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Race, Meritocracy, and the American Academy during the Immediate Post—World War II Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

James D. Anderson
James D. Anderson*
Affiliation:
Department of Educational Policy Studies, College of Education, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Extract

This address concerns the initial integration of African American scholars into the American academy. It traces an interesting and unusual national campaign that first opened the doors of northern white universities to African American scholars. The primary focus is on what this campaign reveals about the interrelationship of race and meritocracy in mainstream American higher education during the immediate post-World War II period. It is also a story about a select pool of highly qualified African American scholars and their opportunities for employment at northern white universities. Finally, this is also a history of a particular process of institutional racism. One underlying purpose is to explore the usefulness of the social science concept of institutional racism for framing and explaining the formation and development of specific types of racial exclusion or discrimination in educational systems that operate with explicitly race-neutral or “color-blind” laws, procedures, and policies.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , Summer 1993 , pp. 151 - 175
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Feagin, Joe R. and Booher Feagin, Clairece, Discrimination American Style: Institutional Racism and Sexism (Malabar, Fla., 1978); Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (New York, 1975), 69.Google Scholar

2 Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination, 69.Google Scholar

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7 Ibid., 83; Wale to Ralph Cooper Hutchison, 17 Sep. 1945, and Wale to Nicholas Murray Butler, 11 June 1945, folder 2, box 309, JRF Papers.Google Scholar

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