They acted partly out of a moral imperative, but also out of fear that the fabric of society was being torn apart by racial conflict. They took chances on promising black students from poor neighborhoods they had long ignored, in addition to black students groomed by boarding schools.
Those who were able, through luck or experience or hard work, to adapt to the culture of institutions that had long been pillars of the white establishment succeeded by most conventional measures. Others could not break through because of personal trauma, family troubles, financial issues, culture shock — the kind of problems felt by many white students as well, but compounded by being in such a tiny minority. And universities at the time, they said, did not have the will or the knowledge to help.
“I think it’s a fair question to ask: Did we really understand or know what we were doing, or could we have predicted what the issues would be?” said Robert L. Kirkpatrick Jr., who at the time was dean of admissions at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, which was part of these early efforts. “The answer is no. I think we were instinctively trying to do the right thing.”
Columbia — an Ivy League campus right next to Harlem — was a particularly revelatory setting. Perhaps nowhere else were the divisions more striking between the privilege inside university gates and the troubles and demands of black people outside them.
The New York Times tracked down many of the nearly 50 black students in Columbia’s Class of 1973, who arrived on campus as freshmen in 1969, when the number of black students admitted to Columbia more than doubled from the year before.
About half of those who enrolled received their degrees four years later. Many went on to comfortable lives and professional success. Eric H. Holder Jr. became the first black attorney general of the United States. But others strayed from prescribed paths.
The debate over race in college admissions only intensified. By the late 1970s, colleges began emphasizing the value of diversity on campus over the case for racial reparations.
Today, Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are facing legal challenges to race-conscious admissions that could reach the Supreme Court. The Trump administration is investigating allegations of discrimination against Asian-American applicants at Harvard and Yale.
University officials who lived through the history fear that the gains of the last 50 years could be rolled back. One of them is Lee Bollinger, the current president of Columbia, who first arrived on campus as a law student in 1968.
“In that time, there was a sense, pure and simple, that universities had to do their part to help integrate higher education,” Bollinger said. “We are still on that mission, but the sense of purpose and urgency and connection to the past have dissipated.”
The Musician
Les Goodson, now 67, grew up in a housing project in Brooklyn, and in those days he was known as Ervin. His mother was a housekeeper for a wealthy family on Park Avenue; his father was a tailor and owned a dry-cleaning shop for a time. He took an early liking to music, learning to play the viola from Cora Roth, his fifth-grade teacher, who still remembers him as “a pure soul.”
In college, Goodson realized that he could reinvent himself, and began going by Les, his middle name, instead of Ervin. He wanted to be a photographer.
Not much in the course catalog spoke to him. “If you go back and look at that blue book, all the courses — I would say 95 percent — were Eurocentric,” he said.
The only black professor he can remember was Charles Hamilton, a political scientist who collaborated with Stokely Carmichael, the civil rights leader, to write about the Black Power movement, which Goodson said influenced him. Columbia’s first black department chair, Elliott Skinner, in anthropology, would not be named until 1972 — the year Goodson dropped out.
“Nothing stopped me from finishing,” Goodson said. “I just did something else.”
He returned to college and received a bachelor’s degree in history from Lehman College in 2003, then completed most of a master’s degree. A few years ago, Goodson was rejected from a Columbia doctoral program.
Goodson has not strayed far from the Columbia orbit. Every Wednesday night, his four-piece band, the Les Goodson Intergalactic Soul Jazz Band, performs at Paris Blues, an old-fashioned dive bar just a 15-minute walk from campus.
What he whimsically calls his “penthouse,” a fifth-floor walk-up in central Harlem, is a few blocks farther.
“Columbia,” he said, “it changed my whole life.”
‘I Didn’t Notice Being Black’
While civil rights leaders pressed colleges to admit more black students, the big push came after the assassination of King on April 4, 1968, followed by uprisings in more than 100 cities and student strikes.
The radical politics of 1968 came too late to affect the admissions decisions that fall. But in 1969, the number of black students recruited and admitted to Ivy League universities and their sister schools rose sharply, in many cases by more than 100 percent.
From 1968 to 1969, the number of students recorded as black who applied to Columbia rose to 220 from 121, the number who were admitted rose to 130 from 58, and the number who registered rose to 48 from 31 out of a total class of about 700. (All of them were men; Columbia College did not begin admitting women until the 1980s.)
Some black students in that class resisted being cast as emissaries of racial understanding.
Gregory Peterson did not see himself in any racial framework. “I shied away from anything that was like a ‘black’ group,” he said, “because I didn’t grow up that way.”
He and his twin brother, Maurice, were in advanced classes in predominantly white schools, although they were part of the black middle class in Queens. Their father owned a barbershop; their mother was a teacher.
At Columbia, Peterson was an English major, and mixed with white students. He discovered his gay identity, though he remained closeted. “I was so busy having problems being gay that I didn’t notice being black,” he said.
After graduating in 1973, Peterson spent a few years in the arts before “the rational side took over,” and he went to Columbia Law School. He went on to become a corporate lawyer. His brother, who also graduated from Columbia, owns a spa.
Peterson and his husband now live on a high floor of a prewar building at a prime Manhattan location.
The Fugitive
In July 1972, Eldridge McKinney, a black sophomore at Columbia, shot the dean of students several times with a .38-caliber handgun. McKinney had been suspended for bad grades, and was angry that he was not reinstated, police said. The dean, Henry S. Coleman, was badly wounded but returned to work.
After the shooting, McKinney’s mother and Roy Innis, the civil rights leader, publicly pleaded with him to turn himself in. Charged with attempted murder, he disappeared. His friends believe that he has been living under an assumed name and identity for nearly 47 years.
McKinney, nicknamed E, became something of a legend. Some black students quietly cheered him on, understanding his rage. “E was sort of like a semi-hero at the time, because apparently he got away with it,” Goodson said.
Darryl T. Downing, a black classmate of McKinney’s, stepped forward to defend him in 1972. He told The Times back then that McKinney wanted to be a lawyer, but found Columbia to be a hard adjustment.
“Columbia is not the situation we’re used to,” Downing, who went to a neighborhood public school in New York City, said then. “But we felt we were lucky to be here, so we got together to adjust.”
Black and Hispanic alumni from those days recall forming tight bonds because they were so few. They studied together. They went to their own parties.
“We had massive — massive — study groups, where everybody would pile into a black lounge,” Downing said. Many black students felt pulled in two directions — assimilation or resistance.
“I think that’s still an open question in some people’s minds: Are you expected to stay with your ghetto identity and the world has to adapt to you?” said Julius Gonzalez, the son of Cuban factory workers in West Harlem, and a member of the Class of 1973. “Or do you make a few adjustments and adapt more to the outside world?”
‘You Had to Prove Them Wrong’
Despite how hard it could be to adapt, there were many success stories among the black students in the Class of 1973.
Gonzalez, whose factory-worker parents had grade-school educations, got an MBA from Harvard and became a financial officer in energy ventures abroad. He is now retired and living in Florida.
Gary Friday, son of a beer distributor in Philadelphia, became a neurologist. Eric Coleman, whose widowed mother straightened and curled hair in her kitchen and took in laundry, is a state judge in Connecticut.
But many names disappeared from the class directory between freshman and senior years. “Sometimes I look through a list of people who actually graduated,” Friday said. “A lot of people are missing.”
About half the students recorded as black in the class — 25 of the 48 — received diplomas in 1973. Seven more got their degrees later, and one graduated early.
The common perception that professors made allowances for minority students was false, Gonzalez said. If anything, being black invited tougher scrutiny. “Some of these guys smirked and looked at you and said, ‘What are you doing here?,’” he said. “You had to prove them wrong.”
It was the dawn of a series of legal battles over allegations of “reverse racism” against white students, beginning with Marco DeFunis, a white student rejected by the University of Washington Law School in 1971. The Supreme Court found the DeFunis case moot in 1974 because the plaintiff was graduating.
Since then, the Supreme Court has consistently upheld the right of colleges to use race as one factor in admissions. But what happened 50 years ago changed admissions forever.
In some ways, affirmative action has become more sophisticated over time, as diversity has become an established principle, and schools — barred by law from using racial quotas — have sought an ideal mix of students that is more reflective of society.
Colleges often turn to private schools to find even poor black and Hispanic students, because “they have the cultural and social capital to succeed on campus,” said Anthony Abraham Jack, a professor of education at Harvard and author of “The Privileged Poor.”
Gonzalez said he saw the difference among the younger generation of black and Hispanic students: “They act like, ‘Yeah, I belong here.’”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.