The Impact of the War Upon Negro Graduate and Professional Schools

Abstract

Before one can undertake an intelligent discussion of the impact of the war on the graduate and professional schools for Negroes, it is necessary for one to understand something of the conditions under which these schools exist and the general educational background of which they are a part. There are only three professional schools for Negroes which are not directly under the control of a college or university, public or private, which has as its major work the offering of courses on the undergraduate level. These three are Meharry Medical College at Nashville, Tennessee; Gammon Theological Seminary at Atlanta, Georgia; and the Atlanta University School of Social Work at Atlanta, Georgia; though it is doubtful that the last named of these schools, the Atlanta University School of Social Work, falls into the class of separate institutions, as since September, 1938, the School of Social Work has been affiliated with Atlanta University as a professional school in the Atlanta University System. It must also be kept in mind that for the most part, graduate and professional work in the college for Negroes represents a relatively recent expansion of the educational program of these segregated institutions. More has taken place within this area in the last ten years than in the whole previous history of the education of the Negro in America. Much of what has taken place has resulted from a series of law-suits instituted by Negro students against the state authorities or the administrators of the state university in an effort to compel them to live up to the letter and spirit of the State Constitution, guaranteeing equal educational opportunities for every citizen of the state. (The reader is probably aware of the fact that in seventeen states of the American Union, Negro and white students are required by law to attend separate schools. In each of these states, either by constitutional or statutory provision, the state guarantees equal educational opportunities to all of its citizens.) The most famous of these cases, vs. the University of Missouri, reached the Supreme Court of the United States and in a memorable decision written by the Chief Justice, Charles Evans Hughes, and handed down on December 12, 1938, the Court held that a state which legally separated the races in the public school system was also legally responsible for providing equal educational opportunities for the racial groups residing in the state, the opportunities to be provided within the boundaries of the state itself. More than anything else, the threat of law-suits and the Gaines decision caused the seventeen states, or many of them, to consider ways and means by which they could provide graduate and professional education for Negro citizens equal to,