Jim Crow Campus

2020 Frederic W. Ness Book Award Winner (AACU)

2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Finalist in Education

This well-researched volume explores how the Black freedom struggle and the anti–Vietnam War movement dovetailed with faculty and student activism in the South to undermine the traditional role of higher education and bring about social change. It uses the battles between students, faculty, presidents, trustees, elected officials, and funding agencies to explain how Black and White southern campuses transformed themselves into reputable academic centers. No matter the type of institution, these battles represented cracks in the edifice of the Old South and precipitated wide-ranging changes in southern higher education and society as well. This thought-provoking history offers scholars and others interested in institutional autonomy and the value of civil society a deep understanding of the central role that institutions of higher education can play in social and political change and the vital importance of independent institutions during times of national crisis.

Book Features:

• Helps institutional leaders to understand the benefits and challenges of dissolving the walls around the ivory or ebony tower.
• Offers a complex analysis of the evolution of higher education in the South.
• Demonstrates how changes in higher education precipitated wide-ranging changes in southern society.
• Examines contemporary arguments about the breadth and limits of first amendment rights and academic freedom on college and university campuses.

Joy Ann Williamson-Lott is a professor of the history of education at the University of Washington College of Education, co-editor of the History of Education Quarterly, and author of Radicalizing the Ebony Tower: Black Colleges and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi.

“...masterful work”

―Teachers College Record

" Jim Crow Campus is an important contribution to higher education literature. This work expands the understudied fields of African American and southern higher education. There is no simple conclusion to how education in the South operated—there were too many variables. The broad scope of this work raises more questions than it answers, and that is one of its strengths. It provides a scaffold upon which to build further research."

―History of Education Quarterly

“ Jim Crow Campus provides insight into the civil rights movement beyond the national narrative, adding significant nuance. Williamson-Lott’s contribution to the historiography of the civil rights movement includes new people, places, tactics, and, most important, perspectives.”

—The Journal of Southern History

“As we operate in an era of intense threats to free speech and academic freedom, Joy Williamson-Lott’s Jim Crow Campus is essential reading. Her riveting prose and well-researched historical narrative tell the stories of the past while also teaching lessons for today.”
—Marybeth Gasman, professor, University of Pennsylvania

“Williamson-Lott’s masterful study is indispensable for understanding how the South went from being an academic backwater in the Jim Crow era to a region whose best colleges and universities are among 21st-century America’s freest, most diverse racially, and most distinguished intellectually. This book is a must-read for every serious student of higher education, academic freedom, free speech, civil rights, student protest, and Southern history.”
—Robert Cohen, professor, New York University

“Williamson-Lott’s book demands that attention be paid to the critical role that the suppression of free speech played in maintaining an oppressive Jim Crow society. For those who feel that we are witnessing today unprecedented levels in the denial of free speech, Jim Crow Campus takes us back to a recent period in the American South in which the suppression of speech was commonplace in government and in the routines of everyday life. Williamson-Lott demonstrates how the dawn of a new freedom of expression in an otherwise racially oppressive society chipped away at the foundation of the racial domination that rested heavily on the subtle and brutal suppression of speech.”
—James D. Anderson, dean, College of Education at University of Illinois

Tentative Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. "Beneath the Towering Oaks of Southern Campuses":  Southern Education through the Middle 20th Century
   "All the Branches . . . Deemed Useful": The Development of Higher Education through the Early Twentieth Century
   "An Inviolable Refuge": Academic Freedom and Standardization through the Early Twentieth Century
   "And for This, the Evil Things They Teach at the University Are Responsible": Expansion and Change through the Middle 1950s
   Conclusion

Chapter 3. "Society's Wisest and Most Rewarding Investment":  Shifts in Students' First Amendment Rights, 1955-1965
   "Use [Your] Damn Head": The Student Press
   "The Distressing Climate Has Smothered the Freedom Necessary to All Democratic Thought": Speaker Bans
   "We Do Not Intend to Wait Placidly By": Freedom of Association
   Conclusion

Chapter 4. "Academic Freedom as an Instrumentality of Treason":  The Red Scare, the Black Scare, and Faculty Purges, 1955-1965
   "Conditions of Academic Freedom are Precarious": The Red and Black Scare in Southern Higher Education
   "Will You Stand Like Men?": Black Private Colleges and Universities 
   "Right Now We Could Use a Lot of Wholesome Publicity": White Public Colleges and Universities
   "Education is to Inform and Not Reform": Black Public Colleges and Universities
   Conclusion

Chapter 5. "No Berkeley, but a Tuskegee": Student Activism and  Expanding First Amendment Freedoms, 1965-1975
   "Like Finding Marijuana in Your Grandmother’s Jewelry Box": The Black Power and Anti-Vietnam War Movements in the South
   "Censored": Expanding Freedom of the Student Press
   "Controlled by the Influx of Foreign Ideologies, Maybe City Slickers": An End to Speaker Bans
   "To Build Together a New South": Freedom of Association
   Conclusion

Chapter 6. "Radical, Hippy, or Other Disruptive Factions on the Campus":  Faculty Activism in the Black Power and Vietnam War Era, 1965-1975
   "Something in the Nature of Genteel Southern Life": The Shifting Terrain of Southern Higher Education
   "Some of Them Must be Sick, Frustrated Young Fellows": White Faculty at Black Public and Private Institutions in the Middle 1960s
   "Whatever They Could to Try and Obtain Justice": Black Faculty at Black Public and Private Institutions in the Middle 1960s
   "A New Humanity": Black Campuses and Black Power
   "The Role of Faculty in Student Rebellion": Faculty Activism, the Vietnam War, and Regional Convergence 
   Conclusion

Chapter 7. Conclusion

Notes

Index

About the Author 

2020 Association of American Colleges and Universities Frederic W. Ness Book Award

2018 Foreword Indies Book of the Year Awards Finalist in Education