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BY ASHIA TROIANO

In print | Published February 5, 2009

With the recent election of the first black president, many Americans are reflecting on the past and the events that have brought the country to this major milestone in history. This Black History Month, as Swarthmore looks forward to panels, movies and other celebrations of black history, The Phoenix is taking a look back at the major milestones defining the African American presence in Swarthmore’s own history. This article is the first of a four part series; while this series is in no way comprehensive, we do hope to bring attention to some of the major turning points in the history of the college. Accompanying this article is a 1942 Phoenix editorial endorsing an end to the barring of African American students.

The first reported African American student who was admitted to and attended Swarthmore College was Dorothea Kopchynski Black ’47. According to the records, she enrolled in the college in the summer of 1943. Due to the United State’s decision to enter World War II, Swarthmore operated on an accelerated schedule by which students could attend school year-round, thus giving male students a chance to finish school before they were drafted into the army. When the war ended, the schedule returned to normal. 

There are theories that there were black students at Swarthmore before Black, or at least ones who enrolled simultaneously, according to Swarthmore’s website. John Nason, who was president of Swarthmore during the time, ran a campaign to place Japanese Americans in colleges, including Swarthmore, instead of internment camps, black men were brought to Swarthmore as part of the US Navy’s V-5 and V-12 programs. Even then, “there is some suggestion that there was at least one black student early in the 20th century, but we were never able to pin that one down,” Chris Densmore, curator of the Friends Historical Library, said. “The records may not specify race.” 

By the early 1900s at least, a black male, who was by all standards a competitive and qualified student, applied to Swarthmore and was accepted. Because applications at the time did not include a question about race, however, admissions was unaware of his African American identity and withdrew his acceptance when it found out. He then went on to attend Dartmouth College, most likely due to the influence of Swarthmore, though there are no records proving that the college had anything to do with his acceptance there.  

“It’s telling that it is a male,” Densmore said of the incident. “There is subtext there that if we get bright, good looking black men on campus, they’re going to start dating white women. Maybe we don’t have a problem with that, but the parents are going to yank their kids out of school. It’s hard for the generation now to imagine how scared people were of those kinds of things.”

And still by 1932, when another black student applied, then-Dean Everett Hunt said, “After a long discussion, it was decided by a large majority that Negro students could not yet be admitted to a coeducational college like Swarthmore. Their admission would raise too many problems and create too many difficulties. There was general satisfaction at the happy solution presented by Dean Speight, just arrived from Dartmouth, when he got the boy accepted there with a large scholarship. A men’s college seemed just the place for him,” according to Swarthmore’s website. 

In the 1920s, Elizabeth Powell Bond, the Dean of Women from 1890 to 1906 and also for whom the Dean Bond Rose Garden is named, and Hannah Clothier Hull advocated the Race Relations Committee for integration at the Philadelphia Yearly meeting. Then-president Frank Aydelotte’s response was: “‘I’ve got too many things on my plate now. I don’t want to get involved in another issue’ … He never did,” according to Densmore. 

It was not until Nason’s presidency — and the tremendous pressure placed on the administration by students — that Swarthmore saw any student of color on campus. “From the time of Dorothea forward, there were other undergraduates, students primarily, pushing the college to integrate — that effort being on the students, more than the college, continued for a long time. Certainly, it was that way when I was a student,” Vice President of Community and College Relations Maurice Eldridge ’61 said.

Many also cite the borough of Swarthmore’s attention to integration as a motivator for the college to integrate. In the early 1880s the state of Pennsylvania desegregated its public schools. By 1891, the borough had established its first public school. While the high school classes were integrated, the elementary school classes functioned under what was known as the Union Room. Black and white elementary school children went to school in the same building, but attended classes in different rooms, thereby maintaining segregation. When the Friends Meeting approached the school about ending this policy, their response was: “We can do that, but then we have to lose the black teacher,” Densmore said. The school was not willing to risk complaints from white parents about their children having a black teacher. In 1939, when elementary classrooms were integrated, the African American teacher was fired. 

Even Swarthmore’s Quaker roots were not enough to convince the administration to integrate the college. “The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting … had nothing to do with the college … but they were bringing people like A. Phillip Randolph, Charles Johnson, and W.E.B. Du Bois to come to Swarthmore Friends Meeting to talk about race relations and the future of integration … And the college had no black students,” Densmore said. 

“The really odd thing about Swarthmore is that all the founders were old abolitionists and a lot of them were involved in African American education … but this didn’t transfer over to Swarthmore,” Densmore said. By sending money to black educational institutions and building schools for freed slaves in the South after the Civil War, the founders of Swarthmore contributed to black uplift, but stopped there. 

Eldridge says this was true of his time at Swarthmore as well. “It’s not as if the folks here didn’t care about the issue at some level, but that they thought there were other ways they could deal with it. I remember having a professor or two who also taught at Lincoln University, and they thought that was their contribution to educating blacks,” he said. “Higher education was to do something at a historically black college while waiting for it to happen here. No one was pushing for it to happen; they were waiting for it to happen, which of course means that by the time it was done consciously, deliberately, and on a larger scale, this college and a lot of other colleges around the country were not prepared to really actually handle the cultural change they were making. Life for those first vanguards of black students was not easy.”

The next recorded black student to enroll at Swarthmore after Black was Gloria Clement ’47, who matriculated in the fall of 1943. 

While these are the facts as we know them now, our knowledge of history is always changing, and what we think we know today may change tomorrow. The limited details about the first black student at Swarthmore call for greater attention to be paid. “I don’t think there’s been a successful effort to write this history,” Eldridge said.

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