Who’s Invited? The Desegregation of Emory University, The University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University Samantha Rahmin AN HONORS THESIS in History Presented to the Faculty of the Department of History of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors 2017 Dr. Beth Wenger, Honors Seminar Director Dr. Mary Frances Berry, Thesis Advisor _______________________________ Siyen Fei Undergraduate Chair, Department of History To my parents for being the wind beneath my wings. i Acknowledgements I’m so lucky to have grown up surrounded by the most amazing family. My parents, Iris Kopeloff and Michael Rahmin, and my siblings, Gabrielle Rahmin and Austin Rahmin, have provided me with unconditional love and encouragement to fulfil my dreams. I’m incredibly grateful that I have the world’s best nana, colloquially known to my friends as “super nana,” as my best friend and constant source of wisdom. I would not be me if it were not for her influence. I have learned so much as a student in the department of history at the University of Pennsylvania. Thank you to Dr. Yvonne Fabella for providing me with endless major specific advice. Thank you to Dr. Thomas Sugrue for inspiring me to pursue this topic and helping me start this research. This thesis would not be complete if it were not for the amazing seminar leader, Dr. Beth Wenger. Dr. Wenger’s ability to teach me research and writing skills of course were a prerequisite for my ability to write this thesis. However, Dr. Wenger’s courses hae also helped me develop as a thinker, and will therefore positively impact every future project that I undertake. Dr. Mary Frances Berry, my thesis advisor, provided me with a wealth of subject specific knowledge, and I am so lucky that this project grew under her guidance. Thank you to my fellow students in my history thesis seminar, and especially my peer group: Chloe Nurik, Hannah Fagin, and John Shinn. Thank you to Dr. Rogers Smith and his Democracy, Constitutionalism, and Citizenship program for both writing support throughout the project and the necessary funding for the work. This thesis benefitted immensely from Emory’s archives, the University of Pennsylvania’s archives, and Princeton’s archives. I am fortunate that many archivists took the time to help me find necessary materials. Finally, I am thankful for the two organizations I have joined at Penn, my sorority, Zeta Tau Alpha, and my branch of student government, the Nominations and Elections Committee. The support of my families at Penn has made me the student (and historian) I am now. ii Table of Contents Introduction............................................................................................................................................... 10 Chapter 1: The Desegregation of Emory University………………………………………...11-43 Chapter 2: The Desegregation of The University of Pennsylvania…………………….44-70 Chapter 3: The Desegregation of Princeton University……………………………………71-94 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………95-102 iii “In studying the experience of black people with Princeton University—a premiere institution of education—one can better understand how engulfing racism was in this nation's history. By neglecting the histories of African Americans at Ivy League universities, scholars have failed to acknowledge the expanse of the struggle for black freedom.1 Who’s Invited? Most basic American history textbooks emphasize that in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education the Supreme Court ruled to “admit public schools on a racially non discriminatory basis.”2 While this decision is frequently celebrated for its immediate impact, much of its significance stems from the way that it catalyzed a chain of events, and these events eventually sparked desegregation of higher education.3 As a result of this ruling, court mandates frequently forced public universities to alter their admissions criteria.4 This switch in policy correlated with a switch in American attitudes: only twenty six percent of Americans thought that “negroes should go to the same schools as whites” in 1942. By 1967 almost seventy percent believed in school desegregation.5 As the American public began to affirm school desegregation, selective private institutions began transforming their approach to admissions in order to desegregate. This thesis offers a case study of the desegregation of three private schools: Emory University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University. The first chapter demonstrates how Emory University fought Georgia’s law in order to admit black applicants. The chapter shows that once Emory won the right to desegregate, it accepted a 1 Stefan M. Bradley, "The Southern-Most Ivy: Princeton University from Jim Crow Admissions to Anti-Apartheid Protests, 1794–1969," American Studies 51, no. 3-4 (2010), doi:10.1353/ams.2010.0129, 110. 2 "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1)," Oyez. Chicago-Kent College of Law at Illinois Tech, n.d. Dec 18, 2016. <https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/347us483> 3 James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: a civil rights milestone and its troubled legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 4 Alton Hornsby, "Black Public Education in Atlanta, Georgia, 1954-1973: From Segregation to Segregation." The Journal of Negro History 76, no. 1/4 (1991): 21-47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2717407. 5 Mildred A. Schwartz, “Trends in White Attitudes Toward Negroes,” National Opinion Research Center at the University Of Chicago. 1967. http://www.norc.org/PDFs/publications/NORCRpt_119.pdf 1 similarly small proportion of black applicants as its peers in the North. The next chapter highlights the tension associated with Penn’s desegregation process, where administrators struggled to balance the need to admit black students while keeping a high average SAT score. The final chapter shows that while Princeton had the resources to admit black students without sacrificing its reputation, Princeton prevented changing its admissions policies until the emergence of new leadership in the 1960s. In order to show the motives behind each schools’ desegregation process, this thesis relies heavily on materials from each school’s archive and each school’s major student newspaper: The Emory Wheel, The Daily Pennsylvania, and The Daily Princetonian, respectively. At Emory, the archive’s Desegregation Collection holds paperwork surrounding a crucial court decision and provocative correspondences between administrators, alumni, and students. Emory’s archives include the President’s paperwork and admissions files. At Penn’s archives, files from the admissions office shed light on the school’s desegregation process. Princeton’s archives contain much material, but a significant portion is restricted from researchers. Fortunately, each student at Princeton had to write a thesis, and these theses contribute to this work. The source base for each school varied slightly. Yet these sources illuminate the theme that each school delayed desegregation until doing so was convenient for each institution to grow a national reputation. All three institutions aspired to become well known “national universities.” To be a national university, many admissions officers believed they ought to reflect the population of the entire nation. Yet through the 1960s, Emory, Penn, and Princeton each maintained a white student and faculty population in a historically black city. From the 2 middle of the1960s to the middle of the 1970s, each school desegregated by admitting black students in greater numbers. By definition, desegregation means, “to free of any laws, provisions of practices requiring isolation of members of a particular race in separate units.”6 In his recent, Why Busing Failed, Matthew Delmont defines desegregation as “assignment of students to public schools without regard to race, religion, or national origin.”7 Emory fought to admit students in that manner, and Penn and Emory claimed to do so. However, defact segregation hindered these schools from initially admitting black students in greater numbers. This thesis shows how administrators at each school worked within the confines of federal and state law along with internal school policy to allow more black students to gain entry. This paper uses the terminology “black students” opposed to “African American students.” Race refers to a social classification system broadly correlated with phenotypes, which confers such structural advantage to privileged groups. The term has “African American” has implications regarding ancestral origin which are irrelevant to this paper. This work focuses solely on the plight of black applicants; a limitation to this work is that it does not address if the universities became inclusive to other minorities.8 Moreover, the biggest limitation of this thesis is that does not attempt to discuss school integration, meaning according to Merriam Webster Dictionary, “to combine (two or more things) to form or create something.”9 Whereas this thesis demonstrates how Emory, Penn, and Princeton allowed more black students to exist in their campuses, it 6 The Merriam-Webster dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 2004). 7 Matthew F. Delmont, Why busing failed: race, media, and the national resistance to school desegregation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 8. 8Stevens, M. L., Creating a class: College admissions and the education of elites. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 15. 9 The Merriam Webster