I would like to expand a bit on the history that Davis Sargeant reported on “Civil Rights and Washington University: a complex history,” Stud. Life, 9/1/11.

In 1968, a confluence of events led the normally compliant WU faculty to set up a large number of committees to examine virtually all aspects of university governance. Among these was Committee #27. It was charged with presenting plans to increase substantially the number of students from minority and low-income families. I was privileged to serve on that committee.

The committee’s report opened by quoting S. A. Hendrick’s essay in College Board Review (Winter 1967-68): “It is my thesis that selective institutions—or to put it more plainly, most members of The College Board—are now operated almost exclusively for white students.” The report suggests that it would have been more informative to say white students from middle and high-income families. Committee 27’s report went on to reject the cumulative deficit thesis that low-income and minority students, in large measure, were so far behind by the end of high school that there was little chance that they would succeed at places like Washington University. The committee embraced an alternative idea that students of genuine talent could be identified by means other than verbal test scores and that, with adequate support, a large fraction would succeed at Washington University. The Committee set its sights high, proposing that 10-20 percent of baccalaureate degrees in the regular curriculum be awarded to students from minority and low-income families. Its report lays out in considerable detail a program for accomplishing this.

Unfortunately, neither my memory nor a brief scanning of my Committee 27 files allows me to report to you whether anything came of the effort. As an aside, it might amuse present students that WU was considered to be expensive; the total cost for a residential student was $3,600 per year; $27,700 when adjusted for the increase in the Cost of Living Index. Don’t you wish!

Daniel H. Kohl
Professor Emeritus, Biology
Campus Box 1137, Washington University
St, Louis, MO 63130-4899

In many ways, Washington University has proven a more welcoming institution than many of its peers throughout history. Women first attended classes in 1869, and from its early days the University eagerly recruited Jews, unlike other universities, such as Columbia and Yale, which retained staunch anti-Semitic quotas into the 1940s. Even the initial policy toward African-Americans was open at first. In 1875, William Greenleaf Eliot, founder of the University, recorded the admission of a local African-American, but no further proof of this student is extant. At least seven African-Americans graduated between 1881 and 1896. Unfortunately, a slight incident in 1892 involving a secondary school run by the University prohibited further progress. The Post-Dispatch reported, “Some of the teachers said that the presence of colored boys created an objectionable spirit among the other boys.” The University interdicted the admission of African-Americans thereafter.

Integration for all schools waited until 1952 at the cusp of the University’s transition to a national university. Arthur Compton assumed the Chancellorship in 1945, and initially resisted a complete end to exclusive admissions policy. Compton was cautious; he could not afford to lose the support of the community or less liberal members of the board. The NAACP unsuccessfully sued the University in 1945 after four African-Americans were denied admission. The University reiterated its commitment to follow “the policy of the State educational systems as to segregation.” Chancellor Compton cited “local social attitudes” toward integration as a deterrent. He must have been mistaken. After the Second World War, many Americans, even in St. Louis, began to question segregation, which resembled recently defeated fascist policies. In 1946, the University’s chapter of the American Veteran Committee, an organization representing students on the GI Bill, endorsed the admissions of African-Americans. Furthermore, Saint Louis University opened admissions to African-Americans in 1944 without incident, proof that the city could sustain an integrated university.

Progress toward integration began in 1947, when the medical school accidentally accepted an African-American for a course in ophthalmology. The administration decided to permit the mistake to become policy for the medical school, though the change was not publicized. Washington University began a process of partial desegregation later that year. Despite objections from Vice Chancellor Belknap, who favored full integration, the University consulted a foundation specializing in improving race relations to discuss ending segregation gradually. In December 1947, the University announced that African-Americans could apply to the School of Social Work. In 1948, however, Compton again disappointed supporters of integration by expressing dissent to President Truman’s Commission on Higher Education, which recommended an end to “discrimination and its legal counterpart, segregation.” Compton favored progress “within the existing legal framework.”

Student reactions varied during this time. One student opined in Student Life that “Washington University [was] not the place for members of the Negro race.” The newspaper itself supported the decisions of the administration until 1951. In 1949, students formed the Student Committee for the Admission of Negroes (SCAN). SCAN’s greatest accomplishment arrived in May of that year, when a poll of nearly a third of the students indicated that 77 percent supported an end to segregation. Finally, after more years of stonewalling student and community protests, the administration relented. Undergraduate admissions were wholly desegregated on May 9, 1952.

Despite being the last institution in St. Louis to completely desegregate, Washington University remained far from racial equality. Though 10 years ahead of the first African-American matriculants to Ole Miss, dormitories were still segregated. This slowly resolved as Compton faced another great challenge: the University was running out of housing. Previously, students were mostly commuters from the St. Louis area, and many took a streetcar from downtown to the campus. Recent recruitment efforts significantly raised the caliber of students and began to make Washington University a truly national institution. The University began an ambitious project to develop the South 40 for undergraduate housing. With more space and new scholarships available, the University began recruiting African-Americans from inner city and underprivileged areas in 1963, an effort spearheaded by Margaret Dagen. Race relations calmed, and students began protesting the Vietnam War instead.

Other issues remained. In 1968, the Association of Black Collegians occupied Busch Hall for nine days in response to a claim of brutality by University police. Ten years later the University-wide Ad-Hoc Committee on Black Concerns published a manifesto, calling for, among other things, the establishment of a Department of Black Studies. Today, this is the department of African and African-American Studies. In 1989, African-American students and faculty rallied to increase the number of black students and professors and demand better facilities for the Black Student Association. Last year, Shanti Parikh became the first African-American female professor to complete the tenure track at the University.

Complications remain. In 2005, students staged another sit in to protest the wages of minority workers for the University. During the class trip to Chicago in 2009, several black men were turned away from Mother’s Bar. But on the whole, Washington University endorses acceptance of all peoples. In many ways, that is a reflection of the students here as well. The University’s history is important, not because it reflects on current students or administrators, but because it can serve as a model for future decisions. Hopefully, whenever issues of tolerance arise, students can look to Washington University’s struggle to desegregate. There we can learn the value of perseverance and the danger of resisting social justice.

This article is indebted to Rudolph Clay, the writings of Amy Pfeiffenberger, Candace O’Connor, and Ralph Morrow, and various articles from Student Life and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

We have come a long way since King’s assassination in 1968. We enacted the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. We integrated our schools. We elected a black president.

Yet self-congratulatory platitudes about how far we have come strike me as profoundly out of touch. As much as our world has changed and improved since 1968, there is still far too much inequality and injustice in our world to justify a collective pat on the back.

Wash. U. students witnessed a taste of this injustice this fall when students were denied access to Mothers Bar and responded admirably, yet the truth is that such discrimination is fairly trivial when compared to the larger gap between Wash. U. students and the broader world.

This week a federal court in California has begun hearing a challenge to Prop 8, the state referendum that stripped same-sex couples of the right to marry. The case is an important reminder that we still have forms of legal second-class citizenship in our country.

This week’s news has also brought reminders of political injustice abroad, in the form of Google’s decision to stop censoring its Chinese site. We may have won the fight for African-American voting rights in the U.S., but in China and elsewhere, political freedoms are still severely curtailed.

Perhaps most tragic are the recent events in Haiti, where even before the earthquake many were living in desperate poverty. As long as 1 percent of the world’s population holds 40 percent of the world’s wealth, and more than a billion people live on less than $1 a day, we cannot claim that the fight for equality is anywhere near complete.

Finally, inequality is also right here in our own backyard. It is present in the difference between the manicured lawns of the Wash. U. bubble and the streets that are mere blocks away. It is felt in the difference between those attending an elite university and those who will never graduate from high school.

The history of the civil rights movement is full of stories of heroism and tragedy, but the one I have always found most compelling is that of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the three young civil rights activists who were murdered in 1964 for their efforts to register black voters in Mississippi. Most striking, Goodman and Schwerner were white, Northern college students with no personal connection to the civil rights movement who still cared enough to die for what they felt was right. Our collective efforts to improve the world from within the Wash. U. bubble seem pretty meager by comparison.

Of all King’s many wise words, my favorite is the following quote: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I believe that wholeheartedly, but I also know this—it will not bend itself. If we truly want to honor King’s legacy, then we still have a lot of work to do.

This legal discrimination did not end because of some benevolent act of Congress. Blacks fought for their civil rights with protests, marches and boycotts all over America, many of which resulted in imprisonment, injury and, in some cases, death. They did not struggle for their rights alone: Many whites fought in the civil rights movement. Prominent white leaders fought the injustice side by side with blacks. In the march on Selma in 1965, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr. and others joined arms with white leaders like Abraham Joshua Heschel and Maurice Davis to protest the injustices faced in the area at the time. White college students fueled the Freedom Summer of 1964, which aimed to register as many blacks as possible in Mississippi, a state that had only 6.7 percent of eligible blacks registered in 1964. This white dedication to civil rights went beyond marching and organizing.

During the Freedom Summer, the Klu Klux Klan murdered three people working to register blacks: James Chaney, a 21-year-old black civil rights worker; Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old white social worker; and Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old white college student.

Even with the threat of violence, whites continued to fight for civil rights. These whites would not directly benefit from the successes of the civil rights movement. They had the right to vote and access to public facilities, yet they chose to protest, boycott and suffer with blacks because they believed what was occurring was wrong. They believed people should not be discriminated against because of who they are. They believed, as King wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

King’s declaration rings true today just as much as when he wrote it in a Birmingham jail cell in 1963. Many of the same injustices the black civil rights movement fought still are applied to members of the gay community. In 32 states, landlords can legally evict tenants because of their sexual orientation, just as landlords could deny housing to blacks based on their race. In 29 states, it is legal for a company to fire an employee based on sexual orientation. This legal right to fire based on sexual orientation is exercised constantly by many employers, including the U.S. military, which has discharged more than 13,000 service members because of their sexual orientation. These brave and loyal American men and women want to defend their country. They were deemed fit to serve and did so, many in occupations the military defined as “critical,” until their sexual preference became known.

This injustice towards gay Americans affects more than just housing and employment. By forbidding committed homosexual couples the same rights as committed heterosexual couples, the government refuses homosexual couples more than 1,100 statutory provisions it grants to heterosexual couples. This includes denying partners the right to visit their loved one in the hospital, refusing American citizens in binational relationships the right to petition for their same-sex partner’s immigration, and forcing estate taxes on property inherited from a deceased partner. It is just to amend the definition of marriage to include homosexual couples just as it was just to amend the definition of marriage in 16 states in 1967, when anti-miscegenation laws forbidding interracial marriage were ruled unconstitutional.

Heterosexuals must stand up with our homosexual peers to demand the righting of the wrongs the government allows, endorses and participates in. We must demand gay equality under the law by signing petitions like the one being circulated by the Right Side of History at therightsideofhistory.org. We must walk arm in arm with the gay community as we fight for the rights these individuals want, need and deserve. Heterosexuals must fight for homosexual rights because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Senior David Dresner doesn’t want his children to have parents who are second-class citizens.

Over the next two years, Dresner hopes to jump-start a national movement by applying new strategies to gain equal rights for the LGBT community.

Dresner’s journey as a gay rights activist started just seven weeks ago when he was approached by Brian Elliot—the older brother of 2008 Washington University alum Marc Elliot—to join him in a project called “The Right Side of History.”

Senior David Dresner works with sophomore Michael Weiss in his mission, entitled “The Right Side of History,” which strives to launch the gay rights movement into the mainstream and eventually to pass legislation guaranteeing the LGBT community equal status. (Sam Guzik | Student Life)

Dresner and Elliot—both openly gay men—hope that The Right Side of History will reshape the status quo of the LGBT movement by using straight youth to garner mainstream interest and propel the movement into the national political sphere.

Equal rights in 26 months

The Right Side of History’s 26-month goal is to pass legislation akin to the 1964 Civil Rights Act that would ultimately afford the LGBT community equal rights in the United States.

The idea to engage straight people in the struggle for gay rights came to Elliot after he read a Columbia University study conducted in every state. The study showed that at least 75 percent of each state supported equal legal rights—a figure much larger than Elliot had anticipated.

Despite this widespread support, however, 29 states do not have laws on record prohibiting employers from terminating employment based on sexual orientation. Additionally, 13,000 people have been discharged from the military in violation of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” for admitting their homosexuality.

“The second takeaway of the study was [that] the young folks overwhelmingly support the most controversial issues,” Elliot said. “Young people were the vanguards of the civil rights movement. This is their generation’s turn to hold our country to its own ideals. It’s not fine for laws to treat people differently.”

Straight support

Dresner said it mathematically makes sense to place a large emphasis on targeting straight people since straight people make up between 90 and 95 percent of the population.

“My efforts right now really need to be focused on the larger 95 percent of the people, and if I’m going to really demonstrate and get the show of force that I’m looking for, I need to go for the harder demographic first,” Dresner said.

Dresner said he believed that gays in the United States would achieve equal rights within 30 years time. But when Elliot said he could fast-forward these results to the year 2011, Dresner knew he wanted to take part in this movement.

Facing Congress

Every year since 1994, Congress has attempted to prohibit discrimination against employees on the basis of sexual identity and orientation as well as disability through the passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. That bill has consistently failed to garner enough support to pass both houses of Congress.

Senior David Dresner (second from left) leads a meeting of students involved with nascent organization fighting for gay rights; the movement, known as The Right Side of History, hopes to see sweeping gay rights legislation passed nationally in the next two years. Also pictured are, from left to right, are sophomore Jeremy Cramer Gibbs, sophomore Michael Weiss, junior David Klein, junior David Dobbs and Gregory Hogan, regional director of the Sigma Phi Epsilon Fraternity. (Sam Guzik | Student Life)

If passed in its entirety, the proposed bill, The Civil Rights Act of 2011 with Religious Exemptions, would be more expansive than the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. The 2011 Civil Rights Act would prohibit job discrimination and afford LGBT Americans the same federal rights of citizenship that are afforded to heterosexual Americans.

The ‘Theory of Change’

Elliot and Dresner hope to tackle this ambitious goal by following the “Theory of Change”—a model developed by the movement that aims to empower youth and engage millions to make change and demand equality.

By doing so, Elliot and followers of the movement hope to pervade American culture and make the issue of gay rights a prominent one–one on the minds of national legislators.

“We’re hoping to engage millions of youth across the country,” Dresner said. “We’re trying to charge straight youth in an autonomous action.”

Powerful support

A professional group, dubbed “Creative Geniuses,” has been formed for The Right Side of History in New York and Washington, D.C. A leading executives from consulting firms are already on board and they said they have spoken with several strategists responsible for the Obama campaign’s success.

Dresner and Elliot are currently seeking to expand the group.

A band of brothers

Dresner is launching the campaign at Wash. U., and he found his first supporters in his fraternity house—Sigma Phi Epsilon (SigEp). His brothers have provided assistance to the movement at the University.

“At SigEp, there are a lot of people who want to get involved and help out,” said junior Lionel Johnnes, a member of SigEp. “The challenge will be branching out and stepping outside of the Wash. U. bubble and spreading to the majority of the population.”

While the support has already spread beyond SigEp on campus, Dresner said he hopes to use the fraternity as a platform from which to reach other college campuses.

With more than 13,000 current members, Sig. Ep. is the largest fraternity in the nation in terms of current members, and Dresner has plans to visit SigEp chapters through the country to garner support.

A group of approximately 25 Wash. U. students has been meeting each Saturday to discuss strategies for spreading the group’s message and expanding the movement.

The right approach?

Although Dresner said he has received overwhelming support for his campaign on campus, The Right Side of History’s tactic to primarily engage straight people represents a controversial stance within the gay rights movement.

In the past, the gay rights movement has traditionally been led by members of the LGBT community.

Junior Ayla Karamustafa, an advocate for LGBTQIA rights, said that while she respects Dresner and his team, she believes the movement disregards the history of the LGBT movement and excludes many people who have devoted their entire lives to the cause.

“Our movement centers on gaining rights for individuals of various sexual orientations and gender identities of all racial backgrounds; to take away those identities or to refuse—at the very least—to acknowledge them renders the entire thing senseless,” Karamustafa said.

Senior Laura Lane-Steele, president of Pride Alliance, said her group agrees with the intention and goals of the Right Side of History but will be working toward the goal of equality in different ways.

“Obviously everyone on Pride is going to have a different opinion on this movement and the issues surrounding it,” Lane-Steele said. “Pride and the Right Side of History have different strategies in achieving goals for LGBT people.”

The ultimate goal

Dresner said he expects challenges along the way but will continue to garner support until he gets the American youth on the right side of history.

“I think a lot of people at Wash. U. care about this issue,” Dresner said. “People can’t believe these types of inequities exist in this country. Wash. U. can be the start of a civil rights movement.”

With additional reporting by Kate Gaertner

Grant mentions in the introduction that her “highlight came when [her parents] began, spontaneously, talking about their pasts: retelling luscious stories of their youth and coming-of-age tale about college and drawing portraits of their social circle. Yet each account was tainted, almost invariably, by the racism they confronted as African Americans.” The book highlights many of these instances, some of them hilarious, others regretfully painful.

The book’s characterization as a civil rights text should not put off readers; it as much a tale of the struggle as it is the people, particularly Mr. Grant, and how he managed to neither suffer nor struggle but thrive during the mid-1900s.

Grant’s language is wonderfully down to earth, with well-placed artistic flourishes. There is a lot of information covered, including details of the life of both Grant’s grandparents, her parent’s incredible circle of friends and associates (including Cab Calloway and Thurgood Marshall) and her upbringing in a “white” neighborhood.

The plethora of information, however, is not necessarily organized well. The subjects stay within the context of the chapter but she tends to change subjects from paragraph to paragraph. This causes the flow of the history to feel patched and unchronological.

The story also contains confusing transitions, where the author draws upon outside source quotes from people who witnessed events. Otherwise, it is still navigable, and one should not shun this impressive recounting of a noble family in a difficult time.

Although the book is described as a biography of Grant’s father, the volume reads more like a memoir. Not to underestimate his fascinating legal career, but the book begins with his parents and ends with his children, as if his life began before him and will continue on with his children: The book was more about Grant’s own heritage than a simple story of her father.

Readers have the opportunity to pick up a copy of the book and meet Gail Milissa Grant for a lecture and book signing this Sunday, Oct. 19, at the Missouri History Museum at 1 p.m.