First black students got here quietly

Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part story on the history of black students at… Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part story on the history of black students at Pitt. The second and third parts will appear on the remaining two Mondays in February.

It was, in many ways, a time like our own. The students went to dances, participated in debate and worried about the weight of their degrees. Pitt football defeated Penn State 11-0 on Thanksgiving Day. Joseph C. Trees, an 1883 alum with money to spare, made a donation for the construction of a gymnasium, stadium and track.

But ending the story there leaves it half-told. In the hearts and minds of many students in the majority, the late 1800s and early part of the 20th century were times of deep-seated unrest. Too young to witness the protests of the ’60s, yet too old to experience the era of unchecked inequality, some white men considered themselves to be targets of an unspoken — but hardly unseen — enemy.

“The suffragettes have come!” proclaimed one article in The Pitt Weekly, a predecessor of The Pitt News. “The University is doomed to succumb to the enchantments of the alluring vote-getters!”

In a separate editorial, The Pitt Weekly called for women to remain practical and subservient.

“The college woman of today, the real, earnest, well-meaning one, is not numbered among the freaks of her sex, who gain attention in the public prints by exploiting suffrage,” the unidentified author wrote. “The keen intellect of the college woman passes over the superfluous argument in favor of universal suffrage and sees in its stead the disadvantages of politics among the gentler sex.”

But if the paper’s treatment of the women’s suffrage movement seemed unsavory, its ignorance, or ignoring, of the black students on campus could be considered a far stronger slap in the face.

The first black student is believed to have enrolled at Pitt in 1829, but it wasn’t until William Hunter Dammond earned a civil engineering degree in 1893 that the University could boast of its first black graduate.

In the 70 years following Dammond’s graduation, the achievements of black students at Pitt multiplied rapidly. In 1937, Edward Lee Harris became the first black student to earn a doctorate at Pitt. Jimmy Joe Robinson joined the varsity football team in 1945 as its first black player. Products of their times and the challenges they faced, black students broke ground in an age of suppression and rejection.

But these issues were not openly addressed for a long time. The Pitt Weekly instructed Pitt men to quit “knocking,” or criticizing, the University. “No longer can this senseless hammering at our institutions be permitted,” the editors wrote. “If you have nothing good to say, say nothing.”

And say nothing they did.

On June 14, 1910, the night of a banquet celebrating the year’s graduates, the front page of the paper detailed a speech by the chancellor, previewed the banquet itself and commended the first eight students to graduate from the newly created School of Education.

There was no mention of Jean Hamilton Walls. Walls graduated that year, making her the first black woman to earn a degree from Pitt. And though The Pitt Weekly could make room for the announcement of a Pitt grad’s promotion to “teacher of science in the Wilkinsburg High School,” there was no space for the simplest acknowledgement of Walls’ achievement.

But Walls would not be deterred. In 1938 she became the first black woman to earn a doctorate from Pitt, after publishing her dissertation, “A Study of the Negro Graduates of the University of Pittsburgh for the Decade of 1926 to 1936.”

Walls’ dissertation reads like a voice from the past, a ghost of a time forgotten. The text is from a typewriter and littered with the parlance of her times, but the details of her report paint a portrait of a changing world.

Black students told Walls they were often ostracized, even by former friends.

“Two students, a man and a woman, reported that some high school friends, among white students, barely spoke to them or had ceased speaking entirely since they had come to the University,” Walls wrote. “The young man said that as a manager of the football team in high school, he had some very friendly relationships with members of the team, but that some of these same members who then had slept in his bed scarcely recognized him when they met on the University campus.”

Walls’ dissertation found that black students were less likely to enroll in the School of Business Administration than were their white counterparts because “business enterprises among Negroes had not reached the state of development to demand many workers trained in business administration.”

Likewise, black students enrolled at the School of Education in relatively low numbers. Walls cited the City of Pittsburgh’s refusal to hire black teachers as the primary cause, but also noted that some black students who went on to work in the field of education complained about “unpleasant experiences connected with the required ‘practice teaching.'”

Though their numbers were few and the range of their studies limited, the black students at Pitt in the early 1900s did offer hope to a generation yearning for equality.

In an unsigned editorial the spring of 1910, The Pitt Weekly offered its vision of the world to come.

“Let us turn now from the past to the future,” the writer suggested. “Let us come back in the coming fall with a determination to make our schoolwork more thorough, more earnest and pain-staking. Let us make our school life more social, more helpful.”

Whether intended or not, the editorial offered prophecy and promise for a campus with a new face. In the following years, more black students would enroll at Pitt and others would continue breaking barriers, working toward equality.

No one, however, could predict in full the course that lie ahead for the University and its black students.