The University in the 1950s

Incidents of lynching increased in the post war forties there were over eight by the end of the forties. Race riots occurred all over the South. When a race riot broke out in Athens, Alabama over a biracial veterans organization trying to win a local election one white complained. “It’s got to the place white folks can’t walk on the streets for the niggers. It’s the nigger GIs that’s getting out of their place.”
The violence of the forties spilled into the 1950s. In 1955, eight of the eleven lynchings of blacks in the 1950s occurred in 1955. The violence reached its peak in the the vicious murder of And Emmett Til. Til was a fourteen year-old black boy, who was shot, beaten and castrated for whistling at a white woman in Missipppi. Til’s murder trial received national attention. Those that had been unaware of the Jim Crow South’s brutality, were forced to deal with the reality that America was not completely a land of the free.

Though there were many tragedies across the country due to racial discrimination, there were also many triumphs. In 1955, Elston Howard, an African American athlete made the New York Yankees. Althea Gibsonwas the first African American, man or woman to win the Wimbledon Championship, the highest honor in tennis, in 1957. And across the country, on May 17th, 1954, when the Supreme Court struck down segregation in America's public schools forever, many African American men and women dared to attend the universities and colleges across the nation, and in particular the South, that were once closed to them.

In the early fifties, there had been some black students who entered the University's specialty schools, like Law, Medicine, and Education under the old "seperate but equal" clause, such as Gregory Swanson who entered the University of Virginia Law School in 1950. The undergraduate community, however, had not been desegregated. This fact was to change. In 1955 three men bravely made history by having the honor to be the first three to desegregate the University of Virginia’s undergraduate community. Their names were Robert Bland, George Harris, and Theodore Thomas.They came to Colgate Darden’s University of Virginia, Colgate Darden, was the University President during the fifties. Bland, Harris, and Thomas all had hope of receiving a prestigious degree from the Southern institution in UVA's Engineering program.

However, they found their efforts to be exhausting. For Bland’s experience, he recalled very little that was unpleasant about being in the University classrooms. However he did not recall anything particularly pleasant either. All Bland recalled was spending a lot of times with his textbooks. Bland was determined to do well in his classes, his math and science background was strong, but not near the preparatory status to which his fellow white classmates had been exposed .

Alienated from their classmates, Bland, Harris, and Thomas studied and socialized together. Bland and Harris were roommates and Thomas was right down the hall from them in his own single. They lived in McCormick Road Dormitories. The social life of the University was centered primarily around fraternity life. If one was not in a fraternity or not allowed to be in a fraternity, opportunities for socializing were very few. The University even then had a reputation as a hard drinking school., as far back as 1928.
As the doors to fraternity life and other social clubs were closed to Swanson they were also closed to Bland, Harris & Thomas.

In each other they sought academic support and strength. Bland, Harris and Thomas, did not have to worry about not having a social outlet for long. The black community of Charlottesville welcomed Bland, Thomas, and Harris into their homes, churches, and social events. Charlottesville blacks were proud that finally black men were attending the University for an education, not to clean yet another hall or dormitory. But whatever the support the young men received. At the end of the first year, Harris and Thomas were to withdraw from the University and to transfer to other universities. Bland stayed and as a result was the only African American to graduate in the Class of 1959.

The young black students that followed Bland in the fifties would quickly find him or each other upon acceptance to the University. Those other trailblazers that followed Bland were Harold Marsh and

UVa partytime, 1955.

Rupert Picot who made up the the Class of 1956. Elmer Dandridge, Nathaniel Gatlin, Aubrey Jones, Walter Payne, and James Trice were the black students in the Class of 1957. Leroy Willis was among them that entered in 1958. There were less than 10 each year, just a few brave ones who decided instead of attending an all black university with their friends they would attend the University of Virginia be it for academics or for principle. Many of them though felt swayed to go due to academics, if not a combination of both.

During the fifties, particularly post-Bland years of the fifties, very little change occurred at the University concerning desegregation policy. Though many other Universities across the South were being forced to desegregate, Darden and the administration regarded desegregation as a necessary evil. To abide by the law, was better than to make the news for violent resistance, as many other Universities in the Deep South were doing. Colgate Darden was also a product of Southside Virginia. Darden allowed the racism or preconceived racial notions of his upbringing alter his views. As University historian Brian Kay noted in his piece on desegregation at the University: "Relative to desegregation, leadership and enlightenment fell to negative emotions engendered by custom, and the often cold expediences practiced in running a state school"