Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South

Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South PDF Author: Melissa Kean
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807133583
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
After World War II, elite private universities in the South faced growing calls for desegregation. Though, unlike their peer public institutions, no federal court ordered these schools to admit black students and no troops arrived to protect access to the schools, to suggest that desegregation at these universities took place voluntarily would be misleading In Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South,Melissa Kean explores how leaders at five of the region's most prestigious private universities -- Duke, Emory, Rice, Tulane, and Vanderbilt -- sought to strengthen their national position and reputation while simultaneously answering the increasing pressure to end segregation. To join the upper echelon of U. S. universities, these schools required increased federal and northern philanthropic funding. Clearly, to receive this funding, schools had to eliminate segregation, and so a rift appeared within the leadership of the schools. University presidents generally favored making careful accommodations in their racial policies for the sake of academic improvement, but universities' boards of trustees -- the presidents' main opponents -- served as the final decision-makers on university policy. Board members--usually comprised of professional, white, male alumni--reacted strongly to threats against southern white authority and resisted determinedly any outside attempts to impose desegregation. The grassroots civil rights movement created a national crisis of conscience that led many individuals and institutions vital to the universities' survival to insist on desegregation. The schools felt enormous pressure to end discrimination as northern foundations withheld funding, accrediting bodies and professional academic associations denied membership, divinity students and professors chose to study and teach elsewhere, and alumni withheld contributions. The Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 gave the desegregation debate a sense of urgency and also inflamed tensions -- which continued to mount into the early 1960s. These tensions and the boards' resistance to change created an atmosphere of crisis that badly eroded their cherished role as southern leaders. When faced with the choice between institutional viability and segregation, Kean explains, they gracelessly relented, refusing to the end to admit they had been pressured by outside forces. Shedding new light on a rare, unexamined facet of the civil rights movement, Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South fills a gap in the history of the academy.

Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South

Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South PDF Author: Melissa Kean
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807133583
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
After World War II, elite private universities in the South faced growing calls for desegregation. Though, unlike their peer public institutions, no federal court ordered these schools to admit black students and no troops arrived to protect access to the schools, to suggest that desegregation at these universities took place voluntarily would be misleading In Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South,Melissa Kean explores how leaders at five of the region's most prestigious private universities -- Duke, Emory, Rice, Tulane, and Vanderbilt -- sought to strengthen their national position and reputation while simultaneously answering the increasing pressure to end segregation. To join the upper echelon of U. S. universities, these schools required increased federal and northern philanthropic funding. Clearly, to receive this funding, schools had to eliminate segregation, and so a rift appeared within the leadership of the schools. University presidents generally favored making careful accommodations in their racial policies for the sake of academic improvement, but universities' boards of trustees -- the presidents' main opponents -- served as the final decision-makers on university policy. Board members--usually comprised of professional, white, male alumni--reacted strongly to threats against southern white authority and resisted determinedly any outside attempts to impose desegregation. The grassroots civil rights movement created a national crisis of conscience that led many individuals and institutions vital to the universities' survival to insist on desegregation. The schools felt enormous pressure to end discrimination as northern foundations withheld funding, accrediting bodies and professional academic associations denied membership, divinity students and professors chose to study and teach elsewhere, and alumni withheld contributions. The Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 gave the desegregation debate a sense of urgency and also inflamed tensions -- which continued to mount into the early 1960s. These tensions and the boards' resistance to change created an atmosphere of crisis that badly eroded their cherished role as southern leaders. When faced with the choice between institutional viability and segregation, Kean explains, they gracelessly relented, refusing to the end to admit they had been pressured by outside forces. Shedding new light on a rare, unexamined facet of the civil rights movement, Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South fills a gap in the history of the academy.

An Education in Georgia

An Education in Georgia PDF Author: Calvin Trillin
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082036066X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
In January 1961, following eighteen months of litigation that culminated in a federal court order, Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter became the first black students to enter the University of Georgia. Calvin Trillin, then a reporter for Time Magazine, attended the court fight that led to the admission of Holmes and Hunter and covered their first week at the university—a week that began in relative calm, moved on to a riot and the suspension of the two students "for their own safety," and ended with both returning to the campus under a new court order. Shortly before their graduation in 1963, Trillin came back to Georgia to determine what their college lives had been like. He interviewed not only Holmes and Hunter but also their families, friends, and fellow students, professors, and university administrators. The result was this book—a sharply detailed portrait of how these two young people faced coldness, hostility, and occasional understanding on a southern campus in the midst of a great social change.

Transforming the Elite

Transforming the Elite PDF Author: Michelle A. Purdy
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469643502
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
When traditionally white public schools in the South became sites of massive resistance in the wake of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, numerous white students exited the public system altogether, with parents choosing homeschooling or private segregationist academies. But some historically white elite private schools opted to desegregate. The black students that attended these schools courageously navigated institutional and interpersonal racism but ultimately emerged as upwardly mobile leaders. Transforming the Elite tells this story. Focusing on the experiences of the first black students to desegregate Atlanta's well-known The Westminster Schools and national efforts to diversify private schools, Michelle A. Purdy combines social history with policy analysis in a dynamic narrative that expertly re-creates this overlooked history. Through gripping oral histories and rich archival research, this book showcases educational changes for black southerners during the civil rights movement including the political tensions confronted, struggles faced, and school cultures transformed during private school desegregation. This history foreshadows contemporary complexities at the heart of the black community's mixed feelings about charter schools, school choice, and education reform.

Slavery and the University

Slavery and the University PDF Author: Leslie Maria Harris
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820354422
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Slavery and the University is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post-Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery's influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.

American Higher Education Since World War II

American Higher Education Since World War II PDF Author: Roger L. Geiger
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216924
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
Geiger provides an in-depth history of the remarkable transformation of higher education in the United States in the decades after World War II, taking readers from the GI Bill and the postwar expansion of higher education to the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, desegregation and coeducation, and the challenges confronting American colleges today. Shedding light on the tensions and triumphs of an era of rapid change, the author shows how American universities emerged after the war as the world's most successful system for the advancement of knowledge, how the pioneering of mass higher education led to the goal of higher education for all, and how the "selectivity sweepstakes" for admission to the most elite schools has resulted in increased stratification today. Geiger identifies 1980 as a turning point when the link between research and economic development stimulated a revival in academic research--and the ascendancy of the modern research university--that continues to the present. Sweeping in scope, this book demonstrates how growth has been the defining feature of modern higher education, but how each generation since the war has pursued it for different reasons. It provides the context we need to understand the complex issues facing our colleges and universities today, from rising inequality and skyrocketing costs to deficiencies in student preparedness and lax educational standards. --From publisher description.

New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, V. 17

New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, V. 17 PDF Author: Clarence L. Mohr
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807834912
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board of Education PDF Author: James T. Patterson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199880840
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
2004 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court's unanimous decision to end segregation in public schools. Many people were elated when Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in May 1954, the ruling that struck down state-sponsored racial segregation in America's public schools. Thurgood Marshall, chief attorney for the black families that launched the litigation, exclaimed later, "I was so happy, I was numb." The novelist Ralph Ellison wrote, "another battle of the Civil War has been won. The rest is up to us and I'm very glad. What a wonderful world of possibilities are unfolded for the children!" Here, in a concise, moving narrative, Bancroft Prize-winning historian James T. Patterson takes readers through the dramatic case and its fifty-year aftermath. A wide range of characters animates the story, from the little-known African Americans who dared to challenge Jim Crow with lawsuits (at great personal cost); to Thurgood Marshall, who later became a Justice himself; to Earl Warren, who shepherded a fractured Court to a unanimous decision. Others include segregationist politicians like Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas; Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon; and controversial Supreme Court justices such as William Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas. Most Americans still see Brown as a triumph--but was it? Patterson shrewdly explores the provocative questions that still swirl around the case. Could the Court--or President Eisenhower--have done more to ensure compliance with Brown? Did the decision touch off the modern civil rights movement? How useful are court-ordered busing and affirmative action against racial segregation? To what extent has racial mixing affected the academic achievement of black children? Where indeed do we go from here to realize the expectations of Marshall, Ellison, and others in 1954?

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture PDF Author: Clarence L. Mohr
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807877859
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Offering a broad, up-to-date reference to the long history and cultural legacy of education in the American South, this timely volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture surveys educational developments, practices, institutions, and politics from the colonial era to the present. With over 130 articles, this book covers key topics in education, including academic freedom; the effects of urbanization on segregation, desegregation, and resegregation; African American and women's education; and illiteracy. These entries, as well as articles on prominent educators, such as Booker T. Washington and C. Vann Woodward, and major southern universities, colleges, and trade schools, provide an essential context for understanding the debates and battles that remain deeply imbedded in southern education. Framed by Clarence Mohr's historically rich introductory overview, the essays in this volume comprise a greatly expanded and thoroughly updated survey of the shifting southern education landscape and its development over the span of four centuries.

Virginia's Massive Resistance

Virginia's Massive Resistance PDF Author: Benjamin Muse
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


A People’s History of American Higher Education

A People’s History of American Higher Education PDF Author: Philo A. Hutcheson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136697357
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This pathbreaking textbook addresses key issues which have often been condemned to exceptions and footnotes—if not ignored completely—in historical considerations of U.S. higher education; particularly race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Organized thematically, this book builds from the ground up, shedding light on the full, diverse range of institutions—including small liberal arts schools, junior and community colleges, black and white women’s colleges, black colleges, and state colleges—that have been instrumental in creating the higher education system we know today. A People’s History of American Higher Education surveys the varied characteristics of the diverse populations constituting or striving for the middle class through educational attainment, providing a narrative that unites often divergent historical fields. The author engages readers in a powerful, revised understanding of what institutions and participants beyond the oft-cited elite groups have done for American higher education. A People’s History of American Higher Education focuses on those participants who may not have been members of elite groups, yet who helped push elite institutions and the country as a whole. Hutcheson introduces readers to both social and intellectual history, providing invaluable perspectives and methodologies for graduate students and faculty members alike. This essential history of American higher education brings a fresh perspective to the field, challenging the accepted ways of thinking historically about colleges and universities.