Problem for South : Blacks Still Feel Sting of Campus Bias

When Kim Cooper entered the University of Alabama here as a freshman in the fall of 1984, she was overwhelmed from the first week by a pervasive sense of social isolation and cultural alienation.

Like other black students at majority-white colleges throughout the South, she found that she was not prepared for what she encountered.

“In the dorms, if you said, ‘Hold the elevators, please,’ the white girls just laughed and let the doors close on you. Crossing campus, whites would seldom smile at you, or say hello. In your classes, there might be a few other black students but usually none--and never any black instructors.

Learns Bitter Truth

“When I looked at the extracurricular activities, I saw no blacks at all in the Student Government Assn. And, at a black fraternity icebreaker that week, I looked at the black frat houses on Bryce Lawn and then at the white frat houses one street over on ‘Fraternity Row,’ and the black houses looked like slave quarters in the back of plantation houses by comparison.”

Cooper was learning a bitter truth that Donal E. Muir, a University of Alabama sociologist and race relations specialist, says is evident at white-majority campuses across the South: “We have desegregated Southern schools, but we have not integrated them.”

Since that first week, says Cooper, now 19 and a sophomore English major, things have only gotten worse.

Last fall, when Alabama’s Panhellenic sorority handbook came out, it devoted a page to each of the 15 white sororities, with picture after picture of smiling white sorority sisters at house parties, beer busts and formal balls. But it relegated the four black sororities on campus to a single page at the back of the book without even a snapshot to enliven the text.

Cross Burned on ‘Row’

More recently, in one of the most blatant acts of racial discrimination since blacks first entered the university, two white students burned a cross in front of a cottage on lily-white “Sorority Row,” a cottage that a black sorority was considering as a residence. The incident occurred after the campus newspaper had reported that members of white sororities on the street were concerned that a black sorority might “disrupt our lives.”

Kim Cooper had thought that she was starting out with few illusions about life at Alabama. Her father, an elementary school principal, had cautioned her: “Kim, you were ‘Miss It’ in high school. But, when you get up there, it’s not going to be that way. You’ll get only as far as they want you to get”-- they meaning the school’s white power structure.

But Cooper had attended a white-majority high school in Montgomery, her hometown, and had had an outstanding academic and extracurricular record that she hoped to match in college. She knew that blacks made up more than 10% of the Alabama student body, that two blacks sat on the board of trustees and that blacks, in the past, had even served as student government president and Crimson Tide homecoming queen. So she wasn’t prepared to feel left out.

But now she says: “I feel like this campus is a playground with a big merry-go-round in the center that says: ‘White Students Only.’ They’re up there riding around, hair blowing in the wind, grabbing the brass ring each time it comes around, while we’re down here pleading with them just to let us on. But only a few ‘model’ blacks ever get to make it.”

Racial desegregation has made obvious strides in the South, since Gov. George C. Wallace made his segregationist “stand in the schoolhouse door” here nearly a quarter-century ago to block the enrollment of two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood.

Statistics Improve

By 1965, for example, nearly 20% of black college students in the South were enrolling in predominantly white institutions. By 1976, 57% of black students were going to previously all-white schools and by 1982, 64%.

But, for all the racial progress such statistics suggest, black students have found that going to a white-majority school is no automatic ticket to acceptance or upward mobility. Large numbers of white students shun them and try to keep them out of extracurricular activities. White professors and administrators can be equally insensitive and uncaring, and the number of black faculty members and school officials remains minuscule.

Cultural and social events are dominated by whites, with blacks getting equal time usually only once a year--in February, during Black Heritage Month. And, at many formerly all-white universities in Dixie, the still-strong Confederate tradition is an irritant to black students.

Hostility Off Campus

To make matters worse, the off-campus community--particularly in predominantly white rural areas--can be even more hostile, with neighborhoods where black students know they are not welcome to live and bars and restaurants that discourage, if not refuse, their patronage.

There are problems at schools all across the South. For example:

- At Auburn University, across the state from the University of Alabama, black students often refer to the school as “Apartheid U.” Black enrollment has jumped by 40% since 1983, but in fall, 1985, the number of black students was still only 3.4% of the 19,056 total.

In a ruling last December in a bitterly contested desegregation suit against the state, a federal district judge declared Auburn the most racially segregated state college in Alabama and said that, “except for the presence of black athletes and the changes mandated by federal laws and regulations, Auburn’s racial attitudes have changed little since the ‘50s.”

In an ironic twist, the judge’s decision was handed down on the same day that Bo Jackson, the black star running back for the Auburn Tigers, won the Heisman Trophy as the nation’s best football player.

- At the University of Mississippi, where rioting mobs converged when James Meredith became the first black student to enter in 1962, blacks and whites have been deeply divided over the playing of “Dixie” and the waving of Confederate flags at “Ole Miss” football games.

Last September, in an incident that made front-page headlines in the campus newspaper, a fight broke out at the all-white Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house after two black football players appeared at a postgame party. Whites charge that the black athletes crashed the party and “became belligerent.” Blacks say the two football players were only doing what white athletes customarily do--showing up at postgame parties on Fraternity Row without invitations--and were provoked into a fight.

Alienation among blacks is high at “Ole Miss.” “I just want to go through here and get out,” said one top black undergraduate scholar. “It’s only four short years of my life, so it’s no big deal.

- At the University of Georgia, a racial barrier of 15 years’ standing between white and black fraternities and sororities was toppled only last year when the Black Greek Council, which represented the campus’s four black fraternities, was merged into the Interfraternity Council, which represented the white fraternities, and the two black sororities at the school joined the Panhellenic Council, which was the governing body for the white sororities.

According to the “Black Student’s Guide to Colleges,” edited by Brown University professor Barry Beckham: “If you’re not used to being around white people, you will definitely experience culture shock” at the Athens school.

- At the University of Virginia, the Black Student Alliance staged a series of campus protests and visits to administration officials this year demanding the resignation of the dean of Afro-American affairs, Paul L. Puryear, on grounds that he ignored black student concerns.

In a face-saving gesture, the university invited Puryear to take another campus post and put the Afro-American affairs office under the vice president for student affairs until a new dean was picked. In his defense, Puryear said that black students who opposed him wanted to establish segregated facilities and services on campus.

Louis Anderson, graduate student in education and former Black Student Alliance president, said: “The problem is ‘Uncle Tom’ administrators. The university doesn’t hire that many blacks to begin with, but then it goes and puts in people who aren’t responsive to the concerns of black students.”

Dropout Rates Increase

Social and cultural strains appear to take a heavy toll on the academic performance and motivation of black students, as evidenced by their higher dropout rates.

For example, at Davidson College, a small, largely white Presbyterian school in North Carolina, the dropout rate among blacks was 43% from 1966 to 1975 and 34.9% from 1976 to 1984. By contrast, the rate for whites was 20% during the same periods. A 76-page report by a campus task force on racial concerns said that black students attributed their higher attrition “more to stresses in the social environment than to academic factors.”

“A great deal of emphasis has been placed on providing blacks in the South with access to higher education at historically white institutions, but not enough has been placed on making that experience a success,” said Cordell Wynn, president of predominantly black Stillman College in Tuscaloosa and a prominent black Alabama educator.

Cracking the “Jim Crow” color barrier in higher education was one of the earliest goals of the modern-day black civil rights movement in the South. In the late 1930s, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People initiated a series of legal challenges to the segregationist doctrine of “separate but equal,” which relegated blacks to black-only campuses that invariably were unequal.

Alcorn Students Handicapped

In 1950, for instance, Alcorn State University in Mississippi--then known as Alcorn A&M; College and the state’s most established black institution of higher learning--had only one Ph.D. on its entire faculty. And, although white students at “Ole Miss” had a new million-dollar library, Alcorn scholars were crowded into a second-story room with no heat, little light and books piled on the floor for lack of shelf space.

With the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in 1954 overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine, a new era of civil rights litigation was started, as Southern states fought stubbornly to avoid compliance with the high court’s ruling.

One of the most publicized cases from that period involved Autherine Lucy, who was admitted to the University of Alabama under a federal court order in 1956 as the first black student. She was forced out by rioting mobs after three days and never returned.

Today, state-supported institutions of higher education in all but two of the 11 states of the old Confederacy are operating under either a court-ordered desegregation plan or a desegregation settlement with the U.S. Justice Department. The exceptions are Alabama, where a court-ordered desegregation plan is in legal limbo pending appeals by the state, and Mississippi, where a desegregation suit by the Justice Department has yet to come to trial.

Progress ‘Rather Moderate’

Louis Bryson, an official of the Southern regional office of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, said the progress in desegregation has been “rather moderate” despite contentions by some states that they have progressed far enough to be released from federal supervision.

“The numbers I’ve seen have not been that impressive,” he said. “The enrollment of blacks has not increased significantly and the hiring of black faculty has not increased to a point where it is on a par with the availability.”

The controversy over the racial barriers against blacks at white-majority colleges has focused renewed attention on the South’s traditionally black schools, which have suffered a steady decline as the desegregation movement took more and more black students--especially the top high school scholars--away from them and as their traditional funding sources have dwindled.

Although it has battled back since, Fisk University in Nashville, for example, was on the brink of ruin in mid-1984. Enrollment had dropped two-thirds to roughly 500 students over the last decade and the school had accumulated a staggering $4.1-million debt.

A seven-year study by Barnard College psychologist Jacqueline Fleming, published under the title of “Blacks in College” in 1984, disclosed that, despite their often-inferior facilities and resources, predominantly black colleges were generally more supportive of black students’ personal, social and cognitive development than white colleges.

The study involved 3,000 black students and 500 white students at predominantly black and predominantly white schools in Georgia, Texas, Mississippi and Ohio.

Fleming reserved her harshest indictment for Georgia Tech in Atlanta: “Black students at Georgia Tech suffer from some of the worst intellectual deterioration in a white school in this study. Their academic energies are apparently frustrated by classroom incidents and then withdrawn from the classroom into extracurricular pursuits that afford no intellectual benefit.”

‘Mentor Program’

Officials at traditionally white campuses have not been unconcerned about the plight of black students. The University of Mississippi, for example, set up a volunteer “mentor program” for entering black freshmen. The mentors are recruited from the ranks of “Ole Miss” faculty, administration and professional staff to help new students adjust to the campus and keep up their spirits.

“I think the program’s been pretty valuable,” said Nadene Dunlap, a sophomore from Bay Springs, Miss., whose mentor is Maryemma Graham, a black English professor. “She’s done everything from providing moral support to helping me with English papers. We can talk about anything and everything.”

Universities are also boosting their efforts to recruit more black students.

In Virginia, the agency overseeing the state’s higher education system has set up a summer fellowship program to attract more minority-member undergraduates into graduate study.

At Auburn University, President James Martin, who came to the eastern Alabama school from the University of Arkansas in 1984, has initiated special minority scholarship programs to attract more black students and started a Minority Weekend, during which 200 black high school students travel to Auburn each fall for a football game, concert and tour of the campus.

“We are doing as hard a job as we can to recruit outstanding minority students,” Martin said. “And I think we’re doing a pretty good job. We’re up 40% in two years--so some of the effort is paying off.”

But white-majority schools may find increasingly tough sledding ahead.

A report last year by the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Education Board warned: “The era of dramatic growth in the enrollment of black students in colleges and universities appears to have ended. And, unless current trends are reversed, the remainder of the 1980s promises to be a period of stability or decline in the number and proportion of black students in Southern colleges and universities.”

Fewer Blacks Enrolling

Tennessee is already seeing the effects. “More blacks are graduating from high school, but fewer of them are enrolling in college,” said Arliss Roaden, director of the state higher education commission. The percentage of black freshmen in the student body has dwindled from 15.4% in 1981 to 14.8% last fall.

Improving race relations on campus may also prove more difficult in the future. A survey of racial attitudes by the University of Alabama’s Muir showed a startling upswing in the proportion of white students at the Tuscaloosa campus who hold negative stereotypes of blacks.

For example, the percent of white undergraduates who believe that blacks are generally shiftless, lazy and lack ambition had plummeted from 49.7% in 1963 to 16.1% in 1972. But it climbed to 19.6% in 1982. Similarly, the percentage of white students who felt that the moral standards of blacks has declined with the desegregation of public institutions had fallen to 9.7% in 1972 but then rose to 14.5% in 1982.

“There’s no real way of knowing why we find this,” Muir said. “It’s my own feeling that the national climate has become more negative. The Reagan Administration has also gone in this direction--abandoning affirmative action, for example . . . .”

The cross-burning incident in late March at the Tuscaloosa school underscored the changing racial attitudes among white students in Muir’s survey. Alpha Kappa Alpha, the black sorority that had planned to move into Sorority Row, has the highest grade-point average of any on campus--white or black--and numbers among its members many upper-middle-class young women with good family backgrounds.

But women in white sororities who expressed concern over the possible disruption to their lives could not see beyond their stereotypic views of blacks, according to one white sorority member who asked that her name not be used for fear of reprisals from her sorority sisters.

“This is the argument that kept getting thrown up in my sorority house: ‘Well, you know, when a black sorority moves in, all those black men will be around here and there’s no telling how many of us will be raped,’ ” she said.

“It’s sickening. They don’t think they’re prejudiced, but they are. They wouldn’t worry a bit if it were a white sorority that was moving in on them.”

University of Alabama administrators attempted to portray the cross-burning incident as a “schoolboy prank” that was not indicative of race relations on the campus. But, to blacks, it brought to a head widespread discontent over their treatment by whites.

“You always get the feeling that history is always trying to repeat itself here,” said Bertram Fairries, a black junior accounting major from Montgomery. “Every time blacks want to advance on this campus, there is always a struggle. It all didn’t end when Vivian Malone and James Hood stepped through the door in 1963.”

Researcher Diana Rector of The Times’ Atlanta bureau contributed to this report.