$19.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-4989-8

Published: Fall 2001

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Copyright (c) 2001 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Preface

The experience of Black women in colleges and universities during the era of integration presents a complex, rich, and varied history. It is a history of racial pioneers. It is also my own history. Beginning graduate school in the fall of 1971 was a significant experience for me. I was crossing boundaries that few of my friends from City College of New York attempted. While most friends who had recently graduated from college were working in jobs as teachers and caseworkers in New York City, I was preparing to continue my education at a private university in Massachusetts. Living in Boston with middle-class White people was part of that boundary crossing. At Brandeis University, I was the only African American in my cohort. Attending graduate school with students from privileged backgrounds was a challenge.

I was somewhat overwhelmed with the many changes in my life and by the everyday details involved in attempting the next educational level. Much of my energy that first year was devoted to mastering a new environment and sorting out my own place within it. I was different from my cohort in terms of race, social class, and urban residence, which meant I had not had the "privileged college experience" of most of my fellow students. Most had lived on a campus and devoted the majority of their time to studying and socializing with peers.

A commuter student in college, I integrated course work and studying with much paid employment. While in college, I tutored elementary school students at a community agency, tutored Upward Bound students in high schools in Manhattan and the Bronx, and worked in after-school programs in community centers for elementary school children. In addition to regular part-time employment, for two years I worked for a CBS News polling operation that conducted national surveys for elections and other news-related programming. Those experiences did not count in this new environment where how much one had read and the ability to discuss these books were prized instead. In time I learned to value my experiences and look at my new peers with my own eyes. Many in my cohort with limited work experiences had a vision of the world that was shaped by books. While I was initially intimidated, I learned over the course of that year to trust my life experiences, especially in terms of what scholars had to say about the people I knew. Much of the 1960s scholarship on White working-class people did not capture the experiences of many of the people whom I knew growing up, yet my classmates were willing to grant legitimacy to such portrayals because they were published in books. It took years to formulate a position that reflected my perspective as a Black person raised in the working class negotiating a predominantly White academic world.

A month into my second year of graduate study, I had my first meaningful discussion with Elizabeth, another Black woman who had just entered the program. The daughter of professionals, Elizabeth talked about her background and began to complain bitterly about how little Brandeis University had done to help her solve her many relocation problems. In contrast, I had felt privileged to be in this space where people recognized me and where I could conduct business without giving my social security number. As Elizabeth complained, I asked, "What made you think that Brandeis would do these things for you?" Apparently, her elite college had made many such accommodations. However, I am sure that the college was pushed into such activities by people who felt entitled to them, just as Elizabeth had attempted to push for services at Brandeis.

The encounter haunted me. Elizabeth was a Black woman, close in age, but I was struck by our very different expectations of what the world owed us. I was clearly working class and she was middle class. I was prepared to enter this educational environment, just as I had entered others, by fending for myself. After this discussion, I began to think more systematically about social class background, particularly how it "stamps" individuals, including people who are members of an oppressed racial group. I questioned how the intersections of race and social class would influence how Black people operate within predominantly White spheres and within their own communities. This core investigation (and the many related questions it spawned) culminated in the study here, which examines the race, social class, and gender constraints on fifty-six Black women who graduated from predominantly White colleges in the late 1960s. Developing, conducting, and analyzing this research was a twenty-year project. In 1980, when I completed my dissertation, "Educated Black Women: An Exploration into Life Chances and Choices," based on my initial investigation, my advisor said there were a hundred ideas in the work. Over the years since then, I have thought about the many themes in the data and have crafted a book that seeks to highlight the negotiations that achieving educational success requires and the different resources that women bring to the task.

In 1980 much research on Black Americans, men and women, was viewed as occurring within a cultural framework, and the findings were considered unique to the Black population and marginal for the rest of U.S. society. Many scholars now recognize that race is both a social construction and a key feature of the stratification system in the United States (McKee 1993; Omi and Winant 1994). Scholars focus on the power dimensions of race rather than limiting themselves to a language of racial differences. These changes have helped to make race and social class, as well as gender, central analytic categories in the social sciences. Thus insights from scholarship on Black women now have a more profound impact on the state of general knowledge. I have also come to a greater appreciation of the significance of this cohort's experiences. These fifty-six Black women, who all attended colleges in a single city, were among the first major wave of Black students in predominantly White colleges in the mid-1960s. Other Black women encountered similar situations in other northern cities during this era of integration. We can learn much from them that can help us understand the shifting issues that face Black students in predominantly White settings.

The lives related in this book are complex and intricate. These women came from different regions as well as different social classes. There were Black women from the South who graduated from segregated high schools as well as women who grew up in the North in overwhelmingly White suburban communities. There were women from working-class communities who struggled in comprehensive high schools where their talents were unrewarded and who then found more support and encouragement in colleges, and there were others who found college to offer experiences similar to their previous schooling. There were middle-class women from highly ranked high schools where they were encouraged to attend college, but not prestigious ones. The nuances in the interactions these women had in educational settings structured the varied paths and patterns of their lives. There is no easy way to present the findings. As a sociologist, my task was to examine these complex lives and develop a perspective that can help readers ask a series of questions to better understand the alternatives these women faced and to examine how people move within varying social structures.

What did being a Black person in a time of shifting racial dynamics mean for the course of these women's lives? What was it like to be a pioneer in a predominantly White college as the college attempted to change how it operated? What obstacles and supports did social class differences create for the women in their journeys through childhood, into college, and into their early adult lives? How did gender impact Black women raised with certain expectations within the Black community and exposed to different expectations in predominantly White colleges? The answers will vary for women who traveled along different educational paths. There are no charts that map out a neat course. However, we know that race is central. Membership in a disadvantaged racial group shaped aspects of these women's lives, especially as they struggled to scale barriers. Social class was always an issue in terms of the women's own expectations for their lives, the material resources available to surmount racial barriers, and their reception by people in mainstream institutions. Gender also played a critical role, especially since their parents' gender expectations shaped how they reared their daughters. Further, as the women interacted with mainstream institutions, they found conflicting visions of their futures based on others' views of oppressed racial groups as inferior. Social class shaped these images of their futures; some Black women coming of age at this time were expected to be schoolteachers and social workers, while others were expected to be service and clerical workers. But these women shared the common experience of being outsiders, looking for a way through the institutional and interpersonal obstacles to their successful passage through the educational system.

This study provides an opportunity to look anew at the integration of educational institutions, both secondary schools and the predominantly White colleges that these fifty-six women entered in the 1960s. While school principals, college presidents, and many other educational officials put forward plans to increase the numbers of Black students in particular settings, these women did the actual desegregating. They were active in the process, making choices about their own educational settings and often working for years to attain their goals. As smart people entering those educational systems, they saw much more than those who were already established in positions of power could see. As members of oppressed groups, they saw much that those entrants with racial privilege did not see. Thus they have much to say about how institutions are structured and what does and does not change when minor alterations are made to their racial composition. By listening to their stories, we can develop a more nuanced understanding of what social change requires of institutions. That vision can help us develop institutions that are truly welcoming, where everyone can thrive.

As part of this age cohort, I shared their historical moment and was also a pioneer in many respects. My own working-class family moved out of Harlem so that the children could attend better schools in a racially and ethnically integrated working-class community in Manhattan, where we were one of only a few Black families. Both in and out of the classroom, I learned much about the racial and ethnic peoples who make up New York. This learning enabled me to cross borders between Black, ethnic White, Puerto Rican, and Asian American peoples, and it still shapes how I do sociology. When I was in junior high school, my family moved to the racially and economically mixed Upper West Side of Manhattan. After one year in a genuinely integrated seventh grade class, I was again pushed to be a pioneer as one of three Black working-class students in an enrichment class. Attendance at an all-girls public high school meant even more learning about how working-class and middle-class students think about themselves and their options.

This background gave me an understanding of the experiences of the women I studied. And in turn, their stories helped me to put into perspective what I had often viewed as the odd behavior of my own parents. I found other Black women whose parents had moved out of the ghetto to ensure quality schooling, even if that meant social isolation. I spoke with other Black women whose working-class parents were avid readers who made sure there were books and magazines in the home. Most important, the experiences of other Black women taught me to look closely at what had been invisible to me, particularly the work that I performed daily as a pioneer throughout my educational experiences. While I often had only a few Black allies in those settings, I was fortunate to have had many working-class compatriots. Thus at each educational level I had close ties with other students as we set about exploring the city's cultural institutions and mastering our academic tasks. The experiences of these other Black women gave me the impetus to categorize and make visible much of the tacit knowledge I already had about pioneers by race, class, and gender in the educational system.

In the ten chapters of this book I hope to help readers understand the times and the work of integration for these Black women. The first four chapters provide a context for understanding the era and the resources that Black women brought to the task of navigating educational environments to reach goals often nurtured in their families. Careful attention is paid to the meaning of being working class and middle class in the 1950s and 1960s (Chapter 2). Chapter 3 extends that discussion to explore how the differences in families' economic resources translated into residential and educational options. Black families during this era shared the need to prepare their daughters to survive in a world where they would encounter racial prejudice and discrimination (Chapter 4). The majority of the women I studied desegregated educational settings long before attending college. Some faced social isolation as young children in predominantly White settings, while others entered integrated or predominantly White high schools after junior high. Family lessons and resources influenced how the women faced the specific challenges in either comprehensive high schools (Chapter 5) or elite high schools (Chapter 6). As they were planning for college and scaling new barriers in their schools, their families offered very different kinds of support (Chapter 7). We also find that social class shaped their expectations for college as well as the adjustments they all had to make in their predominantly White colleges in the mid-1960s (Chapter 8). Chapter 9 turns our attention to how the women balanced their academic pursuits and their social lives and explores their thinking about their lives beyond college. Chapter 10 presents the women as they were in 1976 and provides a way to look at the achievements of these racial pioneers as well as their costs. By examining the lives of Black women who challenged racial barriers before the rise of affirmative action and special programs, we not only begin to unravel the complexity of race, social class, and gender interactions, but we learn about the energy and creativity within people that is essential for integration to happen. In that way, we can see the institutional barriers and can commit ourselves do doing the work that really addresses our legacy of injustice.