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Racial Progress at Oberlin College,
1940-1946

William Bigglestone, OC Archivist Emeritus

An article of mine in the July 1971 The Journal of Negro History titled “Oberlin College and the Negro Student, 1865-1940” concluded during the tenure of President Ernest Hatch Wilkins who served the college from 1927 to 1946. Professor Wilkins, a native of Massachusetts, was almost age forty-seven when he came to Oberlin. He had received his PhD from Harvard and taught at Amherst, Harvard and the University of Chicago. At Chicago his duties for a few years in the 1920s included being Dean of the College of Arts, Literature and Science. An authority on Petrarch and Dante, his specialty in Romance languages did not prepare him to cope with the uncertainties regarding race that he found in Oberlin.

This paper continues the subject of [Oberlin] College’s treatment of African American students to the end of President Wilkins’ administration in 1946.  Over the years since the abolition of slavery the school had changed from a deliberate attempt to accept these students as equals (social activities excepted, especially between the sexes) to a holding action more in line with the attitudes of a nation going through its worst post-bellum period of openly anti-black sympathies. During these times the school also faced changing attitudes among its employees and students. Faculty members and students who helped to end slavery had left the scene to be replaced too often by persons with less, or little, racial understanding. Still, a belief continued where Oberlin College was located there had once been a non-discriminatory community and that this should again be the objective no matter how difficult the goal. Such an aim in a nation rampant with prejudices that existed in the Jim Crow era was not easily achieved. As the 1930s drew to a close, a few students, who did not like the way non-white students were being treated, made their sympathies known in various ways. The protests were not large, but they became persistent and increasingly could not be dismissed. The end of the Wilkins presidential administration brought a close to a great deal of the uncertainty in racial matters that troubled the school.

The World War II years were difficult for the College in many ways. Just the teaching of Navy men on campus as a part of the war effort was an educational trial of immense proportions. In addition, President Wilkins took it upon himself to answer every letter from former Oberlin students then in the service, taking much time from already busy days. On top of all usual administrative problems this was also a period of change nationally in race relations. One topic of debate was, "Should the Armed Forces be integrated?" At home irritants were more immediate. At the beginning of the war, an official outside of Oberlin ordered the Red Cross not to accept the blood of African Americans. Shortly thereafter the order was rescinded, but much bitterness understandably remained in Oberlin as elsewhere among African Americans.¹ During the war no African American was allowed to serve on the town of Oberlin’s rationing and price control board. A statement by the local attorney who had headed the board, that “no Negro had ever occurred to me as a potential appointee,” did nothing to ease the pain.² People asked why none were represented on the faculty of Oberlin College or among its administrative employees and why were they admitted mainly to menial positions?³ Grounds maintenance and dormitories were the main places where African Americans were employed.

Racial attitudes in Oberlin during the 1940s made the community a difficult place in which to register social gains. In a town of 4300 persons that was 20% African American, students of this race were not too noticeable because they made up only a very small percentage of the College’s enrollment. African Americans trained at the College to teach were not assisted to obtain positions in the town. The first African American teacher in the Oberlin public school system, Elizabeth (Betty) Glenn (later Mrs. Philip Thomas), a local woman who had a primary-kindergarten teaching certificate and a 1936 A.B., both from Oberlin College, began teaching in 1940 in Oberlin’s Centennial School which was predominantly African American. When her contract renewal, upon which tenure would be determined, came up in 1942, there was much public and private discussion of whether she should be rehired. It was understood that she would be teaching more and more white children as time went on. She had proved herself a first-rate teacher and individual, and the support generated by interested persons, especially by the Oberlin News-Tribune’s publisher Charles Mosher, was the backing needed to cause the Oberlin Board of Education to renew her contract. The opposition had not been weak, but many of the protesters of 1940 had become Miss Glenn’s supporters by 1942. Oberlin College took a neutral position throughout the affair, its employees taking sides in the matter only if personally inclined.⁴