"Prof. Solomon takes exam at USC"

James Solomon arriving to take the GRE
From State and the Columbia Record, July 28, 1963.

In my article on James Solomon and the desegregation of the University of South Carolina, I wasn't able to include the above photo in my AMS Notices article (photo permissions...).  This is a real shame because it played in an important role in researching the article.  This news item was the first time I found a documentation about Solomon as a mathematician.  (Most of the written material focuses on his work in public service: Director of Social Services, member of a School Board,....)

The photo also captures a lot about desegregation.  On a first viewing, I thought this just showed a normal if stressful experience that most math students go though.  Upon more careful consideration, I think Solomon's experience was totally different.

First, consider why Solomon had to take the exam.  Right now our PhD program requires general GRE scores and makes Subject GRE scores optional, but prior to 1954, the situation would have been different: the university essentially had an open-enrollment policy for white South Carolina residents.  What happened in 1954?  Brown v. the Board of Education made it illegal for U of SC to reject applicants on the basis of race, so university officials implemented a policy of requiring standardized admission scores, in part, to create a tool for restricting the admission of African American students.

A friend of mine asked me, how do I know this?  I know this because the officials themselves wrote that this was their purpose.  While the policy was presented to the public as an innovative policy that would help the university maintain academic standards in the face of increasing enrollment, there was a second line of reasoning that was kept private.  Check out the following excerpt from a report to the president about using standardized tests:

Description of the "Purpose of the Tests" from a November 1953 report of the University Exam Committee

From the University President's archives in the South Caroliniana Library

(The C. E. E. B. is the College Entrance Examination Board or what's usually called the College Board today.)

So one of the purposes of the exams policy was to make it less likely for the NAACP to intervene if the university denies admission to Blacks.  The other "whites-only" schools in South Carolina implemented similar policies around the same time.  The university archives have correspondence between the different university presidents expressing concern over desegregation and exploring implementing standardized tests as a way to mitigate the impact.

An interesting question that I can't fully answer is, how did school officials figure out how to do this? This use of standardized test is a relatively complicated scheme, and anyone who has interacted with university administration knows that universities often struggle to implement very basic policy changes.  (I think U of SC has spent a semester and counting trying to figure out whether students should be allowed to miss 10% of their classes or if 10% should be increased....).

R. Scott Baker's book Paradoxes of Desegregation sheds important light on what happened.  The idea of using standardized tests to maintain racially discriminatory practices originated in the 1940s in response to a lawsuit over public school teacher salaries.  The state government had separate pay scales for Black and White teachers with Blacks being paid substantially less than Whites.  The NAACP filed a lawsuit and the courts found this policy failed the "equal" part of "separate but equal".  State officials responded by replacing the old pay scale with one based on scores on a national tests (the NTE which has evolved in the current Praxis test).

By setting test cutoff scores appropriately, state officials found out that they could essentially reproduce the old racially discriminatory pay scale system while complying with the law.

Table of data on teacher exam scores
From the University President's archives in the South Caroliniana Library

The above table shows how the scores were used.  The grades "A, B, C, D" correspond to pay grades.  The cut-off scores are set so that 98.85% of Whites received higher salaries than 49.14% of the Blacks.  The table is taken from the University President's archived papers on university entrance exams.  Consider why the table is in the archives.  The data doesn't have anything to do with college admissions or anything else the President is for responsible.  Presumably the President had collected this material since it served as a model for how university officials hoped to use the SAT and GRE scores.

A lot of the specifics of how university officials developed out the exam policy are unclear to me.  For example, did university officials develop the policy themselves or did they collaborate with other people?  With the earlier N.T.E. exams, the pay policies were created by the South Carolina School Committee which, despite its name, was a committee within the state government charged with maintaining segregation in education.  Baker argues that the policy was largely developed by a prominant lawyer, David Robinson.  I did not see any material related to Robinson in the President's papers, but President Russell (who was a career politician) would have known Robinson socially, and may have worked with him earlier (in, for example, creating the teacher pay policy).

It is also unclear to me how involved the testing organization ETS was in all this.  The chair of the exam committee traveled to New Jersey to meet with ETS officials and learn more about how their exams worked, but I can't find any documentation about what was discussed.  On one hand, ETS's public record on segregation is quite positive: Wheeler's book A Campaign of Quiet Persuasion documents how ETS officials worked hard to ensure that their testing centers in the South were integrated.  On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that ETS officials wouldn't have figured out what U of SC was trying to do and I find it easy to believe that they would have comprised on politics for the sake of their business (expanding testing to the South represented a big financial opportunity).  Baker was able to document that this was the basic dynamic with the NTE score (which organized by an organization that was later incorporated into ETS).

South Carolina's policy of requiring SAT and GRE scores for admission was innovative. They were the first school in the South to do this, and the idea quickly spread to other schools in the region.  Presumably this was done for the same reason it was done in South Carolina: it provided a mechanism for restricting the admission of Black students.  T. D. Russell's article "To keep negros out..." shows that this was the case at UT Austin, but situation at other schools seems largely unexplored.  Great work for future researchers.

The Saint Louis University students

This post continues the discussing from the blogposts "Arnold Ross and the desegregation of Saint Louis University" and "The Saint Louis University students."

A companion post on Arnold Ross is the blogpost "Arnold Ross and the Afro-Am Student Protests" which discusses Arnold Ross's involvement with African American student protests at The Ohio State University.

I find it striking that, for all the attention given to the desegregation of Saint Louis University, almost nothing is said about the first African American students to enroll.  The most detailed account I have found is McCarthy's 1951 article "Facing the Race Problem at St. Louis University" in the Jesuit Educational Quarterly.  Here is what he says: "Five Negro students were therefore admitted to the 1944 summer sessions.  Two were male undergraduate who were enrolled in the College of Arts and Sciences.  Two men and one women, all public school teachers, were admitted to the Graduate School."

That is not much to go on.  I haven't been able to find any informations about the undergraduate students, but I was able to figure out the first students to receive master's degrees.  Recall the African American students were first admitted in summer 1944.  As far as I can tell, a master's degree was first awarded to an African American in May 1946.  That was when Margaret Taylor received her M.S. degree, and as far as I can tell, she was the only African American to graduate that year.  The next year, in June 1947, a larger cohort of African Americans students graduated.  The people I have identified are the following.

Sylvester Smith
Photo from Kinloch: Missouri's First All Black Town

Sylvester LeClaire Smith
Like Margaret Taylor, Smith's family had moved to St Louis from Mississippi.  Smith was born in 1915 in Macon, Mississippi to a large family of twelve boys and four girls.  When he was young, his family had moved to Kinloch, Missouri (a predominately African American city near the St Louis airport) to escape white supremacist violence.  He graduated from the second class of Vashon High School in 1932 and then enrolled at Lincoln University.  After completing a B.S. degree in education in 1937, he returned to Kinloch and began working the public school system.  Starting as a first grade teacher, he was rapidly promoted, becoming principal in 1938 and superintendent of schools in 1943.

Smith received a Masters of Education degree based on his thesis "Suggested procedure for an audio-visual program in an urban high school district." Smith spent his adult life in St Louis and was an active and involved member of the community.  He is featured, for example, in Lift every voice and sing: St. Louis African-Americans in the twentieth century: narratives, a collection of stories about African Americans in St Louis.  A Kinloch elementary school, Smith Elementary School, was named after him.  Smith died in 2005.

Everett Thaddeus Walker
Everett Thaddeus Walker was born in 1912 in Memphis, Tennessee.  After high school, he attended  LeMoyne College (now LeMoyne-Owen College), receiving an A.B. degree in 1939.  After college, he worked in Memphis and married Alpha Thames in 1942.  Shortly after marrying, he joined the U.S. Army and achieved the rank of staff sergeant.

After the war ended, he moved to St Louis and enrolled in Saint Louis University's graduate program.  He graduated with a Masters of Education specializing in government, history, and education, and he wrote a thesis on "The Political Status of the Negro in the South."

After receiving his master's degree, Walker taught in the St Louis public school system for a number of years.  He taught Social Studies and held the positions of Counselor and Administrator in Vashon, Slogan, and Northwestern High Schools. He taught for over 35 years and worked part-time as a real estate salesman. Walker died in 2008.

Nathaniel Watlington
Nathaniel Watlington was born in Matoaka, West Virginia in 1916, and he went to university at Hampton Institute, receiving a B.S. in 1939.  After college, he served in the Army for three years.

It was after serving in the army that he entered Saint Louis University as a graduate student.  He was an education student, and he received a Masters of Education with a thesis on "Legislation Affecting Negro Education in the Southern State".

The year before he completed his master's degree, he joined the faculty at Stowe Teachers College (now Harris-Stowe State University) where he taught until 1991 when he retired as an associate professor of biology. He can be seen in a group photo of college faculty in the book The Ville, St. Louis.

When he was in his 60s, Watlington returned to school and graduated in 1980 with a doctor of chiropractic from Logan College of Chiropractic in Chesterfield.  He worked as a chiropractor in St Louis for a numbers of years.  Watlington died in 2002.

Clovis Alonzo Bordeaux
Clovis A. Bordeaux was born in St Louis in 1917 to Elizabeth and Sam Bordeaux.  His father played baseball in the St Louis Negro League.  Bordeaux graduated from Sumner High School in 1934 and then received a B.S. in from Lincoln University in 1939. After college, he studied engineering at the Milwaukee School of Engineering and received a certificate in Radio Engineering. He was unable to find a job that used his technical training and ended up working odd jobs until 1941 when he enlisted in the Army Air Corp.

Bordeaux enlisted for 4 years and volunteered to serve in the 99th Pursuit Squadron – the first army flying unit for African Americans.  This was one of the units comprising the celebrated Tuskegee Airmen.  Bordeaux served in the Mediterranean and was a communications NCO, attaining the rank of Technical Sergeant.  Bordeaux said that his class of recruits was highly talented.  Everyone was a college graduate with technical or scientific training, including one math PhD.  The math PhD was almost certainly Luna Mishoe, the former president of Delaware State College and a graduate of South Carolina's own Allen University.

Bordeaux enrolled at Saint Louis University shortly after leaving the army.  Bordeaux graduated with a Masters of Science with a thesis on "A quantitative spectrographic determination of lead in zinc."  After getting his degree, he then moved to Chicago and worked on the Cyclotron Project with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago.  Later he and his family moved to California, where he worked at the Hughes Aircraft Company. Bordeaux died in 2011 at age 93.

Intriguingly none of his obituaries mention his degree from SLU (although they do mention his degrees from Lincoln and Milwaukee).

Clovis A.Bordeaux
From the St. Louis American, May 24, 2011

Who were the first students?
In his article, McCarthy says that the first entering class of African American students included three graduate students, one woman and two men.  If these numbers are correct, Taylor, Smith, Walker, Watlington, and Bordeaux couldn't all have been in the first entering class.  So who was?

The only person I am certain was in the entering class was Smith.  Both in his obituary and at SLU commemorations, Smith is described as entering as a student in June 1944.  Since Taylor graduated in 1946, it is natural to guess that she was also in the class, but of course, she could have enrolled in, say, Fall semester.

Bordeaux probably wasn't enrolled since he never taught in the public school and the first graduate students are all described as teachers.  That leaves Watlington and Walker, although the student could also have been someone who didn't graduate.

With more archival work, one could probably get a more complete picture of the early African American students at SLU.  A great project for an interested student!

(Other posts on St. Louis University are here and here.)

The desegregation of Saint Louis University and its mysteries

Faculty at Saint Louis University in 1945
From 1945 Saint Louis University Yearbook

This post continues the discussing from the blogpost "Arnold Ross and the desegregation of Saint Louis University."

A companion post on Ross is the blogpost "Arnold Ross and the Afro-Am Student Protests" which discusses Arnold Ross's involvement with African American student protests at The Ohio State University.

In this post, I will continue talking about Arnold Ross and the desegregation of Saint Louis University.  In examining what happened, one thing that stands out is how different Ross's account is from the published accounts.

Recall here is what Arnold said:

One of my students at St. Louis University was the first black woman to receive an M.S. in mathematics in the South. She was handicapped because she had had polio when she was young, and she was paralyzed in the left leg. The students and the young priests were with me in saying she should be accepted to the university, and that’s actually what made it possible for the university to make an exception and to start accepting black students when it was a very unpopular thing to do.

This sounds straightforward, and I might expand on it as follows.  After finishing college, Margaret Taylor started working as a public school teacher in St Louis but after a few years decided she wanted to continue her education by getting a master's degree in math.  If it wasn't for segregation, this would have been easy as she could have started to attend Saint Louis University, but at the time, SLU and every other university in the state which offered a master's degree in math refused to admit Taylor because of her race.

Arnold Ross along with some students and young priests somehow became aware of her situation and began advocating on her behalf to the administration.  Taylor was a very sympathetic figure: she was a well-educated math teacher and a practicing Catholic who had a physical disability.  The administration decided to make an exception.  Once Taylor was admitted under an exception and attended without incident, university administrator realized that they should just end the practice of segregation.

Surprisingly this straightforward account is totally at odds with most published accounts.  There Margaret Taylor, Arnold Ross, the SLU students, and the young priests do not appear at all. Rather many published accounts attribute desegregation almost entirely to the actions of one faculty member: Father Claude H. Heithaus.

Father Claude H. Heithaus
From findagrave.com

Heithaus was a professor of classical archeology who had grown up in St Louis and worked at St Louis University since 1940.   A representative account of his role in desegregation is given in the article "Catholic integration in St. Louis, 1935-1947" by Donald J. Kemper, which was published in the Missouri Historical Review.  Kemper traces the origins of desegregation to activities of the local chapter of the Midwest Clergy Conference on Negro Welfare.  The MCCNW was an organization of clergy working to convert the large population of African Americans who had immigrated from the rural South to cities in the Midwest and North.  Local conference members had decided that it was essential to desegregate Catholic colleges, and in 1943, they helped an African American woman, Eloyse Foster, apply to Webster College (a Catholic woman's college).  Foster's admission was blocked by the Archbishop of St Louis, but the whole episode received considerable attention in the press.

Father Heithaus says that he learned about the Archbishop's defense of segregation and decided to take action.  In Kemper's words:

Noting his schedule to preach at the student Mass in the College Church on February 11, he decided to face the issue of the university's refusing entrance to blacks. In a carefully prepared sermon, which he distributed to the local dailies and reprinted in the student newspaper, Heithaus accused the university of being immoral, un-Christian and un-Catholic for discriminating against blacks. At the close of the sermon, he asked the mass of students to stand up and pledge never to have anything to do with discrimination against blacks. Nearly thousand students took the pledge, with no dissenters. The next summer, Saint Louis University began accepting black students.

Father Heithaus's speech was published on the front page of the student newspaper
The University News, February 11, 1944

What is going on here?  This is totally different from Ross's account.  Here desegregation is described as a fait accompli pulled off by Father Heithaus.  Arnold Ross, the students, and the young priests (which probably didn't include Heithaus; he was 46 years old, 8 years older than Ross) are nowhere to be seen.

The book Better the Dream on SLU goes a little deeper into desegregation.  The book presents Heithaus's speech as an important event, but one that was the culmination of agitation by a number of priests and university administrators.

Partial steps toward desegregation had been made a year before Heithaus's speech.  That year Interim University President Kelly created a committee charged with making a recommendation on desegregation.  The committee recommended against full desegregation and instead recommended desegregating the School of Medicine as an experimental first step. However, the recommendation was not implemented as a vote of the administrative board failed to produce a clear mandate.

The next academic year, President Kelly was replaced by Patrick J. Holloran.  Under pressure from priests to consider desegregation, President Holloran sent out letters to alumni and other friends of the university asking their opinion about admitting African American students.  The letter began circulating shortly before Heithaus's speech.  In fact, a copy of the letter, which had been intended as a discreet private inquiry, was published in newspapers the day of Heithaus's speech.

In the account in Better the Dream, it is unclear what impact Heithaus's speech had.  Heithaus received a great deal of public support, and President Holloran called a meeting of university administrators three days after the speech to discuss desegregation.  However, that meeting was inconclusive, and the President only publicly announced the decision to admit African American students in April, three months later.  Moreover, his announcement makes no reference to the speech, and it was made a few weeks after a qualified African American, Norman Cothran, had applied for admission.  Cothran's application might very well have been the primary catalyst.

A close study of the timeline in Better the Dream also calls into question part of the account in the Missouri Historical Review.  In the latter account, Heithaus unilaterally decides to take a stand against segregation, but the fact that the President's letter was leaked to the press on the same day as his speech suggests that it was part of a coordinated effort in favor of rapid desegregation.

University President Holloran
From findagrave.com

Finally, there is a third account of desegregation that seems to runs counter to both Ross's recollections and the accounts in sources like Better the Dream and the Missouri Historical Review article.  In 1951, John J. McCarthy, the Director of Public Information at SLU, published his article "Facing the Race Problem at St. Louis University" in the Jesuit Educational Quarterly.  Here's how he describes how segregation ended:

Response to the letters [from Holloran about desegregation] were quite strongly in favor of the step being taken.  A report of the results was given to a second joint meeting of the Board of Trustees and the Council of Regents and Deans, and the information was also passed on to Father Zuercher and to Father Maher.  The opinion was unanimous that the step should be taken.  Five Negro students were therefore admitted to the 1944 summer sessions.

In this account, not only do Arnold Ross, the students, and the young priests not appear, but Heithaus is absent as well.  This may reflect university politics.  Not long after the speech, President Holloran exiled Heithaus from SLU for agitating for further integration of the university.  (Accounts have Heithaus either leaving for Kansas City to work as an army chaplin or being sent to Marquette University in Wisconsin.)  As a university employee, McCarthy may have felt it best to avoid mentioning the matter.

A study of the historical sources being used sheds a light on the accounts.  The sources seem to primarily be interviews with Heithaus and SLU archival holdings (like minutes of meetings of the Board of Trustees).  Additional sources are going to be needed to create a full picture of desegregation that integrates Ross's recollections with the current published accounts.  I am not going to be doing this here, but in a later blogpost, I will put the African American students who desegregated SLU into the record.

This blogpost about Saint Louis University continues with  "The Saint Louis University students."

Arnold Ross and the desegregation of Saint Louis University

Arnold Ross at Saint Louis University in 1937
From Saint Louis University Yearbook

This post is a companion to the post "Arnold Ross and the Afro-Am Student Protests" which discusses Arnold Ross's involvement with African American student protests at The Ohio State University.

In this post, I will continue talking about Arnold Ross and the support he provided African American students.  In an earlier post, I talked about Arnold Ross and his involvement with African American student protests at The Ohio State University.  The main account of this is a 2001 interview with Ross.  In the same interview, Ross says that one of his students at Saint Louis University was the first black woman to receive an M.S. in mathematics in the South.

Saint Louis University is a private university in Missouri.  Ross's description of Missouri as a Southern state can be debated.  Missouri was a slave state until 1865 when state legislators outlawed the practice at a state convention.  However, the state remained in the Union for the duration of the Civil War (although parts of the state strongly supported the Confederacy).

Southern or not, in the 1930s and 40s, Missouri was a Jim Crow state where blacks were denied equal access to amenities like housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation by state law and local custom.  Laws enforcing racial separation at universities did not apply to Saint Louis University because SLU is a private institution, but following local custom, the university excluded African Americans until 1944.

Ross gives a basic description of what happened in his interview:

One of my students at St. Louis University was the first black woman to receive an M.S. in mathematics in the South. She was handicapped because she had had polio when she was young, and she was paralyzed in the left leg. The students and the young priests were with me in saying she should be accepted to the university, and that’s actually what made it possible for the university to make an exception and to start accepting black students when it was a very unpopular thing to do.

This account raises a number of questions.  Who was the woman?  How did people convince the university to admit her?  (She was admitted a full decade before the Brown v. Board of Ed decision ruled the de jure segregation of public schools unconstitutional.) What was her experience at SLU like?  What did she do after graduation?

Details about the desegregation of SLU are hard to find.  There are a few accounts of the event, and the university has commemorated major anniversaries, but accounts focus on the efforts of (white) local priests to challenge segregationist policies.  They mention that SLU ended its policy of racial exclusion at the start of the 1944 summer session when it admitted five African American students, but they don't even mention the names of all the students.  I could figure out one name because the student showed up at commemoration ceremonies, but he was not Ross's student.  (His degree, for example, was in education.) After doing some research, I found out that nobody seems to know the names.  I reached out to Deborah Cribbs at the SLU Archives, and the university simply does not have any record of which students in the 1940s were African American.

Despite the lack of records, I was able to figure out who Ross's student was using information that Cribbs provided.  SLU regularly publishes a bulletin that contains basic educational information about each graduating masters and doctoral student.  For example, here's the entry for Ross's student Margaret Willerding:

Entry for Ross's student Margaret Willerding in the SLU Bulletin
From the SLU Pius XII Memorial Library

The published information includes the student's undergraduate institution.  The early African American students can be identified from this because, due to segregation, they would have attended a historically black college or university (or, less likely, a university in the North that admitted African Americans). With this in mind, I was able to identify Ross's student.  It was Margaret Cecil Gerdine Taylor.

Photo of Margaret Cecil Gerdine Taylor
From the 1941 Lincoln University Yearbook

How do I know Taylor is the student? Here is her entry in the 1946 SLU Bulletin:

Entry for Margaret Taylor in 1946 SLU Bulletin
From the SLU Pius XII Memorial Library

Lincoln University is a public HBCU in Missouri, so Taylor was African American.  Moreover, while the entry doesn't list the name of her advisor, the topic of her master's thesis (binary quadratic forms) is on Ross's area of specialization.  

The other possible students can also be eliminated. There were five women who received M.S. degrees in math from 1945 to 1946, and all but Taylor and one other student attended whites-only institutions.  The other student was from Minnesota, received a joint math/physics degree, and wrote a thesis on experimental physics (title "Vapor Pressure of Liquid Bismuth by Two Methods Employing a Vacuum Microbalance") which is a topic Ross was unlikely to supervise.

Photo of Margaret Cecil Gerdine Taylor
From the 1942 Lincoln University Yearbook

I was able to piece together a little bit of information about Margaret Taylor from historical records like census data.  She was born in 1920 in St Louis to Clayburn and Lillian Gerdine.  Both of her parents had moved to St Louis from Mississippi.  The parents had probably moved to escape rural poverty and seek job opportunities in St Louis's then growing industries, a common pattern during the early 20th century.  Her father worked as a laborer in the steel industry.

Taylor was from a large family.  From the census data, it looks like she had 5 siblings.  (It's a little unclear because it looks like 2 families were living in the same household, and some of Taylor's siblings may have died in infancy.)  

Since Taylor attended SLU, the family was likely Catholic.  While Mississippi had a small population of Catholics, it's likely that Taylor's family converted after moving to St Louis.  The city had a large Catholic population, and the Catholic clergy were actively trying to convert new African American residents to Catholicism.

Taylor attended Lincoln University from 1938 to 1942.  While there, she was a member of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, serving as Sorority Treasurer in 1942. She was also one of two students to receive a 1942 Student Council scholarship.  

At Lincoln University, she had access to an excellent math education.  Lincoln's faculty included Walter Richard Talbot, one of the first African American math PhDs (University of Pittsburgh 1935).  At this time, few HBCUs employed PhD faculty in any field, and there were less than ten African American PhDs teaching mathematics in the entire country.

Photo of Walter R. Taylor in 1938
From the 1938 Lincoln University Yearbook

There is a 2 year gap between when Taylor graduated from Lincoln and when she entered SLU.  She might have worked as a school teacher (one reference describes all the entering graduate students as public school teachers) and the change in last name indicates that she probably got married (she graduated from Lincoln as Margaret Gerdine but graduated from SLU as Margaret Taylor).

Taylor largely disappears from the historical record after she graduated from SLU.  She died in 1993 and is buried in Calvary Cemetery.  Calvary Cemetery is a Roman Catholic cemetery in St Louis, so presumably Taylor continued to live in the city and remained with the Catholic church for her adult life.  

She is buried as Margaret T. Williams, and the Social Security records indicate that she had changed her last name by 1966.  Presumably she became widowed in the 1960s (a Catholic divorce at the time would be very unusual) and remarried.  Williams may have returned to teaching in the public schools after receiving her M.S. degree or she may have left the workforce to become a housewife or she could have done something completely different.

Somebody in St Louis with the time to dig deep into the St Louis archives might be able to find more information about Margaret Taylor.  For example, one might be able to figure which school Taylor taught at.  Taylor should show up in school records like yearbooks, and until 1954, there are a limited number of schools she could have taught at since she would have only been allowed to work at an blacks-only school.  I couldn't find any digitized high school yearbooks, but local libraries and historical societies should have hard copies.  

Taylor probably also has family still living in St Louis, and they might be able share more information.  Many of her siblings stayed in the city and started their own families.  Most of the siblings have probably died, but their children are likely in their 60s.

One might also be able to find information about Taylor in church records.  In any case, there is certainly a lot more to do for someone in St Louis with time and interest.  If any readers are able to track down more information, please let know!

(Additional posts on St. Louis University are "The desegregation of Saint Louis University and its mysteries" and "The Saint Louis University students.")

Arnold Ross and the Afro-Am Student Protests

Photo of Arnold Ross
From The Ohio State University Math Department

So far this blog has been focused on events in South Carolina, but I am gong to use this post and maybe another one to talk something else: Arnold Ross's role in increasing African Americans' access to higher education.

Arnold Ross was a mathematician and educator who was an influential Department Chair at the University of Notre Dame in the 1940s and 1950s and at The Ohio State University in the 1960s and 70s.  Many of the mathematician readers of this blog probably know about Ross as the founder and long-serving director of the Ross Young Scholars Program.  Less well-known is the support Ross provided to African Americans students.  In this post, I will talk about Ross and African American student protestors at Ohio State in 1970.

African American students blocking Denney Hall entrance
From The Ohio State University Library

Like essentially every major US university, The Ohio State University saw major student unrest in 1970.  In revisiting this history, I was surprised that it's difficult to find a good account of what happened and the narrative isn't what I expected.  Most universities saw student protests break out on April 30 when President Nixon announced that the US was invading Cambodia.  The protests then exploded on May 4 when the four students were shot at Kent State University by the National Guard.

Unlike many schools, the protests at Ohio State did not start with anti-war protests after the invasion of Cambodia.  They started earlier in the year and had their origins in demands from an African American student association, the Afro-Am Society.  On March 9, the society presented a series of demands to the university administration.  The students met with administrators over the course of the week, but with few results.  The main outcome was that the students became increasingly frustrated and on the 13th about fifty of them occupied administrative offices and generally caused disruptions.  School officials called in the State Highway Patrol to restore order, and the tensions temporarily died down as it was the end of the academic quarter.

At the start of the next quarter, the protests expanded.  The Afro-Am Society was joined in protest by new student groups like students in the School of Social Work.  The new protestors both expressed solidarity with the Afro-Am Society and began protesting against new issues like the lack of student participation in university governance and the presence of military recruiters on campus.  Events developed as before: students met administrators, became frustrated, and then began escalating their protests.  In response, administrators increased the police presence on campus.

The protests reached a turning point on April 29.  A group of students and faculty, the Ad Hoc Committee, called for a university-wide strike, and in response, the Governor called out the Ohio National Guard shortly before midnight.  The next day National Guard troops marched on students to break up demonstrations.  The troops remained on campus to try to maintain order, but with mixed success.  On May 6, the University President, at the recommendation of the Governor, closed the university because of the danger of violence and disorder.  The university remained closed for 13 days, until May 19.  This is the longest closure in the university's history.

Student protests seem to have slowly died down after university reopened.  Guardsmen remained on campus, a curfew was put into effect, and students continued to protest, although with less intensity than before.  The administration began to make limited concessions to students.  For example, they agreed to create a Black Studies program and hire more African American police officers, but they did not sever ties with the military.

May 30 is a natural date for the end of the protests as this is when the National Guard was withdrawn from campus. However, many students and administrators would have been embroiled in legal actions stemming from the protests for months, if not years.  The protests cost the university millions of dollars.  Riot control measures (funds for the National Guard, the police, etc) alone cost over $1.5 millions (with inflation, this would be roughly $10 million in 2020), and of course, the physical and emotional cost to the university community is impossible to calculate.

An OSU Student confronts National Guard
From The Ohio State University Library

Where was Ross in all this?  You can read him talk about his experience in a 2001 interview.  Ross knew some of the African American student leaders through an educational program for inner city youth (I think this was the New Careers program).  Ross was sympathetic to the students' complaints, but felt rioting was the wrong thing to do.  He met with students and offered to help them meet with administrators who could address their complaints.  When the National Guardsman arrived on campus in May, Ross was part of a group of faculty that tried to act as a "buffer" between the strikers and the police and Guardsmen.  (In the interview, Ross and the faculty are described as wearing red armbands to signify their status, though in another account, the faculty group is called the Green Ribbon Commission).

Its unclear how large a role Ross played.  I haven't seen Ross's name appear in documentation about the protests, but I haven't looked very hard, and in any case, there doesn't seem to be any comprehensive account of the event.

Regardless of his role, Ross was appreciated by students in 1970.  In 2001(?), I had the privilege to see Norfolk State University Professor Howard Marks Simon Richard talk about his experience and relation with Ross.  Richard was an OSU Ph.D. student in 1970 and was involved in the Afro-Am Society protests.  He explained how Ross had put himself in danger to protect students and expressed gratitude to him for keeping the rioting from getting worse  ("Let's give it up for Dr. Ross", I recall him saying.)

Acknowledgments from H. Marks Richard's thesis
From The Ohio State Mathematica Department 

Ross's involvement in the 1970 student protest is more-or-less well known by his colleagues and students at Ohio State.  They are one of the many great stories circulating on campus about him.  Less well known is Ross's role in desegregating Saint Louis University in the 1940s.  I will talk about that in another blogpost.

Police clear Neil Avenue
From The Ohio State Library

(Thanks to Keith Conrad for catching some errors in an earlier draft of this blog.)

Ask not what HBCUs can do you for you....

Morris College founder J. J. Durham
From Wikipedia

I concluded my AMS article on James Solomon by emphasizing the important role that HBCUs have had in broadening participation in mathematics and encouraging readers to learn about how the AMS is currently collaborating with HBCUs and to think of ways for further collaboration.

When I made my suggestion, I (embarrassingly) did not know what the AMS was doing, so I emailed the AMS Executive Director Catherine A. Roberts. She helpfully provided a detailed description of existing efforts to promote diversity, some of which are directly tied to HBCUs.  Here are some of the things the AMS is doing:

1. the AMS maintains a website with information about diversity issues;
2. the AMS published (with the MAA) the book "Living Proof: Stories of Resilience Along the Mathematical Journey" which is available online as a free PDF.
3. the AMS has a book program that annually offers an AMS published book to each HBCU.  If you work at or near an HBCU, make sure the school takes advantage of this program.
4. the AMS provides free posters that you can order here.

Other suggestions are:

• Donate to the National Association of Mathematicians.  NAM is a strong advocate for HBCUs, and much of their leadership is faculty at HBCUs.
• Donate to the Mathematically Gifted & Black website.  They do a great job of highlighting the achievements of African American mathematicians, many of whom work at HBCUs.  Details on how to do this at the bottom of the page.
• Have the AMS offer reciprocal membership with NAM.
• Have the AMS provide funding to organizations running an AMS Special Session if at least X% of the speakers are from HBCUs.  Somebody should do research to estimate a good value for "X."
• Ask the American Mathematical Society Council to acknowledge and apologize for the society's complicity with de jure discrimination.  Details on how to do this here. 
• Ask for similar apologies from the Mathematical Association of American and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.  (Not sure what exactly to do as I am less familiar with these organizations.)
• Installing programs at the k-12 level in minority and low income schools.  Expand efforts to make existing programs more accessible to African Americans.
• Ask the AMS to maintain a list of grants and fellowships aimed at improving the advanced STEM participation of groups historically underrepresented in STEM.  Examples are the SREB-State Doctoral Scholars Program, the Ford Foundation Fellowship Program, and the GEM Fellowship Program.
• Ask the AMS to maintain a list of college and university programs aimed at improving the advanced STEM participation of groups historically underrepresented in STEM.  Examples are the Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellows Program at the University of Chicago, the MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars Program at MIT, the Grace Jordan McFadden Professors Program at the University of South Carolina.
• Ask the AMS to create a program similar to aforementioned programs with the goal of increasing the number of African American mathematicians.  Alternatively provide greater support to existing programs.
• To help increase the number of African American students in STEM fields particularly African American males, it is most effective to reach students by 5th grade. An idea would be to develop regionally (ex: begin in the Southeast then expand) an educational partnership between local elementary schools and Universities/Colleges. To increase the number of African American males pursuing STEM fields and pursuing a Ph.D. in STEM fields, African American males need to gain exposure at an early age to rigorous content in a successful environment.
• One way to develop an educational partnership is: Local universities/colleges can develop summer programs where students are bused in during the summer for a 12-week program (free of charge with breakfast and lunch provided). Students can be exposed to rigorous content that will help them develop cognitive skills needed for higher order thinking. The consistent development of these cognitive skills will help prepare students to succeed in middle school, high school, and college. The consistency portion can be met through the ongoing educational relationship between elementary schools and Universities/Colleges. The elementary schools provide the students while the Universities/Colleges provide the curriculum taught by college professors and graduate students. The Universities/Colleges know what type of mindset they are looking for in college on both the undergraduate and graduate level so what better way to cultivate a mindset for success than to nurture a mindset of a 5th grader and to continue this nurturing over time
• Similar to the summer programs, local universities/colleges can develop year-long programs where students are exposed to rigorous content after school that will help them develop cognitive skills needed for higher order thinking. The Universities/colleges must work with the local state department and local schools to change the societal thinking where more emphasis is placed on sports than education. The change begins with universities and colleges. When high schools, universities, and colleges, place a higher importance on sports than education then the youth also.  High schools, universities, and colleges must change their perspectives for society to change their perspective.

Roberts also mentioned several administrative things (e.g. hiring a consultant to write an advisory report) which might not be of direct interest but may produce future efforts.

I encourage you to think about how ways for further collaboration.  Even a cursory examination of the history of HBCUs like Morris College shows that these institutions have played an essential role in broadening participation in higher education.  Most obviously these institutions provided educational opportunities to African Americans during periods when they were excluded from most college and universities, but these schools also played less obvious but important roles.  For example, during the 1950s Red Scare, a number of HBCUs provided employment to (white) academics who'd been blacklisted from many universities.

Thanks to Matthew J. Madison, Carol McCain, Catherine A. Roberts, Ikhalfani Solan, Dylan Thurston, Chelsea Walton, Talitha Washington, and Shelby Wilson for contributing ideas and information!

Details on how to donate to the Mathematically Gifted & Black website

Timmerman Attacks: Hoffman Update

Old cover from the Monthly Review

This blogpost is preceded by 

1. "Timmerman attacks, Spring 1957"
2. "Timmerman attacks, Fall 1957"
3. "Timmerman attacks, Spring 1958"
4. "Timmerman attacks: Allen University and Benedict College"
5. "Timmerman attacks: the Benedict professors"
6. "Timmerman attacks: the Allen University professors"

I just found an article Hoffman wrote after he retired that sheds some light on what happened at Allen University.  He spends the article reflecting on his academic career, and fills out part of the story about what happened.  Hoffman was from a Jewish family in New York, and he become committed to radical left-wing politics after his family experienced financial hardship during the Great Depression.  He was especially passionate about African American rights, and he applied for a position at Allen University with the goal of becoming of more involved in the civil rights movement.  Personally, I'm not sure if this reflects remarkable political commitment or breathtaking naivety.  In any case, his situation was different from that of people like Marion Davis who seems to have moved to Benedict primarily because the college was willing to hire Red Scare victims.  (I had a helpful email exchange with Davis's children: they said their parents were supportive of the civil rights movement, but they also don't recall them being actively involved at the time.  Judging from his publications, Marion's husband Horace seems to have been most passionate about labor issues.)

There are a few notable silences in article.  Hoffman says nothing about Toth desegregating the Allen students body (an event that made the news), and his discussion of his dismissal from Allen is as follows:

That two Northern whites [Hoffman and Rideout] and a Northern black [Wiggins] were never securely positioned in the Southern, African-American environment of Allen University was made evident by our third year there, when South Carolina's Dixiecrat Governor Timmerman, having a new A.M.E. bishop and a new college president to do his bidding, demanded our ouster as dangerous "reds." Since our only manifest subversiveness was opposition to every form of discrimination and bigotry, Allen's Board of Trustees refused to go along with the wishes of governor, bishop and president. The governor then deployed a powerful weapon, his decree that no graduate of Allen could be certified to teach in South Carolina's still segregated public schools until we were dismissed....  The trustees held out for two years then told us goodbye....

While I find Hoffman's political commitment very admirable, his use of scare quotes around the word 'reds" strikes me as disingenuous.  The Governor's accusation that he was a communist wasn't groundless: he made specific accusations of subversive activity (e.g. involvement in the American Students Union).  Moreover, Hoffman's very article in which the scare quotes appear supports the accusation: it is published in the US's longest running socialist magazine, the Monthly Review (in 1998 – 10 years after the fall of communist!).

More generally, Hoffman says nothing about his involvement with communism and little about his involvement with left political issues that are separate from African American rights.  For me, understanding the relationship between the civil rights movement and communism in the context of the Benedict and Allen controversy remains a challenge.