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The year was 1964. Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. The Beatles were on the radio. And that fall Centre College enrolled its first integrated freshman class: 214 white students and three African-Americans.
The three trailblazers were all Kentuckians. Sharon Gill Gaskins ’68 and Joyce Cross Marks ’68 both came from Louisville, although they’d attended different high schools. Jim Davis ’68 grew up on a farm in Campbellsville.
Now the manager of a research and development organization at Kimberly-Clark, Davis says he chose Centre for fairly typical reasons: academic reputation, generous scholarship, and graduate school record (even as a high school student he dreamed of advanced study in chemistry). The idea that he would be making history, however, did not cross his mind since, until he got to campus, he did not realize he was Centre’s first-ever black male freshman.
Thomas A. Spragens, Centre president emeritus, acknowledged in a 1982 oral history that the College’s racial pioneers must have been “a bit lonely.” But their “motivation,” he recalled, was “just exceptional.”
Spragens, himself, had arrived in the fall of 1957 making no secret of his intent to integrate the College. The next year the board of trustees formally adopted a policy to accept students without regard to race or creed. Real change, however, came more slowly. In 1962, Centre enrolled its first black student, Timothy Kusi ’65, a 29-year-old married man from Ghana who had transferred from Kentucky State at the suggestion of his Presbyterian minister. A second, Danville schoolteacher Helen Fisher Frye, took some summer school classes in 1963.
Recently Frye explained the reason she enrolled. Although she had worked with both Spragens and his predecessor, Walter Groves, to find the right person to break the color barrier, she decided that she ought to experience the Centre environment herself if she was going to encourage her students.
In the larger world, of course, Brown v. Board of Education had prohibited segregated public schools in 1954. The sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964 would make change all the more imperative.
But although most of the state colleges had integrated by the mid-1960s, Centre’s tuition proved to be a formidable barrier. A key element in achieving Spragens’ goal turned out to be a $65,000 gift from the Noyes Foundation of New York City. In the days before many financial aid programs existed, the Noyes Opportunity Scholarships provided full scholarships for first-generation college students.
“Those scholarships contributed to change in this campus,” Spragens said in 1988. “[T]hey . . . led people, white and black, to feel that things were changing in the traditional patterns of life in Kentucky . . . in terms of making [the student body] more broadly representative.”
Davis, Cross, and Gill threw themselves into academics and official College opportunities. Davis served in student congress and was named to ODK, the leadership honorary. Cross, who would eventually become an executive with the United Way of Chicago, joined the Chain Club and Forum. Gill was president of the philosophy club and won an award for best paper at the national meeting of the philosophy honor society.
But the social side was more difficult.
“Back then the major weekend social activities occurred through the fraternities,” recalls Davis. “And African-Americans were excluded as members. While I was occasionally invited to a frat party at one of the fraternity houses, I always felt like an outsider, since I knew there was no chance that I would be invited to be a member.”
Simple things were a challenge for a black student at Centre in 1964, whether it was getting a haircut on Friday afternoon or finding something to do on Saturday night. “There was a black barber on Main Street, and my assumption was that he would probably know how to cut my hair,” Davis says. “But it turned out the barbershop did not accept black patrons.”
In general, he notes, he did not experience overt racism at Centre. “I did not hear a lot of derogatory name calling or see white students who refused to attend class or eat with black students,” he says. “But subtle things were definitely present, such as not being welcomed into study groups and one or two professors not making themselves available when I requested some extra help in a subject.”
For many of the students and a few of the professors, Davis suggests it was more a “comfort factor” than racism.
“When strange interactions occur between myself and a person who is white, I don’t always step back and say, ‘Boy, that person’s racist.’ It may be just that the person doesn’t have a comfort level with me that they have with someone who looks and acts like themselves,” says Davis, who attended segregated schools until his senior year in high school.
“Many of the students that I was entering Centre with had not gone to a school with any black students. It was a totally new experience for them.”
But just as Bob Dylan sang in 1964, the times really were a-changin’. By the time the Class of 1968 graduated, Centre had 10 black students (in a total student body of 573). Four years later, the number would reach 24. (The current minority enrollment, including black, Asian, and Hispanic students, is 6.9 percent.) The fraternities would integrate in 1971, the same year Spragens commissioned a study of the black student experience at the College. A black French teacher joined the faculty in 1972.
The nation’s more strident activism of the late sixties and seventies would make its way to Centre as well, with students picketing the white-only barbershop on Main Street. The matter was eventually decided in federal court after a Centre student took a stand. But such progress was in the future.
Reflecting on the Centre experience that he began 40 years ago this fall, Davis is satisfied.
“I could have had a much better set of experiences from a social standpoint,” he says. “But I got a very good education. I developed some pretty good relationships. And through it all I had some fun.”
—D.F.J.
Centrepiece
Centre College
600 West Walnut St.
Danville, KY 40422
Phone: (859) 238-5717
Fax: (859) 238-5723
E-mail: alumnews@centre.edu
or johnsond@centre.edu