Two Pipelines onto Campus

Dartmouth's first Black graduate, Edward Mitchell, took his degree in 1828. One hundred and forty years later, in 1968, the College had produced roughly 130 Black alumni in total.

Woody Lee, Class of 1968, arrived in Hanover in 1964. He recalled having no Black faculty member  and no alumni history to consult, and he thought there were only two Black upperclassmen on campus. The first Black professor he can name, Errol Hill of the drama department, arrived while he was still an undergraduate.

However, five years after Lee matriculated, more than 170 Black students were enrolled at Dartmouth at once. This brings us to the question: What could've produced that change?

A Better Chance was founded in 1963 to prepare students from under-resourced schools for admission to private preparatory schools. The first Dartmouth summer programme ran in 1964: about fifty-five students on campus for eight weeks before they went on to schools across the Northeast. Dean Charles F. Dey '58 of the Tucker Foundation, who ran the programme at Dartmouth, was explicit about who it was for. Candidates were identified by a social worker, a minister, a principal or a teacher, and they were not recruited athletes. 

Dean Dey forwarded folders of candidates to the preparatory schools, and many of the schools did not honour the enrolment commitments they had made. When Dartmouth pressed, Frank Boyden, the headmaster of Deerfield Academy, drove to Hanover in a chauffeured Cadillac to explain that Deerfield was a poor country school and could not take more students.

Dey then sent a set of folders that happened to include a couple of good athletes. Deerfield accepted them at once.

The second effort came from the students. The College's position had long been that Black applicants simply did not apply to Dartmouth. The Afro-American Society : through the Black Student Application Encouragement Committee subsequently began recruiting students. Society members went home during college breaks and recruited Black students in their own towns and high schools. Wesley Pugh '73 and Tyrone Byrd '73 both recall the effort, and the class admitted after it was the largest to that point.

The athletics staff also used similiar networks. Thomas Price '71, a football recruit remembers coach Robert Blackman calling him about a prospect from Baltimore and asking him to convice the prospect to join.  The recruit, Stuart Simms '72, went on to become co-captain of the football team.