All quiet at the Western front : a history of black/white race relations at Western Carolina University

All quiet at the Western front : a history of black/white race relations at Western Carolina University

African American college students

African Americans -- Education

College integration

Segregation in higher education

Western Carolina University -- History

Burrell, Dagan LaMont

1992

Bell, John L.

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/CNE/1.0/

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The integration of higher education across the South is too often equated to the violent protests which sometimes accompanied it. This thesis examines Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. In 1957, the institution integrated some three months before the crisis of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. With few exceptions, African-Americans have been accepted as equals both on campus and off. Indeed, the institution's present problems entail not race relations per se, but difficulties in maintaining and increasing its minority enrollment. The transition from all-white college to diversified regional university was smooth for Western Carolina. A great deal of credit for this must be given to the African-American individuals who broke the institution's color barriers. With character and integrity, Levern Allen, Henry Logan, and Lewis Suggs established positive precedents for those African-Americans who followed them to Western Carolina. Western Carolina University's minority populace faced numerous difficulties. The school's few African-American faculty and staff were often overused. African American students often felt alienated from, and under-appreciated by, the larger campus community. They also faced problems peculiar to Western Carolina's rural and mountainous location. Students from urban backgrounds often found Western Carolina uncomfortably small and isolated. Due to these and other problems, the institution's admissions officers constantly struggle just to maintain the school's small number of African-American students. In 1972, the institution became one of sixteen members of the University of North Carolina system. During the mid-1970s, the system came under federal scrutiny due to its racial composition. A lengthy court battle over the desegregation of the University of North Carolina system ensued. In 1981, after Ronald Reagan took office, the two sides agreed on a settlement. In the consent decree, the university system agreed to a set of non-binding guidelines to further integrate the schools. While there were no provisions for enforcing the guidelines, the University of North Carolina system ordered that they be carried out. For Western Carolina University, which had for several years been working to raise its minority enrollment, this proved a disaster. The competition for African-American students the consent decree caused actually drove down the school's minority enrollment figures while, at the same time, it vastly increased the money spent on recruiting African-Americans

2014-07-02

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Western Carolina University Restricted Electronic Theses and Dissertations