Mode of Program Participation
Academic Scholarship
Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
Contested Communities in Appalachia: Race, Region, Power, and the Making of the Whitest HBCU
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Bluefield State College (BSC) is a member institution in the category of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) in southern West Virginia. Opened in 1897 as an all-Negro school under provisions of the 1890 Morrill Act, today the institution serves a nearly 90 percent white student population. The school began its movement toward desegregation immediately following Brown v. Board of Education in 1954—a process so successful that the school would have a white majority student population only twelve years after Brown, raising obvious questions of how and why. The greatest shifts in student and faculty racial demographics occurred from 1966—when the school’s first white president was installed and white students as well as white faculty became a simple majority--forward. Despite several days of Human Rights Commission hearings on campus in 1967, which resulted in a harsh judgment of the City of Bluefield and BSC’s administration, schisms among administrators, faculty and students escalated until a 1968 bombing in BSC’s new Physical Education building. The bombing remains an uncomfortable reminder of divisive issues on campus and in the City of Bluefield; however, the memory of that incident is comfortably unacknowledged by current administrators and faculty at BSC. Not only has BSCs civil rights era history been changed in modern memory—it has, for the most part, been erased entirely. This presentation examines what we can learn about (1) race and higher education, particularly with regard to systemic distributions of power, and (2) contestations of race and power in Appalachia.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Dana Stoker Cochran teaches Women's and Gender Studies and Peace Studies at Radford University.
Contested Communities in Appalachia: Race, Region, Power, and the Making of the Whitest HBCU
Bluefield State College (BSC) is a member institution in the category of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) in southern West Virginia. Opened in 1897 as an all-Negro school under provisions of the 1890 Morrill Act, today the institution serves a nearly 90 percent white student population. The school began its movement toward desegregation immediately following Brown v. Board of Education in 1954—a process so successful that the school would have a white majority student population only twelve years after Brown, raising obvious questions of how and why. The greatest shifts in student and faculty racial demographics occurred from 1966—when the school’s first white president was installed and white students as well as white faculty became a simple majority--forward. Despite several days of Human Rights Commission hearings on campus in 1967, which resulted in a harsh judgment of the City of Bluefield and BSC’s administration, schisms among administrators, faculty and students escalated until a 1968 bombing in BSC’s new Physical Education building. The bombing remains an uncomfortable reminder of divisive issues on campus and in the City of Bluefield; however, the memory of that incident is comfortably unacknowledged by current administrators and faculty at BSC. Not only has BSCs civil rights era history been changed in modern memory—it has, for the most part, been erased entirely. This presentation examines what we can learn about (1) race and higher education, particularly with regard to systemic distributions of power, and (2) contestations of race and power in Appalachia.
