Race, Meritocracy, and the American Academy during the Immediate Post—World War II Era

This address concerns the initial integration of African American scholars into the American academy. It traces an interesting and unusual national campaign that first opened the doors of northern white universities to African American scholars. The primary focus is on what this campaign reveals about the interrelationship of race and meritocracy in mainstream American higher education during the immediate post-World War II period. It is also a story about a select pool of highly qualified African American scholars and their opportunities for employment at northern white universities. Finally, this is also a history of a particular process of institutional racism. One underlying purpose is to explore the usefulness of the social science concept of institutional racism for framing and explaining the formation and development of specific types of racial exclusion or discrimination in educational systems that operate with explicitly race-neutral or “color-blind” laws, procedures, and policies.