Eddie R. Cole - The Campus Color Line

1. vii
2. ix

THE IDEA for this book is a natural extension of my own Black educational genealogy. I grew up in Boligee, Alabama. It is a small town located in the Alabama Black Belt. There, my parents were school teachers. Each worked more than thirty years across the Greene and Sumter county school systems. Before them, my fathers parents were also rural west Alabama teachers, starting their careers in one- and two-room schoolhouses. They were also graduates of Black colleges and members of the states Black teacher association. Combined, their careers made clear the role of education in the Black freedom struggle, and their lives molded me.

By the time I started formal education, the de jure school segregation that my parents and grandparents experienced in the Jim Crow South had long been exchanged for de facto practices. For instance, the all-Black public high school that I attended in nearby Eutaw, Alabama, was located around the corner from a smaller, yet defiant, majority-white private academy. The short, slender Woodfield Avenue was our color line. That was an accepted norm in the Alabama Black Belt; however, it sparked my intellectual curiosity about the decisions made by past educational leaders, and how those choices shaped the present. This book takes up those same questions within the context of higher education.

Today, the debate continues over who should or should not be admitted to certain colleges and universities. The relationship between expanding urban campuses and bordering neighborhoods remains contentious. There is still uncertainty over where hate speech begins and free speech ends. Black students are demanding an end to racism on majority-white campuses. Questions over the legality of affirmative action are entering yet another decade. And campus relationships with law enforcement are under renewed scrutiny. All the while, elected officials regularly resuscitate old questions about Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and the vitality, funding, and governance of those institutions. These are serious issues. But these contemporary issues have long histories.

Several college presidents are just now, in the twenty-first century, acknowledging how their institutions benefited from slavery and, at last, beginning to make symbolic and practical reparations. This reconciliation has been 175 years in the making; however, one does not have to go back that far to see how academic leaders have impacted the struggle for Black freedom, past or present. Therefore, if we are just beginning to unspool and make right the injustices from the mid-1800s, what does that mean for reconciling more recent college presidents decisions?

Perhaps now, more than ever, we need to understand how college presidents have influenced racial policies and practices. This book is being released amid a global health and racial pandemic that will likely permanently change education, and the accompanying economic uncertainty resulting from this crisis has, once again, turned our attention to university leaders. The decisions made by college presidents today will have long-term racial implications, but we can better examine those decisions when we frame them within the history of their predecessors actions for or against racial equity.

In closing this preface, I am reminded of what Frederick Douglass argued in 1881: slavery, ignorance, stupidity, servility, poverty, dependence, are undesirable conditions. When these shall cease to be coupled with color, there will be no color line drawn. But when shall the twenty-first-century renditions of those conditions cease? I wrote this book as a challenge to the global citizenry to critically self-reflect on the ongoing struggle for Black freedom and how academic leaders have held, or are holding, the campus color linea division that has shaped generations.