The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom by Eddie R. Cole

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom by Eddie R. Cole Randal Maurice Jelks The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom. By Eddie R. Cole. (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford, U.K.: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 358. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-691-20676-9; cloth, $32.00, ISBN 978-0-691-20674-5.) Benjamin E. Mays, the sainted president of Morehouse College and mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., once observed, “‘To be president of a college and white is no bed of roses . . . . To be president of a college and Black is almost a bed of thorns’” (p. 63). Eddie R. Cole deserves all the accolades he has received for confirming Mays’s statement. Cole’s research into the Black freedom struggle broadens our historical understanding by exploring the involvement of college presidents across the country from the 1940s to the 1978 Bakke v. California ruling. Cole’s contributions to the history of U.S. higher education and the Black freedom struggle in the twentieth century will be discussed for some time. This book is a reminder that the Black freedom [End Page 385] movement challenged U.S. apartheid at all institutional levels. It also reminds us that predominantly white institutions of higher education were institutional guardians of apartheid in the postemancipation era. These reminders should hardly come as a surprise since historians such as Craig Steven Wilder have detailed the bloody economic investments in the buying and selling of enslaved people by both public and private institutions during the antebellum era. What Cole thoroughly documents is that the twentieth- century challenge to the ruling order was led by presidents of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) alongside the mobilization of student activists. Black college presidents did the behind-the-scenes negotiations that supported students, who used a variety of mobilizing tactics to demand social justice. Cole’s book expands the historiography on Black student activism found in Stefan M. Bradley’s Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Power in the Late 1960s (Urbana, 2009) and Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power and the Ivy League (New York, 2018) as well as in Jelani M. Favors’s Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered a Generation of Leadership and Activism (Chapel Hill, 2019) and Donna Jean Murch’s Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill, 2010). Cole mines HBCU archives and the papers of both southern and northern university presidents. He describes how confining these jobs were, and he details the political pressures and bureaucratic limitations each president faced as they tried to open their campuses to racial integration or keep them closed after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Cole illuminates that the presidents’ approaches varied from institution to institution, and that their priorities differed, in terms of keeping racial integration at bay or assuring that their urban locales remained class-bound white spaces. These presidents, including Black college presidents, also faced increased pressure from students as activists sought to expand democratic freedoms to benefit their communities. The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom is outstanding. My chief criticism is it does not explore the history of athletics enough. Black sports history and the history of athletics at HBCUs must be added to this research. Here Cole might have explored Derrick E. White’s Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football (Chapel Hill, 2019) to tie athletics to the politics of the Black freedom movement. The period Cole covers in The Campus Color Line coincided with the rise of legendary athletes—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Lew Alcindor), Jim Brown, Althea Gibson, Madeline Manning-Mims, Wilma Rudolph, Cazzie Russell, Bill Russell, and Wyomia Tyus. The most significant and ironic moment in the history of sports and racial integration came in 1970, when the University of Southern California (USC) destroyed the University of Alabama in a nationally televised football game led by freshman sensation Sam “Bam” Cunningham. The irony of that win was that USC...