National Context

States took a variety of different paths when faced with the prospect of desegregation and, even within individual states, differences sometimes existed between schools. Although segregation was a problem in both northern and southern universities, perhaps the most well-known responses occurred in the South. On one end of the spectrum was the University of Mississippi where rioting broke out in 1962 after the admission of James Meredith, a violent protest that resulted in the deaths of two people. In Arkansas, on the other hand, officials allowed African American students to enroll in graduate programs that were not available at historically black universities as early as 1948, without forcing these students to take the state to court. North Carolina’s response rested somewhere between these two extremes. Desegregation in the UNC system was neither as late nor as bloody as that of Ole Miss, but it would take lengthy court battles to win African American students access to North Carolina’s predominantly white universities.