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Marybeth Gasman. Envisioning Black Colleges: A History of the United Negro College Fund. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. 288 pp. Cloth: $45.00. ISBN: 978-0-8018- 8604-1.
One of the rapidly growing fields of historical research in higher education encompasses the experiences of African Americans, and Marybeth Gasman's new book on the United Negro College Fund is an invaluable contribution both to that field and to the general area of the history of higher education. She combines careful archival research, oral history interviews, and a clear interpretative framework in providing a readable and convincing work.
The United Negro College Fund began as the result of efforts by Frederick Douglass Patterson, then president of Tuskegee Institute, to overcome the multiple financial challenges faced by almost all of the private Black colleges in the 1940s. As Gasman points out, to some degree those institutions shared the financial straits of small colleges in general, but those conditions were sharply accentuated by racist assumptions about Negroes (a term both Gasman and I use to highlight the historical nature of agency of the time, when other terms, deeply insulting, were rampant).
And in a telling irony about race and education in the United States, she offers an extensive discussion of the curious ways in which John D. Rockefeller Jr., one of the most powerful captains of industry in the 1940s, supported the fund. He typically urged fellow capitalists to support the fund primarily on the basis of furthering social control; but as Gasman argues, the colleges and universities were able to use the ever-increasing monies from the fund to slowly and surely develop curricula as well as extracurricular activities that celebrated equality, the humanity of the oppressed Negro, and eventually, activism in the civil rights movement. Presidents at...