Jim Crow Campus

Joy Ann Williamson-Lott

Publication Date: June 29, 2018

Pages: 176

African-Americans have experienced informal and formal racism throughout the United States since its founding. Quite frequently, education and educational institutions were arenas for both the imposition of and challenges to these policies and practices. In Jim Crow Campus: Higher Education and the Struggle for a New Southern Social Order, Joy Ann Williamson-Lott argues that Southern campuses existed in a region with a history of hostility toward mass education, a poor record of public funding for education, and a two-tiered system that separated black institutions from white ones (p. 7). Both systems, from primary to graduate school, were underfunded and underdeveloped in comparison with their counterparts elsewhere in the nation.

In a brief but well-researched narrative of 124 pages with 28 pages of notes, Williamson-Lott shows how struggles between students, faculty, presidents, trustees, and elected officials over black student rights, the Vietnam War, and the emerging knowledge economy during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s “precipitated wide-ranging changes in southern higher education and southern society” (p. 1). The identification of the importance of the knowledge economy in changing southern higher education and the southern social order is a significant contribution of Jim Crow Campus. The value of the same rules for all that are integral to knowledge development is antithetical to the value of different rules for whites and blacks inherent in white supremacist ideology. If southern states and southern institutions of higher education wished to get a share of the funding available through the federal government and foundations, they had to accept the policies and regulations that accompanied those funds. A recent potential use of federal funds to influence higher education institutions is President Trump’s threat that the federal government should look at the funds provided to colleges and universities that are not open to speakers on the extreme ideological right.

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