First Graduate Students

With the arrival of Robert Clemons and Hardy Liston, Jr. in 1953, NC State was officially an integrated campus. Both men were enrolled in the School of Engineering and while Liston (a mechanical engineer) left in less than a year, Clemons (an electrical engineer) became the school’s first African-American graduate in 1957. Although neither man had to personally go to court in order to enroll at NC State, they benefitted from the efforts of students who had come before them. In 1938, the Supreme Court began the process of graduate school desegregation by declaring in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, Registrar of the University of Missouri that if a program was available to white students in state it had to be made available to African American students as well. Ten years later, in Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma the Supreme Court reaffirmed this decision, arguing that denying African American students admission to Oklahoma’s only public law school denied them equal protection under the law. While white schools could get around integration by establishing separate programs at historically black universities, these decisions did open the door for at least some African Americans. The door was opened wider in 1950, when in Sweatt v Painter the Supreme Court ordered the admission of Herman Sweatt to the University of Texas Law School because the African American Law School established at Texas State University could not compete with the white program.

Although all of the above cases contributed to the desegregation of the UNC Consolidated System, it took a case specifically targeting North Carolina’s universities, Epps v Carmichael, to bring about the integration of its programs. In 1949, Harold Epps and Robert Davis Glass took the University of North Carolina to court after being denied admission to UNC’s law school, but lost when the judge ruled the African American law school at North Carolina College provided sufficient training. This decision was reversed in 1951 (after the Sweatt decision) and, although officials agreed to allow African Americans into UNC’s medical school at that time, they decided to appeal rather than desegregate the law school.

In 1950, John Clark, a member of the Executive Committee of the UNC System’s Board of Trustees, sent a letter to the other members of the Board, urging them to support the efforts of the North Carolina Attorney General to keep their schools segregated and asking for recommendations for a lawyer to assist in the case. He argued that resistance to desegregation was “the single most important matter to come before [the] board since consolidation” and, as such, the board “should give the Attorney General every aid possible and employ the ablest lawyer in America to assist him.” This letter undercuts claims by North Carolina progressives that segregation was necessary only because of the prejudice of poor whites. Clark’s desire to keep the “Negro Boys” from enrolling at UNC’s law school suggests that prejudice was not limited to a particular class. Despite their best efforts, when the Supreme Court upheld the ruling, UNC had no choice but to accept the decision.

Visit other Exhibits in Crossing the Color Line.