//features//
Fall 2017
Breaking Through a Bastion of Whiteness
The History of Racial Integration at Columbia
Leeza Hirt and Aaron Fisher
In the last century, top research universities like Columbia have gone from primarily serving children of the white wealthy elite to reflecting the changing racial and ethnic demographics of the United States. Although most Ivy League schools still have more students from families in the top one percent of earners in the country than they do students in the bottom 60%, racial diversity at schools like Columbia has improved dramatically since the 1960s. Columbia champions its diversity, but a cursory Internet search does not turn up much information on the history of racial integration at Columbia. This lack of information made us wonder: When did Columbia transform from a college primarily for the sons of wealthy white people into a university that leads its peer institutions in racial diversity?
Columbia administrators have occasionally examined the University’s complicated racial history. As former Dean of Students and retired professor of American Studies Roger Lehecka told us, archivists tried to determine who the first black student was at Columbia for the school’s 250th anniversary celebration in 2004, but could not come up with a name. In 2015, the Office of Communications and Public Affairs created a website titled “Columbia Celebrates Black History and Culture,” which profiles notable black Columbians and describes scholarly projects devoted to black history. However, the site does not include a page that gives a straightforward history of racial integration at Columbia.
Our curiosity grew when we realized that other colleges with similar histories—such as Harvard and Princeton—can easily identify the first black students to graduate from their institutions and have erected programs and publications in their honor. Why is Columbia unable to do the same?
***
Robert McCaughey, author of Stand Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York and professor of history at Barnard College, told us the reason Columbia has not formally publicized this history is because, unlike other colleges, Columbia never had an official policy against accepting students on the basis of race. He argued that Columbia College did not actively bar students of color; instead, they did very little to recruit these students.
This practice was not the case at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. The minutes of that college’s faculty meetings reveal that black applicants were rejected in the mid-1800s. The minutes from March 20, 1866, show that “the Secretary was instructed to refuse matriculation in the College to all colored persons until otherwise ordered by the Faculty.” The minutes from June 1866 read: “After due discussion it was Voted that the Secretary be confidentially instructed to suspend the matriculation of colored students, if any should present themselves until their cases have been submitted to and decided upon by the Faculty; and that these instructions take the place of those passed upon the same subject at the Faculty meeting of March 20th.” The records of these minutes located in the Archives include a note that says there “are no documents relating to any of these resolutions in the P&S Manuscript Collection or references to them in the minutes of the Board of Trustees.” Perhaps because of this history, Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons is able to identify its first black alumnus: Dr. Charles Drew, a member of the class of 1940.
The same cannot be said for Columbia College. Class photographs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—until as recently as the 1960s—show that there tended to be one to two black students in the College per year, believed to be from wealthy Caribbean or African families. In the 1920s and 1930s, coaches of athletic teams would try to recruit from black communities in the United States, but their efforts were lackluster and relatively ineffective. As the decades went on, and the black community just a few blocks away from Columbia’s campus grew, the lack of black students at the College became more conspicuous.
Nonetheless, the fact that Columbia was an almost entirely white college in the middle of a black neighborhood seems to have been lost on Columbia’s admissions committee. In a 1931 report by a special committee of the Columbia University Club, several active alumni criticized the Columbia College Office of Admissions for their lack of formal guidelines. They wrote that the “department of Admissions [should] take whatever steps are necessary and advisable to increase applications from any group or type in which past classes have tended to be weak.” The list of private schools and well-funded public schools across the country that Columbia’s admissions team targeted in the 1950s suggest that the University’s definition of “diversity” included only white Protestants from areas outside of New York.
It took the weight of a national civil rights movement for Columbia administrators to expand their definition of diversity.
***
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s upended notions of race and equality in American society, including on college campuses. At the beginning of the decade, Ivy League schools were still bastions of whiteness, largely inaccessible to black Americans. Lehecka, the former Dean of Students, told us that when he was an undergraduate at Columbia in the mid-1960s, “all the black students could fit in two suites in Carman.” Indeed, according to Columbia’s own records, only seven Columbia College students who registered to attend the College in 1964 were black. One reason there were so few black students at this time is because there were not many black applicants, in part because they either had not heard about schools like Columbia or because Ivy League schools had a reputation of being for white students only. To increase the number of black students at Columbia, members of the admissions office would have to change where and how they were recruiting students.
By the middle of the decade, many universities, including Columbia, actively sought black applicants. “Frankly, we hope to get more Negro candidates,” Columbia Director of Admissions Henry S. Coleman told the Columbia Daily Spectator in an October 1963 article. However, Columbia only accepted 15 black students—out of 35 applicants—for that year’s class of 670 total students. Coleman told the Herald-Tribune that he expected these numbers to rise in the coming years, in part because of the work of the Citizenship Council, a student group that showed potential black applicants around campus to demonstrate “that Negroes have a place at Columbia.” It was up to colleges to prove to black students that they would be welcome on campus.
Although some students in the 1960s pushed for a more racially diverse student body, before the protests of 1968, much of Columbia’s recruitment of black students came from the administration. Admissions officers at Columbia’s peer institutions began recruiting more black students around the middle of the decade, but according to Lehecka, Columbia was a few years ahead of most of its peers in its focus on recruiting more minority students. Lehecka told us these top-down changes at Columbia “clearly came from that national idea that things had to change” concerning civil rights. Despite Columbia’s progress, the College was still difficult for many black students to attend once they were accepted. “The truth is [Columbia administrators] weren’t ready to help these students once they arrived here,” Lehecka told us.
By the late 1960s, Columbia College accepted approximately 55 to 60 black students each year, out of around 120 applicants. It was not until the aftermath of the 1968 student revolt that Columbia began recruiting and accepting African American students at a significantly higher rate.
Columbia’s famous student protests, beginning in the spring of 1968 and continuing into the following year, stemmed from a number of issues, including student opposition to Columbia’s planned gym construction in Morningside Park. According to Frank Guridy, a Columbia history professor who teaches a research seminar on Columbia in 1968, at the time, out of a total student population of 2,500 in Columbia College, about 50 were black. Obviously, not every African American student was involved in the 1968 protests, but many were active in the Students’ Afro-American Society. This black cultural student group was in charge of African American students’ protests during the unrest. Many black—and non-black—students demanded the school accept more African Americans, hire more black faculty, and work to make African Americans already enrolled at Columbia more comfortable on campus.
In the wake of those protests and the significant media focus on Columbia at the time, administrators began reforming their approach to minority student recruitment and well-being. Because of the unrest on campus, applications in general dropped more than 13 percent at Columbia and more than seven percent at Barnard in 1969. At the same time, according to an April 20, 1969, New York Times article by Fred Hechinger, the Ivy League and Seven Sisters, as a whole, accepted significantly more black and Puerto Rican students that year. At Columbia, these changes were part of a larger plan to work with black student groups to increase African American enrollment.
In a press release dated April 15, 1969, Fred Knubel, director of the Columbia Office of Public Information, wrote that representatives “of Columbia College and the Students’ Afro-American Society have had many talks on matters of admission in recent months. … The College has increased significantly the number of admissions of black and Hispanic students. It had accepted approximately 115 black (and approximately 30 Hispanic) applicants for 1969-1970. This is double the number of acceptances for 1968-1969, which was 58 blacks (Hispanic figure is not available).” In the same statement, Knubel notes that to improve its recruitment of black students, Columbia College increased the amount of money it gave groups of black students for recruitment-related travel.
Despite the increase in black enrollment at Columbia College, the School of Engineering remained overwhelmingly white. In the March 1969 issue of the Columbia Engineering Quarterly, George Scurlock, president of the Engineering Class of 1969, wrote an article excoriating the engineering school for mistreating its few black students and driving them to drop out of Columbia. “As recently as the Class of 1970, admitted in 1966, there were no American Negroes and one Puerto Rican admitted,” Scurlock wrote. “There are a considerable number of Black students interested in science and engineering. Other schools are finding them. We must, also.”
***
Despite Columbia’s official efforts to recruit black students in the 1960s, the number of black applicants to Columbia dropped over the following decade. In 1976, the Columbia Daily Spectator reported that applications from black students to Columbia decreased by 20 percent. As the percentage of black students at Columbia declined throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, the numbers of other minority students—specifically Hispanic and Asian American students—increased. The CU Record announced in 1983 that “CU leads Ivies in Minority Enrollment,” according to the U.S. Department of Education. However, when it came to African American students, Columbia was tied with Brown for third place.
During this period, black student leaders continued forming their own organizations and publishing numerous articles in student publications to shed light on their difficult and complex experiences. In response to student pressure, Lehecka, then Dean of Students, announced in 1982 that he would appoint an assistant dean of students whose role would be to deal specifically with the “problems of minority students and organizations.” Spectator reported that Verna Bigger, president of the Black Students’ Organization at the time, “said that a new dean to deal with minority problems was necessary but that the position ‘should have been established earlier.’”
As the administration attempted to make the college experience more hospitable to black students, it also decided to increase the presence of black people on more than just a student level. In 1989, Michael Sovern, the University’s president, convened a Task Force on Minorities, which called on Columbia to raise $12 million for an endowment fund to recruit more black faculty and trustees.
***
Columbia’s transformation from a school with seven black freshmen to the most statistically diverse college in the Ivy League does not tell its whole story of racial integration. From the 1960s to the 1990s, curriculum changes worked in conjunction with new admissions policies to integrate Columbia. Indeed, according to Guridy, integration at a college is not just about the racial makeup of the student body; it’s about curricula, too. “Black studies is not about black students learning about themselves,” he told us. And although Columbia often leads the Ivy League in its enrollment of black students, it has not always been a leader in terms of hiring black faculty and developing African American studies in an academic context. Indeed, Guridy told us that “Columbia was slower than most” colleges to have multiple black faculty members. In 1968, according to Guridy, there was only one black tenured member of the Columbia faculty: Elliott Skinner, an anthropology professor. As part of its response to protests in the late 1960s, Columbia hired political scientist Charles Hamilton in 1969. Throughout the next decade, according to Guridy, the University still had disproportionately few tenured African American professors.
In the wake of the protests of 1968 and 1969, Columbia administrators began to lay the groundwork for a black studies program. In an April 14, 1969, press release, Knubel writes of discussions held between representatives of the Students’ Afro-American Society and new Columbia President Andrew Cordier about the possibility of adding a black studies program. However, Guridy noted that “Columbia was kind of slow to institutionalize the academic study of people of African descent.”
Although Columbia established its first African American studies program in 1969, the first iteration of this program was widely criticized for its “lack of structure, funding, resources, and commitment from faculty.” That year, Columbia hired Manning Marable, a professor of history and African American studies, to reform the program. Upon arriving at Columbia, Marable founded the Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS), an interdisciplinary center that, according to Guridy, does not have hiring power because it is not an academic department. Although some peer institutions now have full African American studies departments, according to Guridy, “the notion that black studies is of scholarly import [still] isn’t accepted by everyone.”
***
In a recent feature, The New York Times determined that Columbia is the most racially diverse school—and has the lowest percentage of white students—in the Ivy League. Though Columbia leads in statistical rankings, many believe there is still significant work to be done to improve the experiences of black and other minority students on campus. Columbia’s evolution since the 1960s should inspire students and administrators to maintain that progress in coming years.
Columbia administrators have occasionally examined the University’s complicated racial history. As former Dean of Students and retired professor of American Studies Roger Lehecka told us, archivists tried to determine who the first black student was at Columbia for the school’s 250th anniversary celebration in 2004, but could not come up with a name. In 2015, the Office of Communications and Public Affairs created a website titled “Columbia Celebrates Black History and Culture,” which profiles notable black Columbians and describes scholarly projects devoted to black history. However, the site does not include a page that gives a straightforward history of racial integration at Columbia.
Our curiosity grew when we realized that other colleges with similar histories—such as Harvard and Princeton—can easily identify the first black students to graduate from their institutions and have erected programs and publications in their honor. Why is Columbia unable to do the same?
***
Robert McCaughey, author of Stand Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York and professor of history at Barnard College, told us the reason Columbia has not formally publicized this history is because, unlike other colleges, Columbia never had an official policy against accepting students on the basis of race. He argued that Columbia College did not actively bar students of color; instead, they did very little to recruit these students.
This practice was not the case at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. The minutes of that college’s faculty meetings reveal that black applicants were rejected in the mid-1800s. The minutes from March 20, 1866, show that “the Secretary was instructed to refuse matriculation in the College to all colored persons until otherwise ordered by the Faculty.” The minutes from June 1866 read: “After due discussion it was Voted that the Secretary be confidentially instructed to suspend the matriculation of colored students, if any should present themselves until their cases have been submitted to and decided upon by the Faculty; and that these instructions take the place of those passed upon the same subject at the Faculty meeting of March 20th.” The records of these minutes located in the Archives include a note that says there “are no documents relating to any of these resolutions in the P&S Manuscript Collection or references to them in the minutes of the Board of Trustees.” Perhaps because of this history, Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons is able to identify its first black alumnus: Dr. Charles Drew, a member of the class of 1940.
The same cannot be said for Columbia College. Class photographs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—until as recently as the 1960s—show that there tended to be one to two black students in the College per year, believed to be from wealthy Caribbean or African families. In the 1920s and 1930s, coaches of athletic teams would try to recruit from black communities in the United States, but their efforts were lackluster and relatively ineffective. As the decades went on, and the black community just a few blocks away from Columbia’s campus grew, the lack of black students at the College became more conspicuous.
Nonetheless, the fact that Columbia was an almost entirely white college in the middle of a black neighborhood seems to have been lost on Columbia’s admissions committee. In a 1931 report by a special committee of the Columbia University Club, several active alumni criticized the Columbia College Office of Admissions for their lack of formal guidelines. They wrote that the “department of Admissions [should] take whatever steps are necessary and advisable to increase applications from any group or type in which past classes have tended to be weak.” The list of private schools and well-funded public schools across the country that Columbia’s admissions team targeted in the 1950s suggest that the University’s definition of “diversity” included only white Protestants from areas outside of New York.
It took the weight of a national civil rights movement for Columbia administrators to expand their definition of diversity.
***
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s upended notions of race and equality in American society, including on college campuses. At the beginning of the decade, Ivy League schools were still bastions of whiteness, largely inaccessible to black Americans. Lehecka, the former Dean of Students, told us that when he was an undergraduate at Columbia in the mid-1960s, “all the black students could fit in two suites in Carman.” Indeed, according to Columbia’s own records, only seven Columbia College students who registered to attend the College in 1964 were black. One reason there were so few black students at this time is because there were not many black applicants, in part because they either had not heard about schools like Columbia or because Ivy League schools had a reputation of being for white students only. To increase the number of black students at Columbia, members of the admissions office would have to change where and how they were recruiting students.
By the middle of the decade, many universities, including Columbia, actively sought black applicants. “Frankly, we hope to get more Negro candidates,” Columbia Director of Admissions Henry S. Coleman told the Columbia Daily Spectator in an October 1963 article. However, Columbia only accepted 15 black students—out of 35 applicants—for that year’s class of 670 total students. Coleman told the Herald-Tribune that he expected these numbers to rise in the coming years, in part because of the work of the Citizenship Council, a student group that showed potential black applicants around campus to demonstrate “that Negroes have a place at Columbia.” It was up to colleges to prove to black students that they would be welcome on campus.
Although some students in the 1960s pushed for a more racially diverse student body, before the protests of 1968, much of Columbia’s recruitment of black students came from the administration. Admissions officers at Columbia’s peer institutions began recruiting more black students around the middle of the decade, but according to Lehecka, Columbia was a few years ahead of most of its peers in its focus on recruiting more minority students. Lehecka told us these top-down changes at Columbia “clearly came from that national idea that things had to change” concerning civil rights. Despite Columbia’s progress, the College was still difficult for many black students to attend once they were accepted. “The truth is [Columbia administrators] weren’t ready to help these students once they arrived here,” Lehecka told us.
By the late 1960s, Columbia College accepted approximately 55 to 60 black students each year, out of around 120 applicants. It was not until the aftermath of the 1968 student revolt that Columbia began recruiting and accepting African American students at a significantly higher rate.
Columbia’s famous student protests, beginning in the spring of 1968 and continuing into the following year, stemmed from a number of issues, including student opposition to Columbia’s planned gym construction in Morningside Park. According to Frank Guridy, a Columbia history professor who teaches a research seminar on Columbia in 1968, at the time, out of a total student population of 2,500 in Columbia College, about 50 were black. Obviously, not every African American student was involved in the 1968 protests, but many were active in the Students’ Afro-American Society. This black cultural student group was in charge of African American students’ protests during the unrest. Many black—and non-black—students demanded the school accept more African Americans, hire more black faculty, and work to make African Americans already enrolled at Columbia more comfortable on campus.
In the wake of those protests and the significant media focus on Columbia at the time, administrators began reforming their approach to minority student recruitment and well-being. Because of the unrest on campus, applications in general dropped more than 13 percent at Columbia and more than seven percent at Barnard in 1969. At the same time, according to an April 20, 1969, New York Times article by Fred Hechinger, the Ivy League and Seven Sisters, as a whole, accepted significantly more black and Puerto Rican students that year. At Columbia, these changes were part of a larger plan to work with black student groups to increase African American enrollment.
In a press release dated April 15, 1969, Fred Knubel, director of the Columbia Office of Public Information, wrote that representatives “of Columbia College and the Students’ Afro-American Society have had many talks on matters of admission in recent months. … The College has increased significantly the number of admissions of black and Hispanic students. It had accepted approximately 115 black (and approximately 30 Hispanic) applicants for 1969-1970. This is double the number of acceptances for 1968-1969, which was 58 blacks (Hispanic figure is not available).” In the same statement, Knubel notes that to improve its recruitment of black students, Columbia College increased the amount of money it gave groups of black students for recruitment-related travel.
Despite the increase in black enrollment at Columbia College, the School of Engineering remained overwhelmingly white. In the March 1969 issue of the Columbia Engineering Quarterly, George Scurlock, president of the Engineering Class of 1969, wrote an article excoriating the engineering school for mistreating its few black students and driving them to drop out of Columbia. “As recently as the Class of 1970, admitted in 1966, there were no American Negroes and one Puerto Rican admitted,” Scurlock wrote. “There are a considerable number of Black students interested in science and engineering. Other schools are finding them. We must, also.”
***
Despite Columbia’s official efforts to recruit black students in the 1960s, the number of black applicants to Columbia dropped over the following decade. In 1976, the Columbia Daily Spectator reported that applications from black students to Columbia decreased by 20 percent. As the percentage of black students at Columbia declined throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, the numbers of other minority students—specifically Hispanic and Asian American students—increased. The CU Record announced in 1983 that “CU leads Ivies in Minority Enrollment,” according to the U.S. Department of Education. However, when it came to African American students, Columbia was tied with Brown for third place.
During this period, black student leaders continued forming their own organizations and publishing numerous articles in student publications to shed light on their difficult and complex experiences. In response to student pressure, Lehecka, then Dean of Students, announced in 1982 that he would appoint an assistant dean of students whose role would be to deal specifically with the “problems of minority students and organizations.” Spectator reported that Verna Bigger, president of the Black Students’ Organization at the time, “said that a new dean to deal with minority problems was necessary but that the position ‘should have been established earlier.’”
As the administration attempted to make the college experience more hospitable to black students, it also decided to increase the presence of black people on more than just a student level. In 1989, Michael Sovern, the University’s president, convened a Task Force on Minorities, which called on Columbia to raise $12 million for an endowment fund to recruit more black faculty and trustees.
***
Columbia’s transformation from a school with seven black freshmen to the most statistically diverse college in the Ivy League does not tell its whole story of racial integration. From the 1960s to the 1990s, curriculum changes worked in conjunction with new admissions policies to integrate Columbia. Indeed, according to Guridy, integration at a college is not just about the racial makeup of the student body; it’s about curricula, too. “Black studies is not about black students learning about themselves,” he told us. And although Columbia often leads the Ivy League in its enrollment of black students, it has not always been a leader in terms of hiring black faculty and developing African American studies in an academic context. Indeed, Guridy told us that “Columbia was slower than most” colleges to have multiple black faculty members. In 1968, according to Guridy, there was only one black tenured member of the Columbia faculty: Elliott Skinner, an anthropology professor. As part of its response to protests in the late 1960s, Columbia hired political scientist Charles Hamilton in 1969. Throughout the next decade, according to Guridy, the University still had disproportionately few tenured African American professors.
In the wake of the protests of 1968 and 1969, Columbia administrators began to lay the groundwork for a black studies program. In an April 14, 1969, press release, Knubel writes of discussions held between representatives of the Students’ Afro-American Society and new Columbia President Andrew Cordier about the possibility of adding a black studies program. However, Guridy noted that “Columbia was kind of slow to institutionalize the academic study of people of African descent.”
Although Columbia established its first African American studies program in 1969, the first iteration of this program was widely criticized for its “lack of structure, funding, resources, and commitment from faculty.” That year, Columbia hired Manning Marable, a professor of history and African American studies, to reform the program. Upon arriving at Columbia, Marable founded the Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS), an interdisciplinary center that, according to Guridy, does not have hiring power because it is not an academic department. Although some peer institutions now have full African American studies departments, according to Guridy, “the notion that black studies is of scholarly import [still] isn’t accepted by everyone.”
***
In a recent feature, The New York Times determined that Columbia is the most racially diverse school—and has the lowest percentage of white students—in the Ivy League. Though Columbia leads in statistical rankings, many believe there is still significant work to be done to improve the experiences of black and other minority students on campus. Columbia’s evolution since the 1960s should inspire students and administrators to maintain that progress in coming years.
//Leeza Hirt is a senior in Columbia College and is Editor-in-Chief of The Current. She can be reached at lh2717@columbia.edu. Aaron Fisher is a senior in Columbia College and is Features Editor of The Current. He can be reached at af2803@columbia.edu.