A campus of quiet persuasion

Abstract

This study chronicles a five-year period, 1960-65, during which the College Board, through its activities in southern schools and colleges, became a participant in the civil rights movement,helping to remove barriers to higher education for black students. During the 1950s, one court case after another opened opportunities for black students to attend white colleges and universities in the South. At the end of the decade, only five states still clung to desegregation in their state colleges and universities. Officials of those states, feeding on the grass-roots, massive resistance movement against integration, denied access to black applicants in a variety of ways, including the creation of new admissions criteria. One new requirement imposed by white colleges and universities to keep black applicants out of their institutions was the College Board Scholastic Aptitude Test. It became clear to the College Board, and to its testing partner, Educational Testing Services,that, for the first time, significant numbers of black high school students in the South would betaking College Board examinations. Unfortunately, test centers, the places where candidates “sat” for the tests, were, with few exceptions, located in white schools and colleges. Clearly, this created a dilemma. The solution, reached after considerable research and discussion, was to desegregate the test centers. The College Board assigned responsibility for desegregating its centers to Ben Cameron, director of the Southern Regional Office of the College Board. Cameron worked with a small staff and a College Board committee to accomplish his assignment. One of those staff members, Ben Gibson, collaborated with Cameron to perfect a strategy that the two men employed as they traveled across the South negotiating for desegregated test centers with school and college officials. The correspondence, reports, and other writings of Cameron and Gibson provided most of the information on which this study was based.