need women’s studies, and we didn’t need this, and we didn’t need that.” Guy-Sheftall soon learned that a faculty member at Atlanta University was also interested in founding a women’s center and was going to apply for external funding to do so.

When Stewart learned this, he changed his mind. Around the same time, the Mott Foundation released a call to fund projects at Black colleges specifically. Stewart encouraged Guy-Sheftall to write and submit a grant proposal to the Mott Foundation to fund a women’s center in 1980.

1 Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (New York: The Feminist Press, 1982).

2 Beverly Guy Sheftall, interview by author, Atlanta, December 13, 2016. 205

That’s how the women’s center got founded and funded in 1981. So it was, you know, just a faculty member, me, interested in women’s studies. It was very much motivated by what I would consider to be my already involvement in women’s studies as a field and knowing Black women who were in various institutional spaces that were women’s research center oriented.3

If Guy-Sheftall had not been as persistent in pursuing her interests in women’s studies she does not believe a women’s center would have been founded at Spelman. “And I don’t know that that would have happened at Spelman. So it didn’t happen because we were a women’s college. It happened because I was a faculty member here.” Guy-Sheftall faced resistance not only from administrators, but also from many faculty members. “You know the predictable, what is women’s studies? Is it a fad? Is it rigorous? Is it academic?” These were all questions faculty posed when voting on the first women’s studies curriculum proposal, the minor in comparative women’s studies. While it was a struggle to get some faculty and administrators on board initially, foundations showed significant interest in the WRRC. From its founding in 1981, the

WRRC has been funded by major grants from first the Mott Foundation and then the Ford

Foundation (beginning in 1983) among others. The WRRC was supported by continuous funding from these foundations and individual donors until an endowment was established in 2008 by the

Ford Foundation specifically for the Center. The WRRC was charged with matching a one- million-dollar donation and did so successfully.

While Guy-Sheftall received grant funding for the establishment of the Women’s

Research and Resource Center at Spelman, one major element of the WRRC that remained unfunded early on was an archive. She set out to gain institutional funding for the establishment of the archives early in 1981. In a proposal sent to President Stewart in May of that year, Guy-

3 Ibid. See also: “Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Makers Interview, accessed February 17, 2019, https://www.makers.com/profiles/591f27805bf6236c3464b1ac. 206

Sheftall described the institutional records of the College as, “inaccessible research material which is presently housed in various rooms scattered throughout the campus.”4 Guy-Sheftall realized the need for Spelman to establish an institutional archive when conducting research for the book Spelman: A Centennial Celebration in 1980. She aimed to produce a history that was more than, or different from what was publicly acknowledged as the official history of the

College. In order to challenge the traditional narrative of Spelman effectively she determined she would need to utilize the papers of the founders themselves. “I didn’t want the traditional narrative of the Spelman founders. So I wanted access to the archives, which was very difficult because they were just in boxes.”5 In order to collect the documents necessary to write and publish this book on behalf of the College, for the one hundred year anniversary of its founding,

Guy-Sheftall had to climb stairwells to remote corners of old buildings on campus where records were stored in conditions that were potentially damaging. In her proposal for the funding of the archives she stated:

At present, the archives at Spelman consists of a small room on the fourth floor of Giles Hall (main classroom building) in which are housed over 1,000 cubic feet of materials related to the history and development of the College from its founding in 1881 to the present. Archival material on deceased alumnae is housed in an even smaller room in the basement of the Administration building. An extensive photograph collection, as well as other historically significant documents, including the President Read papers (fourth president), are housed in file cabinets contained in the Special Collections room of the library.6

4 Beverly Guy-Sheftall “Proposal for Archives,” May 19, 1981, Box 7, Folder: Archives 2, Donald Stewart Papers, Spelman College Archives.

5 Beverly Guy-Sheftall, “Toni Cade Bambara Conference Opening Plenary Speech,” (Atlanta, Georgia, March 23, 2017).

6 Guy-Sheftall “Proposal for Archives.” 207

Unfortunately, these circumstances were not unique to Spelman. Many other institutions of higher education, especially Black colleges, found themselves struggling to create and maintain institutional archives. Guy-Sheftall wrote:

The gradual deterioration of archival collections continues to be a problem in colleges and universities across the nation. Moreover, black colleges, in particular, are in dire need of centralized, coordinated assistance in planning and establishing basic archival programs for their records since their archives have frequently suffered the most neglect given other more pressing needs in these economically disadvantaged institutions.7

Unlike other institutional archives in higher education, Guy-Sheftall did not envision Spelman’s archives being housed in a library; rather, she aimed to house the College archives within the newly formed Women’s Research and Resource Center in order to oversee the content, scope, and accessibility of the collections. Though the founding of the archives was funded with institutional funds, with grant money funding the WRRC long-term the risk of the archives falling into disrepair or becoming inaccessible to researchers because of potential institution- wide financial woes could potentially be prevented. Guy-Sheftall recognized the significance of all those scattered, unorganized files when she saw them. She believed that Spelman’s institutional papers were a treasure trove for scholars studying the lives of Black women. She

7 Ibid. Unfortunately, while conducting research for this dissertation it became apparent that this is still the case for many Black colleges. Several collections I hoped to view were unavailable because various archives were understaffed and unable to process them. For the majority of the time I researched in the Bennett College archives, there was no college archivist employed by the institution. Fortunately, I was allowed to enter the archives and view collections on my own merit and knowledge of the collections housed in the basement of Holgate Library. Fisk University did not have an archivist when I initially made a research visit request in 2016. I had to wait for several months until an archivist could be hired. Most of the archives I visited for this research were staffed by a single archivist and some had part-time assistants usually in the form of student workers or alumnae volunteers. Only two HBCU archives I visited held records in temperature/humidity regulated spaces: Spelman College and the archives at Robert F. Woodruff Library on the campus of Clark Atlanta University. 208 was committed not only to Spelman and the development of the WRRC, but also to the continued development of the field of Black women’s studies. Establishing an archive at

Spelman within the WRRC not only promoted the college as the institution with the largest repository dedicated solely to the historical papers of Black women, but the research potential of this archive for the field of Black women’s studies was momentous as well. She stated:

Not only will the processing and preservation of important material in the archives provide needed research sources for the ongoing research projects to be conducted by the newly established Women’s Research and Resource Center at Spelman, but the development of the Spelman archives is important to the scholarly community at large.8

Guy-Sheftall’s vision of an archive stayed true not only to her dedication of creating a first-rate women’s studies program and center at Spelman, but was also in line with her commitment to the future of Black women’s studies in general. She recognized that the Spelman records she had sifted through were a goldmine for the field and that anyone who wished to study the history of

Black women’s experiences would be interested in what Spelman had to offer. Having gone through the files across campus, she was able to identify sub-fields within Black women’s studies the archival material would especially support. This enabled her to make the case that

Spelman was uniquely positioned to make a noteworthy impact on the field of women’s studies.

She stated:

The materials contained in the archives constitute a unique resource for scholarship for several reasons. First of all, Spelman is the only institution of higher learning in the nation which was founded for the purpose of educating black women, so that the archives is truly unique because it contains the only source of information on the history of the oldest college for black women in the world…Since the South is the home of Spelman and Bennett Colleges, the only two black women’s colleges in the nation, scholars must have access to the Spelman archives if they are to address this subject in a

8 Ibid. 209

comprehensive manner. The general histories of Black education deal only peripherally with the separate subject of higher education for black women, North or South. Furthermore, while there has been increased interest in the subject of higher education for women in general and especially women’s colleges over the past 10 years (a reflection of increased interest in women’s history and women’s studies generally), sources on the history of women’s education generally ignore the education of black women. Despite the college’s century of service to women who achieve, her uniqueness and significance as a black women’s college has been grossly ignored by those documenting the history of higher education for women in America.9

She also noted the impact of the rise and popularity of social history within the academy and argued that Spelman’s archival collections could and should be influential in that field. She compared what she knew existed in Spelman’s records to that of what was recently discovered and processed at other institutions. For example, she drew a comparison between the papers of

Selena Sloan Butler, a Spelman alumna from the class of 1888, to that of famous white women such as progressive reformer Jane Addams and M. Carey Thomas, the first president of Bryn

Mawr College. Referring to the funding of other Black women’s archival projects like the 1979 founding of the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial Museum and the National Archives for Black

Women’s History (both projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities), she stated:

the funding available for the above mentioned projects has been due in part to an awareness that over the past ten years the historian has become increasingly interested in the records of the common man and woman --- diaries, letters, court proceedings, etc. … Indeed, Spelman College should become an integral part of this movement to rediscover forgotten women in the nation’s history by making available to scholars their papers which it cannot do without first developing its own archives.10

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid. 210

Guy-Sheftall’s ambitious and compelling proposal was not sent to funding agencies. Instead,

Donald Stewart decided to put forth the commitment to fund the archives internally. In addition to the institutional records of the College, since its founding in 1981, the Spelman archives has managed to obtain the papers of several influential Black feminists, Audre Lorde and Toni Cade

Bambara in particular.

In 1984, three years after Guy-Sheftall made the case for the archives, scholar-activist Ruby

Sales suggested to Patricia Bell-Scott and Beverly Guy-Sheftall that they create an academic journal about Black women’s experiences. She said to them, “What you need to do, Pat and Bev, is a journal; there is no forum which has our lives as its focus.”11 One year later, the journal Sage was born. In the introductory essay for the first issue of their journal, Patricia Bell Scott remarked, “Because Ruby made this remark in a classic “you-better-take-me-seriously” Black woman manner, we took her seriously and decided that she was right.” They determined that each issue would be dedicated to a Black woman “sage” selected for her contributions to the topic the editors designated for each issue. In the inaugural issue, they declared themselves and, by extension, their journal, as both pro-Black and pro-woman. True to the spirit of their friend

Ruby Sales’ request, Guy-Sheftall and Bell Scott created three objectives for the journal:

(1) To provide a forum for critical discussion of issues relating to Black women

(2) To promote feminist scholarship

(3) To disseminate new knowledge about Black women to a broad audience.

11 Patricia Bell Scott, “Editorial: In Celebration of Black Women’s Scholarship,” Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 1, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 2.

211

Additionally, the co-founding editors stated, “We claim a Black feminist or “womanist” (in the words of Alice Walker) perspective, which has obvious implications for our focus, style, and format.”12 This declaration aligned with their personal politics and their vision and hopes for the field of Black women’s studies. Bell-Scott and Guy-Sheftall identified the historical moment, marked by the launching of Sage, as a pivotal one in which the intellectual, political and creative works of Black feminists were coalescing. They aimed for the content of the journal to be interdisciplinary to reflect how Black women were then expressing their intellectual, political, and creative positions. Their focus, while containing a significant amount of content on Black women’s experiences in the United States, was never solely on African American women explicitly; rather, Sage, from the beginning, was inclusive of the experiences of Black women across the African Diaspora and accepted both creative and academic works that examined a wide range of experiences both historically and contemporarily. Given the focus of the journal, it was natural for the editors to expect and embrace work created by mostly Black women. After all it was Black women who were the creators of the field of Black women’s studies and whose work reflected Black feminist demands to include the experiences of Black women in academic women’s studies and Black studies. However, they determined that they would accept,

“contributions to all departments from anyone who shares our perspective.”13 To the editors, the political and scholarly lens of accepted work undoubtedly mattered in addition to the identities of contributors. Black women’s scholarship certainly dominated the pages of Sage for its entire existence, staying true to Ruby Sales’ desire to see a journal by and about Black women.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid. 212

The inaugural issue of Sage, published in the spring of 1984, was devoted to the topic of

Black women’s education. Black women’s experiences in multiple levels of education were explored. The editors selected two Black women as the honorary sages for this initial issue: Mary

McLeod Bethune, founder of Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School (later

Bethune-Cookman College), and Jeanne L. Noble, author of the groundbreaking 1956 work The

Negro Woman’s College Education. Included in this issue was Bell Scott’s essay “Black

Women’s Higher Education: Our Legacy.”14 In this essay she noted that Black women’s experiences in and influence on higher education had been vastly overlooked by historians of education, women’s studies scholars, and Black studies scholars. Because of the academy’s immense silence on this topic, this theme was fitting for the introductory issue of Sage. Rosie N.

Doughty and James J. Doughty’s piece “Toward a Meaningful Education for Black Girls:

Perspectives from Two Policy Makers,” delved into the issue of public schools that, from their practitioner and research perspectives, were not meeting the needs of Black girls across the country. This first issue also included an interview with educator Willa B. Player who, to that point, was the only Black woman to have served as president of a Black women’s institution

(Bennett College 1955-1966) and was the first woman to serve as president of a four-year institution of higher education. Additionally, the first issue included a photographic essay that depicted the experiences of Black women as students and educators during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These historical photos included images of Black students, prominent Black women educators like Anna Julia Cooper, and lesser-known educators such as

Spelman alumna Flora Zeto Malekebu who taught at a Nyasaland (Malawi) mission school and

14 Patricia Bell-Scott, “Black Women’s Higher Education: Our Legacy,” Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 1, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 8-11.

213

Mary Ann Brooks who, while still a primary grades student herself, taught afternoons at the

“school for street waifs,” in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta, the place of origin of Spelman College. Brooks was a founding alumna of Spelman, holding a special place in the hearts of founders Harriet Giles and Sophia Packard.15 Also, the premier issue of Sage included bibliographies of works dedicated to the lives of Black women, women of color, and feminism broadly speaking. Included in these was a lengthy bibliography, by Janey L. Sims-

Wood, of selected theses and dissertations about Black women published between 1982 and

1983.16

Sage was instrumental to the development of Black women’s studies as a field of academic inquiry. It was the first publication of its kind and was published for over ten years, giving scholars who studied Black women’s lives and labors both a space to publish and a place to learn. While not everyone on the editorial board was a faculty member at an HBCU, several were. The impact of Beverly Guy-Sheftall as both a founding editor and contributor to Sage is undeniable. Spelman College’s women’s studies program was blossoming at the same time Guy-

Sheftall and Bell Scott, who was on faculty at the University of Georgia, were developing Sage.

The founding of Sage was very much in line with Guy-Sheftall’s vision for women’s studies at

Spelman and her desire to see Black women’s studies flourish at HBCUs and in the broader academy. Other HBCU faculty who served on the editorial and advisory boards hailed from

Howard University, Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Tougaloo College, Fisk

15 Sarah Ruffing Robbins, Learning Legacies: Archive to Action Through Women’s Cross- cultural Teaching (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 45-48.

16 Janey L. Sims-Wood, “Selected Listing of Master’s Theses and Doctoral Dissertations About Black Women, 1982-1983,” Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women, 1, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 24-25. 214

University, and other historically Black colleges. Sage, the Spelman archives, the comparative women’s studies curriculum, the National Black Women’s Health Conference, the Audre Lorde

Black Lesbian Feminist Project, the Toni Cade Bambara Conference are all examples of Black feminist projects that came from the WRRC within the first fifteen years of its founding.

And yet, even with all of this accomplished, Beverly Guy-Sheftall is careful in her characterization of Spelman, which is often labeled as a feminist campus simply because it is a women’s institution. In many ways, feminist scholars everywhere associate the work of the

WRRC with the image of Spelman as a whole, but Guy-Sheftall separates the work of the

WRRC with the culture of the campus: “I would say it (Spelman) had almost no connection to the women’s movement. I am almost never, ever historically in spaces around women’s movement where there are any more HBCU people; which I have always found just really strange,” Guy-Sheftall remarks. In response to statements that Spelman is a feminist campus,

Beverly responded, “I said, no it’s not. We have some feminist pockets.” During the Presidency of Johnetta B. Cole the WRRC’s impact expanded and the Center gained a new home, the

Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby, Ed.D. Academic Center. While Spelman may not fully be “a feminist campus” the WRRC’s impact on women’s studies at HBCUs and Black women’s studies in general is certainly a reality.

In addition to the scholarly pursuits of the WRRC, student activist projects, organizations, and campaigns have historically found a political and intellectual home within the

Center. For instance, comparative women’s studies students founded a student chapter of the

Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance (FMLA) in 2002 and the group has been active since, 215 hosting events and organizing campaigns that center women’s issues and concerns.17 The most well-known instance of activist organizing being the “Nelly Protest,” or as the student organizers called it, “Take Back the Music,” organized in 2004 to attempt to force rapper Nelly to address critiques of his music video “Tip Drill” that featured misogynistic lyrics and exploitive imagery of Black women. Nelly’s organization JesUs4Jackie joined with the Spelman Student

Government Association to conduct a bone marrow drive on campus. His sister was battling leukemia at the time and Nelly hoped to locate a donor on Spelman’s campus. Not knowing this,

FMLA President Moya Bailey organized a public forum where students across the AUC, from

Spelman and Morehouse in particular, voiced their opinions on the Tip Drill video and misogyny in hip-hop in general. When Bailey learned of the bone marrow drive plans, she and Asha

Jennings, President of the Student Government Association, agreed that Nelly should not be invited to campus, but that the foundation should be allowed to conduct the bone marrow drive.

They and other members of the FMLA found the video exploitive of Black women and yet offered to continue to hold the drive. They wanted the opportunity to have a conversation with

Nelly regarding the video. Nelly’s foundation requested that the SGA guarantee no protests would occur if they followed through with the drive. Bailey recalls, “Our SGA stood behind us and said, “We can’t guarantee that there will be no protestors. This is a campus and if students feel compelled, etc.” But at that time, it wasn’t technically a protest – we were still in the planning stages of what was going to happen on Friday.”18 In response, Nelly’s foundation

17 For another example of the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance’s work at Spelman, see: Kibkabe Araya, “Abortion Rights Ignite Spelman Discussion,” Spelman Spotlight, April 11, 2006, Spelman Spotlight Collection, Spelman Archives.

18 Faedra Chatard Carpenter, “An Interview with Moya Bailey,” Callaloo 29, no. 3, (Summer 2006): 754.

216 called off the event. It is not surprising that FMLA students organized this action within the context of Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s women’s studies classroom, where she asked them what they thought of the controversy, inspiring them to action. Both Bailey and Jennings were in that class together.19

In 2013, Nelly, still harboring antagonistic feelings against Spelman’s FMLA students, stated publicly in an interview with HuffPost Live host Marc Lamont Hill that he believed the only thing he could have done differently would have been to “kick somebody’s ass.”20 Nelly, in a roundabout way, blamed Spelman students for his sister’s death. Jennings and Bailey responded publicly, calling attention to Nelly’s continued disrespect toward Black women.

Jennings stated:

Our important message was to show the African-American community we shouldn’t have to choose between these issues,” she said. “They are all equally as important, we can do both. And so we fought, tooth and nail in order to, before I graduated in May of 2004, put on our own bone marrow drive.21

Bailey published an open letter to Nelly reminding him that he chose to cancel the bone marrow drive and that the small group of “protestors,” as they were branded in the media, were all

19 Ibid.

20 “Nelly Wanted To ‘Kick Somebody’s Ass’ Over Spelman’s Protest of ‘Tip Drill’ Video,” Huffington Post, November 12, 2013, accessed February 2, 2019, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/12/nelly-kick-somebody-ass-spelman-protest-tip- drill_n_4262503.html.

21 “Former Spelman Students Tell Nelly ‘We Shouldn’t Have To Choose Between These Issues,’” Huffington Post, November 18, 2013, accessed February 3, 2019, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/18/former-spelman-students-nelly-_n_4298264.html.

217 prepared to donate and were simply asking to have a conversation in hopes of resolving the issue and addressing the harm they believed the video/song and others like it cause.22

In addition to the FMLA, the WRRC has historically supported the LGBTQ student organization Afrekete and its predecessor, the Lesbian and Bisexual Alliance (LBA). In 1992, student Wendi O’Neal approached President Johnetta B. Cole about forming a queer student organization in response to a homophobic incident that took place at Spelman. According to a study conducted by the WRRC:

At that point there were about eight students who were meeting secretly in the counseling center with a supportive staff member; among them was an out domestic exchange student. Wendi attributes events in their own lives, the contentious public debate around gay rights, and the rise of the Christian right’s mobilization in Black churches as factors that motivated them to push for a chartered student organization so that they could address the needs of lesbian and bisexual women in the AUC. They called themselves the LBA, the Lesbian and Bisexual Alliance, so that students would know they weren’t hiding.23

Antonia Randolph, another founding member of the LBA remembers the support of Beverly

Guy-Sheftall and other progressive faculty members like Theater Professor Dr. Paul Jackson,

Anthropology Professor Dr. Daryl White, and Reverend Gale Bowman, the Campus Chaplain.

“Dr. Guy-Sheftall was one of those professors. I didn’t have a class with her until my senior year, but I knew she was a professor that was supportive of gay students.” The LBA met in the

WRRC and Sisters Chapel, two spaces controlled by supportive faculty and staff. Randolph

22 Moya Bailey, “Guest Post: An Open Letter to Nelly,” Black Youth Project, November 14, 2013, accessed February 3, 2019, http://blackyouthproject.com/guest-post-an-open-letter-to- nelly/.

23 M. Jacqui Alexander and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, “Introduction,” Facilitating Campus Climates of Pluralism, Inclusivity, and Progressive Change at HBCUs (Atlanta: Spelman College Women’s Research and Resource Center, 2011), 11-12.

218 stated that students knew the WRRC was a feminist space that attracted allies. In the fall of 1993,

President Cole issued an open letter to the campus community in support of queer students, stating that she wanted Spelman to be a “beloved community” that embraced queer students.24

While the WRRC and specific faculty were supportive of the LBA, Randolph remembers administrative support being at the level of tolerance. “We had administrative support in the sense that they allowed us to charter the organization.” Randolph claims that Johnetta B. Cole’s administration was certainly not hostile, but that the main support for the organization came from faculty members. She felt that Spelman became a public face for Black feminism under Cole’s leadership, especially when the college procured Audre Lorde’s personal papers for the WRRC archive, but the day to day experiences of queer students on campus was a different story.

Randolph recounts many instances of discrimination and intimidation launched at the

LBA and its members that caused students to drop out of Spelman or feel intimidated to be out.25

“I came out my freshman year in the dorm and I had a really homophobic roommate. I was ostracized a lot by the people in my dorm who were formerly friendly, and it just felt really severe.”26 Randolph and her co-organizers were harassed by religious conservatives who showed up to a meeting and told them they were “going to hell.” They were forced to keep meeting locations a secret, not advertising them on flyers, and instead provided a phone number to call for meeting locations. They were harassed on the phone as well. The mail for the LBA was opened over the summer, after they were recognized as an official student organization. Keeping

24 Johnetta B. Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003).

25 Antonia Randolph, phone interview by author, June 6, 2017.

26 Ibid. 219 the LBA alive was a formidable undertaking, yet through Randolph and her comrades’ work, it survived as a space for building community amongst Spelman’s queer community and the larger

AUC. In addition to the LBA becoming a social organization and safe space for queer students, the organization connected with other local organizations and participated in various political events including a PRIDE parade, and an AIDS march.27

In 1995 when Donna Hope first attended an LBA meeting, the organization was meeting in the basement of Sisters Chapel. Hope remembers the meetings being small with only a handful of attendees. As a dual degree student who also attended Barnard College, she was inspired by how “out” students were at Barnard compared to Spelman. As Hope remembers, “early on it was about community.” The women who had formed the LBA, including Antonia Randolph, were her “Big Sisters.” As they graduated, they passed the organizational baton to sophomore Hope.

“I didn’t feel emotionally prepared,” she stated, because she had yet to come out to her mother.28

“I admit I was very reluctant! I was in the very intense Dual Degree program with very little free time; LBA had no faculty advisor, no meeting space, and our beloved and progressive Dr. Cole was resigning as President. It wasn’t easy but I was determined to make the LBA thrive.”29 In

1996, Hope ramped up LBA outreach and while students were still afraid to publicly join or support, Hope kept pushing forward. Tragically, her mother passed away in January 1997, forcing Hope to pause on LBA organizing. However, in the fall of 1997 she and her comrades decided to be much bolder with their visibility. They placed ads in the local papers about their

27 Ibid.

28 Donna Hope, phone interview by author, May 24, 2017.

29 Alexander and Guy-Sheftall, “Introduction,” Facilitating Campus Climates, 12.

220 meetings and flyered the entire Atlanta University Center to attract students to their organization.

Hope also believed a name change was in order for the organization. “I decided that the LBA needed a new name to reflect the new, fierce, bold, proud, and OUT lesbian/bisexual Spelman sister. I had just read Audre Lorde’s Zami30 and Catherine McKinley’s Black lesbian anthology,

Afrekete, and knew that Afrekete was the perfect name.”31 She and others affiliated with the

LBA connected with a local elder Black lesbian group named Zami as well.32 At the end of the book Zami, Afrekete appears as Lorde’s lesbian partner. Additionally, Lorde also speaks of the

Yoruba Orisha Afrekete, more popularly known as Eshu, in her work The Black Unicorn.33

Afrekete has partnered with other LGBTQ student organizations across the AUC and at other schools, HBCUs and PWIs.34

30 Audre Lorde chose this name for her biomythography because it means “women who work together as friends and lovers,” on the island of Curaçao, the home country of her mother. See: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. New York: Crossing Press, 1982.

31 Alexander and Guy-Sheftall, “Introduction,” Facilitating Campus Climates, 12-13; Catherine McKinley, Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing (New York: Anchor Books, 1995).

32 Hope, interview.

33 Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn: Poems (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1995); Kara Provost, "Becoming Afrekete: The Trickster in the Work of Audre Lorde" MELUS 20, no. 4 (1995): 45-59.

34 Howard University was the first HBCU to have an officially recognized LGBTQ student organization, Lambda Student Alliance, which lasted through the mid-1980s. In the 1990s, Oxala, a new organization was started at Howard that lasted until 1999. Howard students reinvigorated the organization in 2000. Since 2009 the organization has been called Coalition of Activist Students Celebrating the Acceptance of Diversity and Equality (CASCADE). Many more HBCUs have LGBTQ student organizations currently; however, studies show HBCUs are far behind PWIs in developing and sustaining student organizations and resource centers for LGBTQ students, see: Emily Lenning, “Unapologetically Queer in Unapologetically Black Spaces: Creating an Inclusive HBCU Campus,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 1 (39): 283-293; Alexander and Guy-Sheftall, “Introduction,” Facilitating Campus Climates, 13. 221

Afrekete is still active and continues to tackle many issues in recent years including a policy change at Spelman that opened admissions to, “women students including students who consistently live and self-identify as women, regardless of their gender assignment at birth.” The college also maintained that if a student transitioned while attending Spelman and no longer identified as a woman, they were allowed to remain enrolled in the College. Even though trans students and queer students have always attended Spelman, the College joined other women’s colleges across the country to explicitly state in written policy that trans people were welcome as students. In a letter to the college community, President Mary Schmidt Campbell stated, “Like same-sex colleges all over the country, Spelman is taking into account evolving definitions of gender identity in a changing world and taking steps to ensure that our policies and plans reflect those changes in a manner that is consistent with our mission and the law.” Campbell also stated,

“In adopting this admissions policy, Spelman continues its fervent belief in the power of the

Spelman sisterhood.”35 While the intentions of the administration were certainly good, some students believed that the policy’s language projected the idea that gender is binary. Trans

Afrekete member Theo Triplett stated:

I think that people’s ideas of trans women in particular are very different from the reality for a lot of trans women, particularly [trans] women of color…I think that [people at] Spelman think that, because of people like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, trans women have to look a certain way to be women. That’s just not financially attainable for someone just coming out of high school, so I feel like we have to deal with that aesthetic aspect of womanhood.36

35 Mary Schmidt Campbell, “President’s Letter to the Community: Spelman Admissions and Enrollment Policy Update,” Spelman College, September 5, 2017, accessed February 3, 2019, https://www.spelman.edu/about-us/office-of-the-president/letters-to-the- community/2017/09/05/spelman-admissions-and-enrollment-policy-update.

36 Tiffany Pennamon, “Spelman Expands Its Admissions Policy to Include Trans Students,” Diverse Issues In Higher Education, August 13, 2018, accessed February 3, 2019, https://diverseeducation.com/article/122665/. 222

Additionally, members of Afrekete talked openly about harassment from public safety officers at the College when trying to enter campus. While Afrekete students were attempting to wade through the language and outcomes of this new policy, they received threats in the form of hateful notes and letters. In response they organized demonstrations on campus to protest the treatment they received and what they felt like was an inadequate response from the administration concerning their safety. In June 2017 Afrekete members issued a list of seventeen demands. Acknowledging both the progress and shortcomings of Spelman, Beverly Guy-Sheftall stated:

We’ve been at it from the beginning, both in terms of being very supportive of Afrekete [and] having a very robust Arcus Foundation [grant project]. There are lots of things that we have been attempting to do. Spelman, in that regard, has been the HBCU who’s been out in front of these issues. But we still have, I think, a lot more work to do.37

Several years before Spelman led the way in HBCU trans-affirming policy changes, in

2009 Morehouse College enacted a revised version of its dress code policy that swayed in the opposite direction. While dress codes at HBCUs have always existed, this new policy caught the attention of the mainstream media, supporters of HBCUs across the country, and LGBTQ organizations because for the first time, the College specifically banned the Morehouse’s student body from wearing, “women's clothes, makeup, high heels and purses.” In addition to banning

“women’s clothing” students were forbidden from, “wearing hats in buildings, pajamas in public, do-rags, sagging pants, sunglasses in class and walking barefoot on campus.”38 This policy

37 Pennamon, “Spelman Expands Its Admissions Policy.”

38 Mashaun D. Simon, “Morehouse Dress Code Seeks to ‘Get Back to the Legacy’,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, October 17, 2009, accessed February 3, 2019, 223 clearly targeted gender non-conforming and transgender students on Morehouse’s campus.

Additionally, the policy sought to eradicate bodily presentations that were deemed to be representative of working-class standards of dress. As a part of the Atlanta University Center,

Morehouse is surrounded by a working-class Black neighborhood and it seemed that the administration believed the dress code would enable them to distinguish Morehouse students from their working-class neighbors.

Morehouse had banned “homosexuality” in the 1970s but did so without any scrutiny or massive backlash given the social norms of the era.39 When asked about the policy, Vice

President of Student Services Dr. William Bynum stated, “We are talking about five students who are living a gay lifestyle that is leading them to dress a way we do not expect in Morehouse men.” Student Daniel Edwards, co-president of Morehouse’s gay straight alliance “Safe Space” stated that he believed the statement to be discriminatory but that students were divided on the issue. "The policy is just saying that you have to show more respect in how you dress and there are things that are just not acceptable at Morehouse," senior Cameron Titus said. "We have a legacy that we are trying to uphold."40 Under national media scrutiny, the Morehouse administration revised the dress code policy, removing the ban on what they referred to as

“women’s clothing.” However, the other more class-inflected rules remained in place including a ban on “decorative orthodontic appliances”, i.e.. Grillz, permanent and removable, sagging pants,

https://www.ajc.com/news/local/morehouse-dress-code-seeks-get-back-the- legacy/4BQeGNx4kTckXgxmlUaJnN/.

39 See Chapter 3; Morehouse College Student Handbook “The Companion,” 1975-1976, 18, Robert Woodruff Library Research Center.

40 Lateef Mungin, “All-Male College Cracks Down on Cross-Dressing,” CNN.com, October 17, 2019, accessed February 3, 2019, http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/10/17/college.dress.code/.

224 doo-rags, cap, and hoodies indoors, etc.” No doubt, the national attention Morehouse received for this dress-code caused the administration to reconsider and rescind the formal ban on

“women’s clothing,” yet the politics of respectability and traditional notions of gender still dictate what is deemed appropriate attire for a Morehouse student. The ideal “Morehouse Man” is still, “expected to exhibit modest, neatness, timeliness, and appropriateness of behaviors on and off-campus.” Additionally, the “Etiquette and General Behavioral Expectations,” statement indicates that the administration expects, “students to take responsibility for their behavior, in addition to holding their peers accountable for being good citizens,” encouraging students to not only self-police, but to police the conduct and appearance of their peers.41 The language of citizenship is utilized to describe the ideal “Morehouse Man” according to the standards of the college administration. Students who are seen as legitimate campus citizens project an image of

Morehouse that is steeped in a heteropatriarchal vision of Black male respectability.

Morehouse has also come under scrutiny regarding the issue of sexual assault and rape several times in the last decade. Spelman women have repetitively attempted to draw attention to cases of sexual assault and rape they claim have been committed by Morehouse students. In

2016, a Spelman College student posted numerous tweets on Twitter stating she had been raped by four Morehouse students. Social media exploded as people connected to the institutions weighed in, some sharing similar experiences of rape and sexual assault, and others admonishing

Spelman students for speaking out. On November 8, 2017, signs that stated, “Morehouse

Protects Rapists. Spelman Protects Rapists,” were placed in plastic covers and posted all over the

41 “Etiquette and General Behavioral Expectations,” Morehouse College Office of Student Conduct, October 12, 2009, accessed February 3, 2019, https://www.morehouse.edu/media/studentconduct/MC-Etiquette-and-General-Behavioral- Expectations.pdf. 225

AUC. Some of the signs listed names of students who had allegedly committed sexual assaults.

The next morning the campus woke to a spray-painted message on the Martin Luther King, Jr.,

Chapel at Morehouse that said, “Practice what you preach Morehouse. End rape culture.” This bold message spray painted on one of the most sacred spaces in the AUC, the signs posted the previous day, and a twitter account called “Raped at Spelman,” caught national media attention as the #MeToo movement was on the rise. Unlike those who in 1973 only looked to the outside world for perpetrators of such violence, Spelman and Morehouse students shined a light inward and revealed openly and publicly that they were not afraid to lift the rug and kick the dust from underneath.

HBCUs are certainly not alone in their uphill battles against sexual assault, homophobia, sexism, and transphobia. PWIs also are sites of violence with regard to these issues and administrations have been slow to adequately respond in many cases.42 And, like PWIs, it is the activism of students at HBCUs that continues to bring about meaningful change. Students like those in Afrekete at Spelman have inherited the legacy of their predecessors, who for generations have resisted cultures of respectability on Black college campuses while they also fought white supremacy. Their histories of resistance have been overlooked and understudied, but their impact has been lasting, as will the legacy of students at HBCUs now, who continue the fight.

42 In fact, one study claims that HBCUs are doing a better job addressing sexual assault than other schools. It should be noted that this study measures and rates an institution’s approach to sexual assault by assessing whether or not they are complying with Federal Laws like the Clery Act of 1990 and the Campus Sexual Assault Victims' Bill of Rights of 1992, not if sexual assaults are prevented or how survivors believe their institutions address the issue. See: Heather M. Karjane, Bonnie S. Fisher, and Francis T. Cullen, Sexual Assault on Campus: What Colleges and Universities Are Doing About It, National Institute of Justice Report (Washington, D.C., 2005).

226

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Vita Jennifer Ash Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History Gender and Women’s Studies Program University of Illinois at Chicago [email protected]

EDUCATION

Ph.D., U.S. History, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Graduate Certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies, Completed Fall 2016

Preliminary Exam Fields: United States History African American History (Passed with Distinction) History of Gender and Sexuality in Africa and the African Diaspora (Passed with Distinction)

M.A., U.S. History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), 2008

Comprehensive Exam Fields: United States History African American History Atlantic World History

B.A., History, Western Carolina University (WCU), magna cum laude, 2005 Minor, Anthropology

ACADEMIC EMPLOYMENT (2007-PRESENT)

Lecturer, Department of African American Studies, UIC, August 2018-2019

Teaching Assistant, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, UIC, August 2015-May 2016

Lecturer, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, UIC, Summer 2015

Teaching Assistant, Department of History, UIC, January 2014-May 2015

Adjunct Lecturer, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, UNCG, Winter 2012 and Summer 2013

Full-Time Instructor, Department of History, Philosophy, Religion & Interdisciplinary Studies (H.P.R.I.S.), Bennett College, August 2009- December 2013

Adjunct Instructor of History, H.P.R.I.S., Bennett College, August 2008-May 2009

Teaching Assistant, Department of History, UNCG, August 2007-May 2008

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COURSES TAUGHT

University of Illinois at Chicago (January 2014 – Spring 2019): African American History to 1877 (Instructor, Spring 2019) Reading Black Women Writing (Instructor) Gender in Everyday Life (Instructor) Global Perspectives on Women and Gender (Teaching Assistant) History of Modern Africa (Teaching Assistant) History of Chicago (Teaching Assistant)

Bennett College (2008-2013): Origins of Civilization I (World History to 1600) Origins of Civilization II (World History since 1600) U.S. History to 1865 European History to 1815 Women in U.S. History Writing Intensive Women in U.S. History Portrayals: Women Leaders in History, Theater, & Film (team taught interdisciplinary course) Historiography of the U.S. South The U.S. Civil Rights Movement Slavery in the U.S. History of Black Feminism (team taught interdisciplinary course) Historiography

University of North Carolina, Greensboro (2007-2013): Introduction to Women’s Studies, Online Course (Instructor) U.S. History to 1865 (Teaching Assistant) U.S. History since 1865 (Teaching Assistant)

ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS

“Black Freedom Movement and Sexuality.” Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History. Edited by Howard Chiang. Farmington Hills, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2019.

Review of Erica Rhodes Hayden and Theresa Jach, eds., Incarcerated Women: A History of Struggles, Oppression, and Resistance in American Prisons, for the Coordinating Council for Women in History Quarterly Newsletter, Spring 2018.

POPULAR PUBLICATIONS FOR GENERAL AUDIENCE:

“The Power of Black Women’s Political Labor Remembered: Bennett College and the Civil Rights Movement.” Public Seminar, The New School for Social Science Research. March 9, 2018.

Review of Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Truth About the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Praxis Center Blog, Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, Kalamazoo College, September 7, 2017.

Co-Editor, with Alice Kim and Iván Arenas. Reparations Now, Reparations Won! Chicago: Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, 2016.

243

EDITORIAL EXPERIENCE

Editorial Staff Member, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, May 2018-Present

Member, Graduate Student Working Group, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, 2017

SCHOLARSHIPS, FELLOWSHIPS, AWARDS

Recipient, Marion S. Miller Dissertation Fellowship, Department of History, UIC, 2017-2018

Recipient, Kegan Travel Award, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, UIC, Summer 2017

Recipient, Annual Graduate Prize, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, UIC, Spring 2017

Recipient, Dissertation Grant, Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, UIC, Spring 2017

Recipient, Departmental Travel Award, UIC Department of History, Fall, 2016

Pre-Doctoral Fellow, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Sawyer Seminar, UIC Social Justice Initiative, 2016-2017

Recipient, UIC Chancellor’s Research Award, 2015-2016 (renewal granted Spring-Summer 2017)

Recipient, Archie K. Davis Fellowship, North Caroliniana Society, 2015

Recipient, Short Term Research Fellowship, Black Metropolis Research Consortium, University of Chicago, Summer 2015

Recipient, Kegan Travel Award, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, UIC, Fall 2014

Recipient, Departmental Research Travel Award, Department of History, UIC, Summer 2014

Recipient, History Doctoral Fellowship Award, Department of History, UIC, 2014-2017

Recipient, Provost’s Research Travel Grant, Bennett College, 2013

Recipient, United Negro College Fund Travel Grant, 2012

Humanities Teacher of the Year, Bennett College, 2009-2010

Draper-Gullander-Largent Scholarship, Department of History, UNCG 2007-2008

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RESEARCH APPOINTMENTS & OTHER PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Graduate Research Assistant to Professor Jennifer Brier, Gender and Women’s Studies, UIC, Summer 2018

Graduate Research Assistant to Professor Nadine Naber, Gender and Women’s Studies, UIC, Spring-Summer 2017

Graduate Research Assistant to Professor Barbara Ransby, African American Studies, Fall 2014- Spring 2016

Graduate Research Assistant, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Summer 2015

Graduate Student Employee, The Porch Project, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Summer 2014

Coordinator, Ella Baker Institute, Social Justice Initiative, UIC, Summer 2014

Conference Organizing Team Member, Freedom Dreams, Freedom Now!: Chicago Freedom Summer Conference, Social Justice Initiative, UIC, Summer 2014

History Learning Specialist/Tutoring Coordinator, Center for Teaching, Learning, & Technology, Bennett College, 2008-2009

Graduate Research Assistant for Professors Lisa Levenstein and Peter Carmichael, UNCG, 2006- 2007

GRANT WRITING EXPERIENCE

Co-Writer, with Jennifer Brier, “Transmedia Collage,” Exhibition Grant, Arts and Public Life, University of Chicago, 2018.

Research Assistant, National Endowment for the Humanities in the Public Square Grant, “Making the West Side: Community Conversations on Neighborhood Change.” Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, 2016.

Research Assistant, National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities Initiatives Grant, “Securing the Common Good: Hull-House History at the University of Illinois at Chicago,” Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, 2016.

CONFERENCE & WORKSHOP PRESENTATIONS

Panelist, “Prison Abolition, Reparations, and Social Practice: Chicago-Based Responses to State Violence,” National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference, Baltimore, November 2017.

Roundtable Participant, “Feminist Reflections Across Geographies,” National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference, Baltimore, November 2017.

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Roundtable Participant, “Black Women and Transformations in Education since the 1960s,” 17th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities, Hofstra University, June 2017 (aired on C-SPAN American History TV Series, August 13, 2017)

Invited Panelist, Film Screening of Agents of Change, Bringing Theory to Practice National Conference, May 2017

Invited Opening Plenary Panelist, “Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Radical Black Feminist Activism in the Archives,” 16th Annual Toni Cade Bambara Conference, Women’s Research and Resource Center, Spelman College, March 2017

Roundtable Participant, “Strategic Solidarities: Campus and Community Campaigns,” 16th Annual Toni Cade Bambara Conference, Women’s Research and Resource Center, Spelman College, March 2017

Panelist, “Education in Historical Perspective: As Sites of Inequality and Struggle,” Mellon Sawyer Seminar, UIC Social Justice Initiative, January 27, 2017

Invited Commentator, “This Nation Has Never Honestly Dealt with the Question of a Peacetime Economy”: Coretta Scott King and the Struggle for a Nonviolent Economy in the 1970s, by David Stein, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 18, no.1: 80-105, Department of African American Studies Event, UIC, November 17, 2016

Presenter, “‘Segregation…. Diminishes Our Stature As Women’: Bennett College Students and Greensboro’s Black Freedom Struggle, 1957-1961,” UIC Department of Gender and Women’s Studies Brown Bag Series, September 2016

Invited Facilitation/Lecture, “History of Anti-Black Racism in the U.S.,” Arcus Center for Social Justice, Kalamazoo College, April 2016

Roundtable Panelist, “On Teaching and Learning Civil Rights History to Foster Civic Engagement,” National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference, San Juan Puerto Rico, November 2014

Panel Moderator, “Grassroots Mobilizations in the 1950s and 1960s: Black Agency and the White Anti-Racist Tradition – Ella Baker, the Black Church, and Anne Braden,” Freedom Dreams! Freedom Now! Conference, Chicago, IL, May 2014

Presenter, "Women Students' Challenges to Traditional Notions of Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality from the 1950s to the 1980s,” Gendered Perspectives Conference, Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans, LA, 2012

Presenter, “Women’s Activism in Greensboro: Bennett College and the Civil Rights Movement,” Southern Conference on African American Studies, 2010

DEPARTMENTAL & INSTITUTIONAL SERVICE

Invited Panelist, Dissertation Writing Panel, Department of History, UIC, October 2017

Invited Panelist, Graduate School Informational Session, UIC Gender and Women’s Studies Program, Fall 2015

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Lecture, “Teaching Women’s Studies at Bennett College and Black Feminist Theory as a Pedagogical Tool,” Faculty Development Lecture Series, Bennett College, December 2013

Faculty Advisor, NAACP Chapter, Bennett College, 2013

Faculty Advisor, Social Justice Living/Learning Community, Bennett College, 2013

Member, Ad Hoc Diversity and Inclusion Committee, Bennett College, 2013

Facilitator, Division of Humanities Fall Film Series, Bennett College, 2012

Facilitator, Women’s History Month Film Series, Bennett College, 2012

Member, College-Wide Academic Advising Committee, Bennett College, 2011-2012

Member, Faculty Welfare Committee, Bennett College, 2010-2013

Member, Africana Women’s Studies Steering Committee, Bennett College, 2010-2013

Faculty Co-Advisor, Student Gay/Straight Alliance, Bennett College, 2009-2013

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES

Selected Participant, Write Out! Program, Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy, UIC, Summer 2016 and 2017

Selected Participant, New York University, Faculty Resource Network, Summer Seminars, 2011- 2013

Workshop Participant, “Women’s Studies at HBCUs,” Spelman College Women’s Research and Resource Center, 2010

Participant, Faculty Development Workshop on Developing Writing Intensive Courses, Bennett College, 2010

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

Organizer, Chicago Torture Justice Memorials Oral History Project, Spring 2018-Present

Member, Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, 2015-Present

Popular Education Workshop Organizer and Facilitator, Chicago Freedom School, 2015-Present

Invited Panelist, “"Feminism Then and Now: A Live Reading of "Sentimental,” Based on the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions,” Tracers Book Club, Chicago, IL, June 2015

Organizer and Panel Moderator, “Chicago Police Torture Teach-In: Burge and Beyond,” sponsored by the Department of History, the Social Justice Initiative, Jane-Addams Hull-House Museum, and Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, UIC, March 10, 2015

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Organizer and Panelist, “Reclaiming MLK Teach-In,” Sponsored by the Department of History, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Social Justice Initiative, and Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, UIC, January 15, 2015

Organizer, “Scholars Speak Out,” Community Forum, Scholars for North Carolina’s Future, Bennett College, April 2013

Invited Lecturer, “African Americans and Women in the American Revolution,” Guilford County Public Schools Building Bridges Program, Greensboro, NC, 2009, 2011, and 2012

PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS

National Women’s Studies Association American Studies Association Organization of American Historians Coordinating Council for Women in History Berkshire Conference of Women Historians American Historical Association