Almost no institution of higher education in this country before the hiring of Allison Davis at the University of Chicago in 1941 believed that any black man was intelligent enough to be a professor at a white university. In 1940 there were 330 black PhD’s in this country. Not one taught at a white institution. In an attempt to boost the number of black faculty members at white institutions, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, in 1946, wrote a letter to some five hundred college and university presidents in the North, requesting that they make some effort to recruit black faculty. Four-fifths of the colleges did not deign to reply to this outrageous request. Most of the colleges that did reply stated that they would make no special effort to recruit black faculty members. Some said that black faculty were most needed in black colleges, others stated that blacks would be unhappy in a white environment. One said, in a classic non sequitur that the Ohio River was too close by to permit hiring a black faculty member while one honest college stated that, “It isn’t that we discriminate against the Negro race as such, it’s just that the entire college is white.”
--from The Education of Black Folk
