Search Results

This chapter examines the frustrations and accomplishments of young African-American women who studied at Oberlin College in Ohio in the years prior to the Civil War. Immersed in an otherwise all-white student body and taught by an all-white faculty, African-American women students resented and resisted misunderstandings and incidents of outright discrimination in campus by pursuing antislavery activism. Nevertheless, young women of different races enrolled at Oberlin showed strong affinities, shaped by the values of “respectability” and the doctrines of “practical abolitionism.” Respectability prompted black women undergraduates to join with their white counterparts in the cause of “female moral reform,” allowing them to exhibit the “virtue” that slavery and skin color had presumably denied them. The women at Oberlin drew strength from autonomous networks of African Americans as well as from sympathetic whites in their construction of a vital role for black women in the work of emancipation and in their quest for equality and empowerment.

This chapter provides a local analysis of lived experiences on three integrated college campuses – Berea (KY), Howard (DC) and Oberlin (OH). Selected from among thirty colleges open to blacks and whites after 1870, these three were widely endorsed as models for replication by important cultural, political, and media figures. Diaries and personal letters from college presidents, students, and others reveal the intensity with which campus-level actors were attached to the ideal of integration. Administrative reports, budgets, fundraising materials and detailed minutes from Board of Trustee meetings illustrate decision-making processes and practices in structuring racial contact on campus. Fundraising materials, including speeches, pamphlets and letters to donors show how the colleges depicted their mission to potential students, donors, and policymakers; an independently-constructed data set of over four hundred newspaper articles shows how these colleges were portrayed to readers across the United States. Berea, Howard, and Oberlin differed in racial composition, recruitment strategies, and black representation on faculty and administration. Despite variation on key factors thought to predict inter-racial cooperation, on-campus dynamics were insufficient to resist segregationist pressures from beyond the campus gates.

This chapter discusses William Mercer Cook as he grew from child to adolescent. It explains several important points in his life, from the death of his father, his journey with his mother, and the life that he had when he stayed with his relatives. It also narrates Will’s decision to pursue his latent desire to study music at Oberlin College. It adds that his artistic ability was undoubtedly inherited from his paternal grandfather, who once organized an orchestra in Detroit, wherein he played the violin and clarinet. It then explains that the violin was to become the instrument upon which Will would choose to express his musicality.

This chapter focuses on Jennifer L. Morgan's freshman year at Oberlin College, which coincided with a nearly volcanic outpouring of written work by black feminists. Like many of her generation, Morgan felt as though something elusive and profound had slipped through her fingers by virtue of having been born a bit too late. She clung to the story of her parents finding each other in the crowds during the March on Washington in the summer before they married, and worried that her attendance at the “No Nukes” and “U.S. out of Central America” rallies was little more than a weak echo of something far more real. Morgan was looking for something in the here and now—the desire to be caught up in something important was, after all, precisely what had propelled her to Oberlin in the first place.