Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South

Duke, Emory, Rice, Tulane, and Vanderbilt

Melissa Kean

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780807133583
• eBook ISBN: 9780807149119
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

1

Intelligent White Men of the South
The Late 1940s

The presidents of Duke, Emory, Rice, Tulane, and Vanderbilt, charged with leading these universities into an uneasy post–World War II future, found themselves in the 1940s at the center of gradually growing controversy on campus. Each of these schools nurtured strong traditions and was deeply proud of its roots. Their alumni revered the founders and early leaders and the philosophical foundations of southern higher education that they had laid. The trustees, who had often known the giants of the past during their own days at school, saw these foundations—the nurturing of under graduates, strong leadership in the South, a commitment in the denominational schools to Christian education—as guideposts for their own stewardship. Other ideals were unspoken but exerted no less influence. The older men who sat as trustees—locally powerful businessmen, bankers, attorneys, and clergymen—saw their schools as extensions of their private domains, places for their children and their friends’ children to make important social and business contacts under the paternal gaze of trusted guardians of the status quo. They valued academic excellence and a strong national reputation, but usually rather less than they valued a good football team. Strict standards, but not exclusively academic ones, they believed, should guide admissions decisions. These should include the same kinds of standards that operated at the country club. Family background and ties, religion, good character, contributions to the community—all were easily as important as intelligence and ability in their definition of merit. These values endured among alumni and trustees long after World War II, even as American higher education as a whole was being completely transformed. As the years passed, these beliefs came under sometimes subtle but insistent attack as the southern universities were drawn into the national mainstream. More rapid and dislocating still were the changes to the larger southern economy and society. Trustees and older graduates felt buffeted and exhausted by this change, as the South and the schools they had known as boys disappeared.

The presidents of these five schools experienced the rapid changes after the war in a very different way from the trustees. While always carefully respectful of the past, they were more eager to embrace the future. Highly educated, they all had significant experience outside the region. Every one of them knew perfectly well that there was no university in the South that could even approach the attainments of any number of schools in the Northeast, the Midwest, and California. They also grasped that the new financial realities in the postwar world presented them with a rare chance to build real academic excellence, to join the top ranks of American higher education. They seized the opportunity presented by massive postwar federal research funding and continued philanthropic interest in southern education, engineering a leap forward in the quality of both teaching and research on these campuses. As they succeeded, these schools became far more cosmopolitan places, with more complex bureaucracies, professors and students from all around the country, and an increasingly sophisticated outlook on their place in the nation.

The presidents, with their broad view of the changing national academic landscape, conceived of these vast changes on their own campuses as the modern fulfillment of the founders’ aspirations. They were uniquely situated, though, to grasp the depth of the opposition to new ways. All but one (Rice’s William Houston) were themselves sons of the rural South who needed no instruction in the importance and subtleties of family relationships, social hierarchies, and local traditions. The social aspects of their roles as university presidents gave them a clear view of the world of the local leadership, with its private clubs, close-knit social scene, and loyalty to settled ways. From this vantage it was easy to see how a threatened and angry group of alumni could, in their reverence for the past, understand the postwar changes not as a fulfillment, but as a betrayal.

Thus, there was a growing gap between the presidents (and most of the faculty), who embraced the important changes in higher education as well as the changes in the social and economic climate of the nation and the South—and most of the trustees, who saw no reason to abandon a system that had given them happy and productive lives and that all their friends approved of on moral and social grounds. In order to be successful, university presidents must be adept at balancing the interests and desires of a variety of constituencies. No president has ever had the power to simply act as he or she thinks best. Not only trustees and alumni, but also faculty, students, administrators, financial backers, even local townspeople—all must be consulted, appeased, or squelched in accordance with changing needs. While their relative importance varies across time and circumstance, none of these groups can be safely ignored in making policy decisions. After World War II this problem became acute. The era began with intimations of change, and that change soon grew deeper than anyone imagined. The presidents of these institutions struggled to persuade the trustees, who held the final decision, to accept new curricula, a new emphasis on graduate studies, and an atmosphere of intellectual openness that many of them found suspect and even, at times, anti-American.

Among the changes brewing at these five schools was a new pattern of race relations. There had always been plenty of black people on campus. They were gardeners, porters, janitors, cooks, and laundry workers. A few held skilled positions as glass blowers for chemistry labs or machine shop technicians for engineers and physicists. Their roles on campus were carefully circumscribed, although with the usual local variation in segregation customs. In short, race relations on campus were an extension of race relations in Durham, Atlanta, Nashville, New Orleans, and Houston. This seemed ordinary and perfectly comfortable to the whites involved. In the postwar ferment, though, strange things began to happen. Blacks, becoming better educated and more prosperous by the year, started to come to campus for other reasons. Although there was not yet any real push to open admissions to black students, black townspeople sometimes came to hear concerts or lectures. The occasional black professor attended a scholarly meeting. At times, black ministers were invited to address campus groups, usually student religious organizations that earnestly debated issues of social welfare.

Even these minor changes enraged many alumni and trustees. While they accepted, grudgingly, the raft of substantive changes in the academic focus of the schools, race was a different matter. To many older alumni, faculty, and trustees the former seemed matters of judgment and debate, the latter examples of naked coercion. Hence, small breaches of established racial etiquette could trigger almost comically oversized fears. The presence of a single black speaker on campus could set off paroxysms of anger toward blacks who didn’t “keep in their place,” bullying northerners, and university administrators who cravenly submitted to their demands. There was, in this view, simply no predicting where it would all end. If no one would, or could, hold the line, these tiny breaches would end in a flood.

The presidents, however, remained focused on the job—building nation ally respected academic institutions. Their daily lives were dominated by the tasks required to improve the schools’ research and teaching enterprises. It was precisely because of this ambition that they remained ever mindful of the changing racial climate in the larger nation. In particular, each president kept close track of the growing anti-segregation sentiment among the federal agencies and private northern foundations that provided much of the money needed to improve the school. A struggle to reconcile the trustees to the new patterns of race relations was inevitable. To this end, the presidents adopted—each in his own way and each to his own particular purposes—a flexible rhetoric of moderation, one that turned on the critical proposition that in spite of growing outside pressures the white southern elite remained in firm control of race relations in the region and at these schools. This malleable, even ambiguous, rhetoric allowed those who feared change to articulate a seemingly moderate basis for caution, but it also helped the presidents who sought change to create the climate of calm they believed would allow them gently to nudge trustees forward.

I

Harvie Branscomb, chancellor of Vanderbilt, succeeded in clearing a path through the thicket of conflicts. Before the Vanderbilt Board of Trustees settled on Branscomb as the school’s new chancellor, they had approached President Rufus Harris of Tulane about the job. Although tempted (and flattered) Harris turned them down, suggesting that his temperament was perhaps wrong for Vanderbilt. “Character, personality and temperment [sic] prescribe generally one’s way of getting things done, and I do believe that mine would scarcely be effective or proper in concluding the issues and adjustments that appear to me to be necessary at Vanderbilt…. I am made aware that it will take a gentler hand than mine to do this.” While it may be true that Harris’s oversized personality would not have worked well in sedate Nashville, if Vanderbilt’s trustees believed that they were getting a “gentler hand” in Harvie Branscomb they were greatly mistaken.¹

In 1946 Branscomb was fifty-one years old and at the height of his considerable powers. He was a keenly intelligent man, strong willed, energetic, self-confident, and a subtle and astute politician. He had a powerful vision of what a great southern university could be and a powerful conviction that he was just the man to build one. From the moment he arrived on the Vanderbilt campus, Branscomb resolutely pursued what he believed to be the school’s best interests with any means at his disposal, often to the discomfort of the trustees and alumni who sometimes fought change almost as ferociously as Branscomb sought it. From the start of his tenure, Branscomb was personally convinced that segregation’s days were rightfully numbered; that it was both wrong and a terrible drain on southern society. He was also eager to gain Vanderbilt a national reputation and completely cognizant that these things were linked. Thus, among his efforts to improve Vanderbilt during the immediate postwar years Branscomb included steady work, often behind the scenes, to change the university’s relationship to the black community. Almost from the moment Branscomb set foot on campus he began signaling that changes in relations with Nashville blacks were afoot. (Quietly reversing long-standing policy, for example, very early in his tenure he let Fisk University faculty know they were welcome to attend events at Vanderbilt’s Neely Auditorium.)² Branscomb articulated a rationale for controlled, limited loosening of racial restrictions that convinced the trustees to allow a series of minor but meaningful adjustments. Carefully positioning himself not as an active proponent of change but rather as a sober, responsible southern leader, Branscomb pushed through moderate measures by arguing that southern whites had a duty to see to the best interests of the region’s blacks and that failure to do so invited the intervention of people with more extreme views who could well do real damage. Branscomb’s moderation was moderation with content. He staked out the middle ground in an effort to move all sides toward real, workable change.

Branscomb came from Alabama. He was born in Huntsville in 1894 and grew up in rural Alabama towns where his father, a Methodist minister, led congregations. Later in life he pointed to his father as an early model for his own beliefs about race in the South. His father, Branscomb reported, was “slightly more liberal on matters of race than most other citizens,” an attitude he put into practice by inviting local black ministers to attend his weekly “Preachers Meeting.” Probably wisely, few chose to attend, but the lesson was not lost.³ As a young man Branscomb went off to study at Birmingham College, run by the Methodists of northern Alabama, and earned his B.A. in 1914. It was, he later noted, “a useful institution, struggling to become a superior one,” but while he was there it remained the “kind of college where lunch was sometimes late because we had to wait for President Simpson to come out from town on a street car with the bread under his arm.”⁴ The contrast must have been staggering when Branscomb arrived at Oxford as only the second Rhodes scholarship winner from Alabama.⁵ He spent three years there and earned a distinguished M.A. in biblical studies.

Branscomb left Oxford to serve with Herbert Hoover’s Belgian Relief Commission and then returned to the United States in July 1917, ready to enter the military. After trying and failing to join the air force, he instead went to work for the army YMCA at Camp Wheeler in Macon, Georgia. There, he spent a brief stint with Will Alexander, noted for his progressive ideas about racial justice in the South, who ran the YMCA’s pastoral and social service efforts at southern army camps.⁶ Branscomb did then enter the army briefly, returning home in 1918.

In 1919 Branscomb took a job as a philosophy instructor at the infant Southern Methodist University in Dallas. After a year, he became an associate professor and moved over to teach in the School of Theology. With characteristic confidence Branscomb believed that the post–World War I era held real opportunities for progress, and he was convinced that teaching theology put him in position to exert important influence on the course the South would take. With the region “facing in the next decade a choice of roads, reactionary resistance to change or acceptance of new ways of thinking and acting,” Branscomb thought that the education of the South’s next generation of ministers was critical. “No progress in the South could be made,” he believed, “without the major Protestant churches … going along.” Although this analysis had much to recommend it, Branscomb’s estimation of the South’s readiness for significant change was wildly optimistic.⁷

Branscomb’s departure from SMU in 1925 provided ample evidence of the conservatism that continued to permeate the South, its churches, and its institutions of higher education. When a colleague in the School of Theology was fired for exposing students to what were deemed unacceptably liberal theological teachings, Branscomb fought the school’s administration. His defense of the fired teacher was both too public and too stubborn, as well as completely ineffective. Branscomb himself was summarily fired. Although his opposition to the school’s actions was absolutely consistent with his intellectual leanings, his intensity was probably explained by the fact that he already had a job offer from the Duke University Divinity School. It was simply time to leave.⁸

Branscomb arrived at Duke at the age of thirty and stayed for twenty-one years, leaving only to finish his doctoral dissertation in 1927 and for a year of study in Europe. Fortunately, his early performance as a campus politician at SMU did not turn out to be typical. As time passed he revealed a strong streak of political acumen, and in 1944 he became the dean of the Divinity School. Harkening back to his father, when he assumed that position he opened the school’s chapel services to black ministers, who were sometimes invited to participate. Branscomb left in 1946 when he assumed the chancellorship at Vanderbilt.⁹

Vanderbilt University had been established, after several false starts, in 1873. It was organized by the Methodist Church, led by the powerful Bishop Holland McTyeire, but funded largely by Cornelius Vanderbilt. A bumpy beginning gave way to a period of vigorous growth and steady improvement. By the early 1900s, however, Vanderbilt’s ties to the Methodist church had become a hindrance. The church leaders who controlled the board were increasingly unhappy with the school’s movement toward becoming a broader, more secular institution that accompanied its strides in quality. At the same time, the church did not provide Vanderbilt with enough funds, which forced the administration to look outside for money. This too was a problem, as non-Methodist donors were wary of the school’s strong denominational ties. The result, in the middle of the 1910s, was a bitter legal battle that ended with the church and the university severing their official relationship. By the 1930s, Vanderbilt was on fairly solid footing, due largely to huge grants from the Carnegie Foundation, the Vanderbilt family, and the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation. Still, the school remained, in Paul Conkin’s words, a “thoroughly conventional” regional institution. It struggled with academic quality and with the balance between its powerful, northern-funded Medical School and the rest of the university. The Depression and World War II kept Vanderbilt from more than incremental growth in size and quality.¹⁰

When Branscomb arrived as chancellor in 1946, what he had to work with did not look promising. Vanderbilt was too small, with woefully inadequate facilities. Outside its Medical School, it had no really prominent faculty. Its immediate neighborhood was steadily deteriorating. Lacking even minimally adequate housing, it had become nearly a streetcar college. Half of its students came from Nashville, two-thirds from Tennessee. Its enrollment in the fall of 1946 of about three tho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Intelligent White Men of the South: The Late 1940s
• 2. “The Sense of Security No Longer Exists”: The Early 1950s
• 3. The Backlash against Brown: 1954
• 4. Unable to Lead: The Late 1950s
• 5. Push Comes to Shove: The Early 1960s
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index