Deferred Dreams and Exiled Citizens: Black Graduate Education in the Age of Jim Crow

• In Event: 61.021 - New Directions in Black Educational History

Abstract

In 1949, Paul Jones, a twenty-year old African American man, applied for admission to the University of Alabama Law School. The dean of admission rejected Jones’s application because the lone public law school was for white students only. In an attempt to ameliorate the situation, the dean encouraged Jones to seek legal training outside of Alabama with financial assistance from the state. Jones, however, gave up his dream of studying law because he had no desire to leave the only home and community he had ever known. More than 4,000 black southerners did, however, use state funds to leave home in search of the education that their home states denied them due to race.

Many scholars of black education have written about African Americans’ quest for elementary, secondary, and baccalaureate education, but black efforts to secure graduate and professional education have been largely overlooked. As late as 1940, only nine black institutions in the South offered the master’s degree and no black institution conferred the Doctor of Philosophy degree. Those nine institutions were Fisk University; Howard University; Hampton Institute; Atlanta University; Xavier University; Virginia State College; Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College; North Carolina College for Negroes; and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College. Most of these institutions began their graduate programs in the 1930s. Rather than provide African Americans with the same in-state opportunities for graduate study at public institutions that were provided to white citizens, southern and border state lawmakers appropriated tax dollars to send black citizens out-of-state for graduate training. Missouri began the “segregation scholarships” in 1921. By 1948, North Carolina, South Carolina, Arkansas, Virginia, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia had followed suit. These states continued their scholarship programs until the 1960s defying the United States Supreme Court decision in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) in which justices decreed that states had a responsibility to offer white and black citizens in-state education.

This paper uncovers the hidden history of the exportation of black scholars to preserve segregation. In telling this story, I build on the argument many scholars have made about the centrality of education to the twentieth century African American freedom struggle. In addition to boycotts, marches, and legal action, some African Americans chose to challenge racial discrimination by taking advantage of Jim Crow scholarships to demonstrate African American intellect and potential. Those who pursued post-baccalaureate study with Jim Crow scholarships accepted the exportation of their talents and intellect to sharpen their skills and make plain the immorality and illogic of keeping African Americans out of southern universities.

Author

• Crystal R. Sanders, The Pennsylvania State University