A Force for Change: The Class of 1950

chapter 8

those free people

The African-American experience

Sally Papenguth Bell

A member of the class of 1950, she moved to West Lafayette in 1939 with her family. Her father was the Purdue University swimming coach.

“West Lafayette was pretty small when I got there in 1939,” she says. “It was a friendly place, a place where you could walk around at night. But it was also a community that was closed to blacks. Blacks who came to town with visiting athletic teams or choirs couldn’t even stay in the Purdue Memorial Union. They were housed in Lafayette.

“In fact, even years later, the prejudice existed. One of my friends in college was a black woman. One day a sorority sister came to me and said that I shouldn’t walk with my black friend because it just wasn’t done.

“Our family would leave in the summer and go to Canada where my father ran a girls’ camp. One year my mother decided we ought to rent the house while we were gone. This was during the war, and some service people rented it.

“The family who rented our house came from a southern background, and they had a small baby who was cared for by a black nanny. When people saw the black nanny pushing that baby around, there was quite a to-do. It was against an unspoken law. They were shocked that she was living in West Lafayette.”

Winifred Parker White

Her father was a graduate of Amherst College in Massachusetts. He did graduate work at Harvard and Indiana University. He taught math at a high school in Indianapolis. Her mother was a graduate of Butler University in Indianapolis. She was a social worker and a teacher. There was no question what Winifred Parker White would do when she graduated from high school.

“In our family, it was assumed all of the children would go to college,” White says. “That was a fact of life.”

White and her sister, Frieda, both were accepted to Purdue University for the term starting in the fall of 1946. The university brochure said all freshman women would live in the women’s residence halls, so they applied there.

They were refused. They are African-Americans.

They had come from a segregated school system in Indianapolis. White had never gone to school with white children. She never even had much contact with white people. Then, she came to Purdue.

“Frieda had graduated from high school in January of 1946, and she went to West Virginia State,” White says. “But she didn’t like it and left. Our father decided we would both attend Purdue. My father felt the program at Purdue was one that was very good. It taught the technical areas and critical thinking methods, and he liked that.

“In 1946, there were only five black women on the campus and twenty-three black men. Out of all the thousands of students at all different grade levels, that was it. Many of the black males at Purdue were returning veterans.

“We were not allowed to live in the dorms. The university did not allow minorities to live in the dorms—not blacks anyway. Some black males lived in the men’s residence halls during the war, and a few lived in International House student housing, but that was it.

“During our first semester, Frieda and I lived with a family in Lafayette. It was an African-American family. The first page of the Purdue catalog stated that all women must live in the residence halls, but we weren’t accepted. They said that didn’t apply to us. There had never been any black students in the women’s residence halls.

“So my father and some of his influential friends went and talked to the governor. By the second semester, we were allowed to live in the Bunker Hill (barracks) residence hall. My sister and I shared a room.

“Before we moved, the dean of women came to the house where we were living in Lafayette. She tried to discourage us from moving into the dorm. She said we wouldn’t be happy there. Although she was very nice in the way she carried herself, her mission was to discourage us from wanting to move into the women’s residence hall. But we wanted to be with the other freshmen on campus.

“I also remember very well that a questionnaire was circulated to women in the residence hall to see what they thought. A small percentage did not approve of our moving in. I don’t remember what the numbers were. Another small percentage said it would be all right. The majority said they didn’t care one way or the other.

“How did I feel about that? We were hurt. I think it had a lot to do with the approach I ended up taking towards education. However, I did survive, and I do not regret the education I got at Purdue. I majored in microbiology and chemistry.

“After we were accepted into the residence hall, several other black women enrolled, and they were able to live in Wood Hall. But my sister and I spent all three and one half years in Bunker Hill.

“At that time, the city of Lafayette was very segregated. We could not eat anyplace off campus. If we went to the movies, we had to sit upstairs in the balcony. I can remember my sister standing up one day, looking down at all the whites below, and saying, ‘Look at all those free people.’

“There was a group of people at Purdue, faculty and students, who helped us get through. We formed an organization called the Social Action Group. We worked on changing some things.

“We did make some very good friends, and we did get the good education that my parents wanted us to have. I hope we helped to clear a path that many others followed.

“Our social life was rather difficult. We socialized with the other black students—usually over in town. Sometimes we attended university dances, but we went to all of the football and basketball games at Purdue. However, there were no black athletes. It seems to me in my senior year they finally let a black player wear a uniform to scrimmage with the football team.

“For the most part, the faculty was very good. Because the emphasis was so scientific, we certainly were exposed to first-class studies. But some professors didn’t have high expectations for us, and we felt that from them. I had some difficulties. I went on academic probation my third semester because all that was going on did have an effect on me. But I overcame it. I didn’t graduate with honors, but I had a decent grade-point average.

“I met some very fine people at Purdue. As I look back on it, I’m glad I went to Purdue. It prepared me for the real world. By the time I graduated, I wasn’t reluctant to face whites, and I learned to know and respect them as individuals. I had come from a segregated school system. I had never attended a ‘mixed’ school in my life. In fact, before Purdue University, my association with whites was minimal.

“I think one of the reasons our father sent us to Purdue was for this experience, although it was a cultural shock for me. Our parents had fought their battles, and they wanted us to fight ours. I’m glad more minority students are attending Purdue today, because the technology of the world has just skyrocketed, and African-Americans should be a part of it.

“There was a lot of pressure on us while we were at Purdue. We represented black people. We felt we had to make a name for ourselves.

“And there were other pressures. One of the things we faced was curiosity about us. There were so many people who had never lived with minorities before. It was a new experience for them, too.

“You know, we used to wear those yellow cord skirts our senior year. Girls would run up and down the residence hall and play tricks on each other. They’d write things on those cords. I remember a group coming to our dorm to do something, and we heard someone say, ‘Don’t bother them, whatever you do. Don’t disturb those people.’ My sister and I said to each other, ‘Why can’t they come in here? We have yellow cords, too.’ Our door was open, and we expected them to do something with our skirts. But they didn’t. We weren’t going to bite them!

“In some classes, the professors made a point of including material about the contributions of black people. Sometimes it was overdone, but at least they were making an effort. At other times in classes, I felt the pressure because I was different. It was very confusing to me at that age.

“I met my husband at Purdue. He was a chemistry major from Gary, Indiana, and a veteran. He was staying in Lafayette. He graduated in 1948, and we were married. He went to dental school in Washington, D.C., and I stayed at Purdue to finish my undergraduate work.

“Today I am director of special services at Milwaukee Area Technical College, one of the largest in the country.

“I’m glad things have changed, that they’re not the way they used to be. I still believe Purdue is one of the outstanding universities in the country, and I’m glad I went there. I learned to treasure diversity.

“I’ve never been afraid of people since.”

Jimmy Joe Robinson … flashy Negro right half is perhaps the top runner of the (Pittsburgh) Panther squad. Though out shadowed in the total yardage department by his diminutive left side mate, the dusky speed merchant has no peer in the Pitt ranks as a broken field runner and power plunger. [Italics added]

PURDUE EXPONENT, PAGE 1 PHOTO CAPTION, NOVEMBER 13, 1948

Frieda Parker Jefferson

She is the sister of Winifred Parker White and is a woman who loves to converse. Frieda Jefferson taught high school for forty years, almost all of it in the Milwaukee area.

“There was never any decision for me to make about whether I was going to college,” she says. “I was going. I graduated from high school in January of 1946. From January of 1946 to June of that year, I went to West Virginia State College near Charleston.

“I did not like it. It was in the middle of nowhere. When I got home that summer, my sister was ready to go to college, so my father made the decision to send us both to Purdue because, he said, we were interested in what he called technical courses. My sister wanted to be a bacteriologist. I was interested in dietetics at that time. But I went into home ec, which today we call consumer education.

“My sister and I applied to live in the dorm at Purdue and were not accepted. My father wrote a letter to the governor. I still have a copy of that letter. He made it well known that Purdue was a land-grant school supported by state taxes and his taxes supported the school just like everyone else’s, so why couldn’t his children live on campus.

“The fact that blacks were not allowed in the dorms was a policy that had been set up in the housing office at Purdue. It was not a law. It was a policy. Someone had made that decision, and it had been passed on. My father also sent a copy of that letter to Fred Hovde, who was president of Purdue. President Hovde said he was surprised at that policy. I don’t think he was, but he said he was.

“We moved into the barracks the next semester.

“I had come out of a segregated school system in Indianapolis. Once again, that segregated system was a policy, not a law. All the Negroes, as we were called then, went to a designated school.

“During the Second World War, there were changes in the Army. But it seems that as soon as the war was over our society put those changes aside and went back to ‘as usual.’ Lafayette was a good example. Black men had fought and died in that war, and people acted like they’d never heard of them.

“So the fact that we were not allowed in the dorm was not unexpected. It did, however, make us angry, and it did take away some of our self-esteem. You never knew what was going to happen next.

“I had a history class. I wasn’t a freshman, but I don’t remember what year it was. This history class was on Saturday morning. Everyone had to jump out of bed to get there, and everyone always had someplace else they’d rather be.

“In this class, we were discussing the Civil War. The woman in charge asked a question, and I answered it. The book had used the term rednecks. I also used the term when I answered the question, and it offended a veteran who sat in the back of the room. So he started talking and using the word niggers.

“The thing that made me so angry was that the woman in charge of the class never said a thing. She did not open her mouth. Of course, if this happened to me today, I would jump up and that class would be over.

“This man was not only in my history class. He was also in an education class I had. He had lost an arm in the war. I spent the whole weekend fuming. I finally decided I was going to have to say something to this man when I saw him again. I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t suppress my feelings.

“He had lost a limb fighting for his country, but the next time I saw him I got close to him when we came out of the door of the classroom, and I said to him, ‘You know, I’m very sorry that when you lost your arm that you didn’t get blown up completely.’

“The man looked at me and didn’t know what to say. His mouth opened in surprise. I shut him up for the semester. He never opened his mouth in class again. He never said another word to me, and I never talked to him.

“I think he was so used to using words like nigger that it never dawned on him that those words made people upset. He didn’t think it was anything to get upset about. He was totally surprised by what I said. I could see the look of surprise on his face. He could have responded to me without anyone hearing a word because we were standing that close together. He learned something that day.

“And I learned a lesson, too. I learned the term redneck offended some people, and even though it was used in the book, I shouldn’t have used it. If I didn’t like being called names, I shouldn’t have used names myself.

“Purdue taught me how to survive. It taught me how to think through problems. It opened my eyes to living with different kinds of people. It was a good experience for me.

“In the segregated school system I had come from, even though it was in a big city, you never had any contact with another race. I never had to interact with people I didn’t know well. At Purdue, my sister and I had to do that, and some of the people we met were very nice. Some of them, once we sat down and talked with them, were very nice. It was a learning process.

“In Lafayette, blacks could not go to a restaurant. They could go to Walgreen’s, but they could not go to most places. My sister and I joined a small branch of the NAACP at Purdue. There were more white people in it than blacks because there were only about twenty-six black people in the whole university.

“A group from the NAACP used to go to Lafayette restaurants, and a black person would go in, sit down, and put down a coin for a cup of coffee. The man behind the counter would come up and say, ‘You can’t eat here.’ The person from the group would ask, ‘Is that your decision or the decision of the management.’ Usually he’d say it was the decision of management, and the NAACP representative would pick up the coin and leave.

“Once a young man behind the counter at a restaurant really surprised me and said, ‘Here, have your cup of coffee,’ and he took the coin. I was very upset because that was my last money, and I didn’t really want the coffee.

“We went back to Purdue for a homecoming a couple years after we graduated, and by then, you could go anyplace. We didn’t stay overnight, but I understand we could have. After the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation in 1954, things changed. When we attended Purdue, there were just a few places close to the dorm where we could eat. But by 1955 or 1956, things had changed.

“While we were students at Purdue, when we went to the movies, we had to sit in the balcony. Even in Indianapolis, by that time, you could go to the show and sit in any seat you wanted. But not in Lafayette. I think as things changed at Purdue, the town changed, too.

“My sister and I really did not socialize with people in the dorm. They were nice, but once again, being the products of a segregated school system, I don’t think we felt that comfortable. If everyone was going to an Easter Sunday service, we’d go. But to a party in the dorm—no. Sometimes we were asked and sometimes we went, but usually—no. We went to Lafayette to parties and dances with the black people. Really, we didn’t have a lot of time for socializing. We studied hard.

“My most interesting experience was my last year when, as a home economics student, I had to live in and help care for a home. I had to leave my sister and our room and go live in this home with other students for six weeks. I dreaded it. But it was very nice. For the first time, I was the only black living with these white students. It was an interesting experience. Very good.

“When it came time for student teaching, I was assigned to Jefferson High School in Lafayette [she laughs]. The black children in Lafayette went to a segregated school through eighth grade. Then they went to Jefferson High School, but there weren’t many of them.

“My whole class at Jefferson was white, and I was a black teacher. I taught there for six weeks. As the next step in teacher training, I was allowed to practice teach out of town. I went to Gary in a black setup. They were both good experiences.

“Most of my teachers at Purdue were women, and they didn’t pay attention to race. I didn’t have any problems. But some of the black fellows in engineering had some bad experiences with teachers. When I graduated I got very good recommendations from my teachers.

“My sister and I felt we had to do well. That came from home. My father used to give us lectures. He’d say if we did a project we would have to do it twice as well as anyone else just to be recognized. He’d say if we wanted a B we’d have to do A work. But I can honestly say I never got a grade I didn’t deserve.

“You always felt like you had to do well and be good. When we went into the dorm, we had to be quiet even though everyone else was making noise and jumping up and down. Everyone would expect the Negro girls to be noisy and be having sex with everyone on campus, so we had to be especially good.

“My father always told us, ‘When you’re in college and you go someplace with black friends, don’t sit all together, spread out.’ So I’d go to concerts, and I’d sit way away from my friends. I finally decided that wasn’t any fun, and I quit doing it. I made that decision on my own.

“Dating—now that wasn’t a problem. There were twenty-one black males on campus and five black females. We didn’t have any problem getting dates. The problem was, where could we go on those dates. But really, I didn’t date much. I didn’t meet my husband until five years after I left Purdue.

“After I graduated, I moved to Tucson and taught there. I did not like the situation there. I was right back in a segregated school system. I thought I had left that kind of system behind. I came back to the Midwest and went to Milwaukee. It was integrated, but there were so few blacks it didn’t make any difference.

“I never felt like a trailblazer when I was at Purdue. But people said I was. In the 1970s, I sent two sons to Purdue to study engineering. I went back and people were saying, ‘You were here in the late 1940s and 1950? How could you stand it?’

“I got to thinking. They were right. There had been others before me. There was one black man who finished in chemical engineering, and he stayed at the university and washed glassware. There had been two black girls who lived with a minister and his wife in West Lafayette. That minister received much criticism from people in his church and some left the congregation.

“It was a period of change. And I guess we were trailblazers.”

L. Orlando Starks

When he came to Purdue University in the fall of 1946, L. Orlando Starks was just like everyone else. He couldn’t find a place to stay.

A three-year World War II veteran, he was twenty-three years old when he started at Purdue.

“It was especially hard for me to find a place to stay, you know,” he says. “I am an African-American, and I had some difficulty finding a place. I lived for awhile with an African-American family in Lafayette. I later moved into a co-operative house in West Lafayette.

“You don’t know what is was like back then unless you went through it. When I was fighting in Italy and we liberated a town and marched through it, the Italian people lined the streets and brought roses and bottles of wine to us. When I came back to the States, just off the boat, I marched in a victory parade in downtown Richmond, Virginia, and people there wouldn’t even sell me a cup of coffee after the parade was over.

“What do I tell my children about all this? I never tell them anything about it. I don’t want to belabor it. It’s a different world now. We can’t dwell on misgivings about the past. We have to look forward to better things. We have to be optimistic about the present and future. That’s my philosophy.

“And my experience at Purdue was very good.”

Starks lives in Los Gatos, California, where he has retired from a career in technical publications. He was the first person in his family to graduate from college. Born in Indianapolis in 1923, there were five children in the family during the depression years.

“My dad worked several odd jobs and retired from the Allison Division of General Motors in Indianapolis,” Starks says. “It wasn’t so bad. I graduated high school in 1941 and attended the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis. I received a scholarship and I aspired to be an artist. I got drafted into the Army in March of 1943.

“I received basic training in the Twenty-eighth Regiment of the Second Cavalry—last of the horse soldiers. They deactivated the cavalry, assigned us to a quartermaster truck corps, and sent us over to the European Theater of Operations. I went to French Morocco, and then we went to Italy—Anzio, Sezze, and the Battle of Casino, which opened the gateway to Rome.

“We didn’t have to fight for Rome because the Nazis pulled out. We went into Rome on June 4, 1944. It was very exciting. Two days later the Allies invaded Normandy. We thought going into Rome was a great triumph. But everybody was focused on Normandy.

“We saw quite a few aircraft flying over Gaeta on their way to Normandy to help with the invasion. I’ve never seen that many aircraft in my life—wave after wave after wave of them as far as I could see. They flew over for an hour.

“The Nazis made a counterattack near the town of Lucca on December 15, 1944. Christmas in Italy was very bleak at that time.

“I saw a lot of action. Up until the last few years, I never really talked about the war. We were in Genoa in northern Italy when the war in Europe ended.

“I went home on furlough. The plan was to bring us home, then send us to Camp Hood in Texas for amphibious training for the invasion of Japan, which would have occurred in November of 1945. But the war ended. They dropped the atomic bombs while I was home on furlough. I think President Truman did what he thought was necessary. It saved a lot of American lives—possibly my own life.

“I still had to go to Camp Hood. The service had established a point system, and you had to receive a certain number of points to get out. I got out in November of 1945. I came back home and decided I’d go to college.

“My high school math teacher convinced me to go to Purdue. I decided to attend adult school and take some refresher math and science courses first. The GI Bill made the difference for me.

“I enjoyed my professors, and I never did run into any major problems at Purdue. I heard other African-American students talk about problems, but I never experienced any significant problems myself. I was accepted by Iota Lambda Sigma, the trade and industrial scholastic honorary fraternity. I held an elective office in that organization. I was secretary. I was also a member of Omega Psi Phi social fraternity. And I was in the Purdue chapter of NAACP. A group of us students participated in the Social Action Committee over at the Wesleyan Foundation.

“I was quite busy. I was taking twenty-one hours a semester for the most part, and I worked for awhile. I majored in trade and industrial education, which later was changed to the School of Technology.

“Around campus, I wore my battle jacket and Army trousers along with my combat boots.

“I look back on those days as happy days. I have some fine memories—the camaraderie and the fellowship. I got a lot of encouragement from the professors and from fellow students that I knew. I felt I had people who were interested in me as a person and were concerned that I participate fully in everything. ‘Hold your head up high,’ they said. ‘You don’t have to bow down to anyone. You’re at Purdue.’ My spirits were bolstered.

“There were something like twenty-six other African-Americans on the whole campus. We figured there were five or six ofus in our graduation class. That was an estimate. The school wouldn’t tell us. They said they didn’t keep any records of race, just nationality. There were a lot of foreign students on campus—a number of Chinese, Indian, and South American students.

“I have no complaints about my life. I’ve been very happy. I think the depression and the war made our generation more prudent in our endeavors. We’re very conscious of family and security. We want to protect our home and way of life. We learned if we made a dollar we should save a dime, and we’ve adhered to that throughout our lives.

“My children sometimes ask me about my life during my younger years. They ask a lot of questions about the war years. But I don’t like to look to the past. I’m optimistic. I like to look ahead. I recently received my black belt in karate. I might just go back to work as a bodyguard. After all, the Hollywood movies indicate this is an exciting lifestyle.

“You know, I’m only seventy-two years old—better late than never.”