Brick and Mortar: Historically Black Colleges and the Struggle for Equality, 1930-1960

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  • March 20, 2019
Creator
  • Lundeen, Elizabeth
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of History
Abstract
  • This dissertation documents the history of inequality endured by state-funded historically black colleges (HBCs) from 1930 to 1960. Through a comparative exploration of today’s North Carolina Central University and Virginia State University, it reveals how these institutions survived despite meager appropriations and provided black students, faculty, and administrators shelter from the storm of indignity created by segregation. Using a wide variety of sources, including correspondence records, student newspapers, oral histories, and civil rights organizations’ records, this dissertation shows how HBCs played an integral role in the black freedom struggle by inculcating a sense of citizenship in black youth when disfranchisement denied them formal participation in the body politic. It also reveals how state-funded HBCs functioned as sites of contestation where presidents, students, faculty, lawyers, state officials, and philanthropists sought to shape the schools to their own ends. Although state HBCs reflected white powerbrokers’ desire to define black educational progress, these long-standing educational institutions—symbols of resilience and pride in black communities—served as sanctuaries from which African Americans could endure and deliberate over the best tactics for achieving racial equality. By analyzing intergenerational dialogue that took place on HBC campuses, this dissertation offers new ways to think about the goals and methods of the black freedom struggle, particularly the struggle to desegregate education. Constrained by their roles as leaders of public institutions, presidents adopted a long-term vision for keeping their institutions afloat. Distancing themselves from litigation and direct action protest, they focused on upbuilding institutions that could provide equal, if separate, education to black students. Their “brick-and-mortar politics” clashed with their students’ desire to make swift change through more confrontational activism. Because ideas about how to best achieve racial equality were in flux during this period, the decision to confront segregation head-on was hardly a foregone conclusion. The impulse to equalize resources was as much a part of the conversation as the impulse to desegregate institutions. By interrogating the historical relationship between equality and desegregation, this study informs our understanding of the present system of public higher education, which is legally desegregated but contains sorely under-resourced historically black institutions.
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  • In Copyright
Advisor
  • Leloudis, James
Degree
  • Doctor of Philosophy
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
Graduation year
  • 2018
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