Sean Varner
Features Editor
It was 1951, and it was a fine autumn day. (One imagines so, I mean. There’s no way of knowing for certain, unless one was kicking around back then. Even so, memories being faulty and all that, the matter’s still a puzzler.)
President Otto Kraushaar sat in his office, sipping a pensive cup of coffee and thinking on his day—or, perhaps, about that new I Love Lucy show, or going to the drive-in with Mrs. President Kraushaar to see The Man From Planet X, or Fats Domino, or some other thing that people thought about in the early 1950s—when a visitor dropped in to see him: she was a well-spoken, well-dressed black woman. A graduate of Radcliffe College, she was the mother of a daughter who was preparing to enter college in a year’s time, and she had come to Goucher to inquire about its policy toward black applicants.
“If it were my decision to make,” Kraushaar told her, “I’d certainly urge your daughter to apply. But I’ll need to clear it with the Board of Trustees before anything is certain.”
Satisfied for the present, the woman left, and Kraushaar prepared to take the issue to the Board.
*
Concerning racial discrimination, President Kraushaar held liberal views. Nevertheless, as he pointed out to his visitor, the decision resided ultimately with the Board of Trustees.
The whole situation was similar to a dilemma that his predecessor—President Robertson—had dealt with twenty years prior. It was during Robertson’s tenure that there had been a great discrimination against the admittance of Jewish students. President Robertson insisted on an open admission policy that set no limit to the number of Jewish students the College would accept; Kraushaar continued this policy, which set solely a “student’s potential for academic growth” as the standard of admittance.
*
At a meeting of the Board in late October, Dr. Kraushaar raised his issue. A long and interesting discussion ensued, the leader of which was a Judge Morris Sopher, a well-respected jurist who had been a member of the Morgan State College Board for many years. He encouraged the group to explore fully and freely the question; most of the trustees present participated in the discussion in such a manner. However, to the dismay of Kraushaar, who had hoped “the outcome might be a motion to declare that Goucher admitted students without regard for race or color,” a decision was not made. As the meeting’s minutes note, a decision “was deferred until such time as an application has been received.”
The outcome did not sit well with the lady to whom Dr. Kraushaar had previously spoken. According to Dr. Kraushaar, “She was understandably indignant, and wrote a letter of stinging rebuke which spared neither the College nor the trustees, nor me. As she saw the situation, we were asking her daughter to go through the entire application process for admission to Goucher College without any assurance that she would not be rejected as a Goucher student simply because she was black.”
Kraushaar went on to call the letter “a masterpiece,” and took some pleasure in reading it aloud at a subsequent meeting of the trustees. “That rebuke made me all the more determined to cross the bridge of desegregating the College as swiftly as possible.”
Soon, a second black candidate applied. When Kraushaar took to the Board the canidate’s completed application, along with a recommendation from the College Admissions committee that the student “was in every way qualified,” they voted to accept her. The Board followed that action with a blanket recommendation that admission to Goucher College should not be judged on a basis of race, color, or creed.
As far as the students themselves were concerned, many were strongly supportive of the school’s desegreation. They participated frequently in demonstrations and were placed under arrest just as frequently. (In fact, the office of the Dean of Students soon learned to hand bail funds and provided advising for students on court hearings.)
The number of black women admitted to the school would not increase greatly throughout the 1950s; that would have to wait until the 1960s, when the situation entered a more mature phase.
Categories: Features, History of Goucher
The Quindecim 