City normal schools and municipal colleges in the upward expansion of higher education for African Americans / Michael Fultz. -- Nooses, sheets, and blackface: white racial anxiety and black student presence at six midwest flagship universities, 1882-1937 / Richard M. Breaux. -- A nauseating sentiment, a magical device, or a real insight? Interracialism at Fisk University in 1930 / Lauren Kientz Anderson. -- "Only organized effort will find the way out!": faculty unionization at Howard University, 1918-1950 / Timothy Reese Cain. -- Competing visions of higher education: the College of Liberal Arts, faculty and the administration of Howard University, 1939-1960 / Louis Ray. -- The first black talent identification program: The National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students, 1947-1968 / Linda M. Perkins.

This volume examines the evolution of higher education opportunities for African Americans in the early and mid-twentieth century. It contributes to understanding how African Americans overcame great odds to obtain advanced education in their own institutions, how they asserted themselves to gain control over those institutions, and how they persisted despite discrimination and intimidation in both northern and southern universities. Following an introduction by the editors are contributions by Richard M. Breaux, Louis Ray, Lauren Kientz Anderson, Timothy Reese Cain, Linda M. Perkins, and Michael Fultz. Contributors consider the expansion and elevation of African American higher education. Such progress was made against heavy odds—the "separate but equal" policies of the segregated South, less overt but pervasive racist attitudes in the North, and legal obstacles to obtaining equal rights.

An authoritative one-volume history of the origins and development of American higher education This book tells the compelling saga of American higher education from the founding of Harvard College in 1636 to the outbreak of World War II. The most in-depth and authoritative history of the subject available, The History of American Higher Education traces how colleges and universities were shaped by the shifting influences of culture, the emergence of new career opportunities, and the unrelenting advancement of knowledge. Roger Geiger, arguably today's leading historian of American higher education, vividly describes how colonial colleges developed a unified yet diverse educational tradition capable of weathering the social upheaval of the Revolution as well as the evangelical fervor of the Second Great Awakening. He shows how the character of college education in different regions diverged significantly in the years leading up to the Civil War—for example, the state universities of the antebellum South were dominated by the sons of planters and their culture—and how higher education was later revolutionized by the land-grant movement, the growth of academic professionalism, and the transformation of campus life by students. By the beginning of the Second World War, the standard American university had taken shape, setting the stage for the postwar education boom. Breathtaking in scope and rich in narrative detail, The History of American Higher Education is the most comprehensive single-volume history of the origins and development of of higher education in the United States.

How can striving Hispanic-Serving Institutions serve their students while countering the dominant preconceptions of colleges and universities? Winner of the AAHHE Book of the Year Award by the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs)—not-for-profit, degree-granting colleges and universities that enroll at least 25% or more Latinx students—are among the fastest-growing higher education segments in the United States. As of fall 2016, they represented 15% of all postsecondary institutions in the United States and enrolled 65% of all Latinx college students. As they increase in number, these questions bear consideration: What does it mean to serve Latinx students? What special needs does this student demographic have? And what opportunities and challenges develop when a college or university becomes an HSI? In Becoming Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Gina Ann Garcia explores how institutions are serving Latinx students, both through traditional and innovative approaches. Drawing on empirical data collected over two years at three HSIs, Garcia adopts a counternarrative approach to highlight the ways that HSIs are reframing what it means to serve Latinx college students. She questions the extent to which they have been successful in doing this while exploring how those institutions grapple with the tensions that emerge from confronting traditional standards and measures of success for postsecondary institutions. Laying out what it means for these three extremely different HSIs, Garcia also highlights the differences in the way each approaches its role in serving Latinxs. Incorporating the voices of faculty, staff, and students, Becoming Hispanic-Serving Institutions asserts that HSIs are undervalued, yet reveals that they serve an important role in the larger landscape of postsecondary institutions.

For nearly sixty years, the University of Oklahoma, in obedience to state law, denied admission to African Americans. Only in October 1948 did this racial barrier start to break down, when an elderly teacher named George McLaurin became the first African American to enroll at the university. McLaurin’s case, championed by the NAACP, drew national attention and culminated in a U.S. Supreme Court decision. In Breaking Down Barriers, distinguished historian David W. Levy chronicles the historically significant—and at times poignant—story of McLaurin’s two-year struggle to secure his rights. Through exhaustive research, Levy has uncovered as much as we can know about George McLaurin (1887–1968), a notably private person. A veteran educator, he was fully qualified for admission as a graduate student in the university’s School of Education. When the university denied his application, solely on the basis of race, McLaurin received immediate assistance from the NAACP and its lead attorney Thurgood Marshall, who brilliantly defended his case in state and federal courts. On his very first day of class, as Levy details, McLaurin had to sit in a special alcove, separate from the white students in the classroom. Photographs of McLaurin in this humiliating position set off a firestorm of national outrage. Dozens of other African American men and women followed McLaurin to the university, and Levy reviews the many bizarre contortions that university officials had to perform, often against their own inclinations, to accord with the state’s mandate to keep black and white students apart in classrooms, the library, cafeterias and dormitories, and the football stadium. Ultimately, in 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court, swayed by the arguments of Marshall and his co-counsel Robert Carter, ruled in McLaurin’s favor. The decision, as Levy explains, stopped short of toppling the decades-old doctrine of “separate but equal.” But the case led directly to the 1954 landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which finally declared that flawed policy unconstitutional.

Anna J. Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Eva B. Dykes shaped the educational landscape in Washington, D.C., in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These three pioneer educators serve as examples to describe the societal circles they were involved in. The many facets of their educational achievements are analyzed in the context of the educational elite of Washington. Cooper, Terrell, and Dykes not only had to live with race discrimination but also with gender discrimination. Unpublished archive material is used to illustrate how they interacted and how they treated each other. Marina Bacher is a scholar, author, and educator. (Series: American Studies in Austria, Vol. 18) [Subject: Education, Sociology, History]

Winner, 2017 Missouri Conference on History Book Award In 1936, Lloyd Gaines’s application to the University of Missouri law school was denied based on his race. Gaines and the NAACP challenged the university’s decision. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) was the first in a long line of decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court regarding race, higher education, and equal opportunity. The court case drew national headlines, and the NAACP moved Gaines to Chicago after he received death threats. Before he could attend law school, he vanished. This is the first book to focus entirely on the Gaines case and the vital role played by the NAACP and its lawyers—including Charles Houston, known as “the man who killed Jim Crow”—who advanced a concerted strategy to produce political change. Horner and Endersby also discuss the African American newspaper journalists and editors who mobilized popular support for the NAACP’s strategy. This book uncovers an important step toward the broad acceptance of racial segregation as inherently unequal. This is the inaugural volume in the series Studies in Constitutional Democracy, edited by Justin Dyer and Jeffrey Pasley of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy.

Rosey E. Pool (1905–71) did not live an ordinary life. She witnessed the rise of the Nazis in Berlin firsthand, tutored Anne Frank, operated in a Jewish resistance group, escaped from a Nazi transit camp, published African American poets in Europe, operated a London “salon” with her partner, witnessed independence movements in Nigeria and Senegal, and took part in the American civil rights movement. I Lay This Body Down is the first study of Pool and her remarkable transatlantic life. A translator, educator, and anthologist of African American poetry, Pool corresponded, after World War II, with Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Naomi Long Madgett, Owen Dodson, Gordon Heath, and others who fostered her involvement in the Black Arts Movement, both in Britain and the United States. Though Pool was often cast as an outsider—one poet was amazed that “one so removed” was interested in the Black cause—she saw herself as part of a transatlantic struggle against oppression. For Pool, the “yellow Jew stars” the Nazis forced her to wear “were our darker skins.” Rosey E. Pool’s life allows Lonneke Geerlings to explore intersections of European and American history. As a Holocaust survivor and activist fighting against segregation in the Deep South, Pool connects stories that are often studied and told in isolation. Her life helps us understand the intersecting histories of Jewish Europe and Black America, but it also allows us to see how Pool dealt with tragedy, trauma, and loss. At its core, this book is about resilience and hope. Indeed, Pool’s life illuminates the power of reinvention for dealing with both challenging personal circumstances and the traumas of global history.

Presenting a diverse and inclusive overview of academic leadership, this timely work will be of use and interest to current, future, and aspiring leaders in higher education, along with higher education scholars and students.

Blackface – instances in which non-Black persons temporarily darken their skin with make-up to impersonate Black people, usually for fun, and frequently in educational contexts – constitutes a postracialist pedagogy that propagates antiblack logics. In Performing Postracialism, Philip S.S. Howard examines instances of contemporary blackface in Canada and argues that it is more than a simple matter of racial (mis)representation. The book looks at the ostensible humour and dominant conversations around blackface, arguing that they are manifestations of the particular formations of antiblackness in the Canadian nation state and its educational institutions. It posits that the occurrence of blackface in universities is not incidental, and outlines how educational institutions’ responses to blackface in Canada rely upon a motivation to protect whiteness. Performing Postracialism draws from focus groups and individual interviews conducted with university students, faculty, administrators, and Black student associations, along with online articles about blackface, to provide the basis for a nuanced examination of the ways that blackface is experienced by Black persons. The book investigates the work done by Black students, faculty, and staff at universities to challenge blackface and the broader campus climate of antiblackness that generates it.