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Academicians
African Americans, long denied legal equality with the white majority, have historically looked to education as one of their main avenues for social and economic advancement. The history of black academic achievement in the United States has been impressive, but it has not come easily. Only in recent years have a significant number of black academicians received due recognition and rewards for their intelligence and hard work. Despite their progress in establishing a place in academia, African American scholars still face considerable obstacles to widespread success at the highest levels of the American educational system.
Historical Background
The vast majority of African Americans who came to this country before the Civil War arrived as slaves. With very few exceptions, slave owners typically forbade their slaves from receiving even the most rudimentary education. Free blacks had little more success in seeking educational opportunities. Most colleges and universities were racially segregated, and the first college to admit African Americans—the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—was not founded until 1837. Wilberforce University in Ohio, the nation's first black-owned and black-operated college, opened its doors in 1856.
The Civil War ended slavery but did not end educational discrimination. Large numbers of colleges and universities in both the North and South still refused admission to blacks. In response to these institutional barriers, African Americans founded a wealth of black colleges and universities after the Civil War, including Fisk University, Tuskegee Institute (later Tuskegee University), and Morehouse College. At this time, individual black scholars also recorded historic firsts. In 1876, Edward Alexander Bouchet became the first African American to receive a doctoral degree, earning a Ph.D. in physics from Yale University. Pioneering sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University (in history) in 1895.
African Americans continued to face significant formal and informal barriers to academia until the mid-1900s. For example, it was not until the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that legally enforced racial segregation ended in public schools. Later, the civil rights movement of the 1960s led to widespread changes in admissions policies at the nation's colleges and universities. As a result of these developments, black enrollment in historically white colleges and universities expanded dramatically.
Prominent Black Academics
As black enrollment in institutions of higher education has increased, so has the number of African American academics who have achieved national and international prominence. Their areas of study run the gamut of educational fields, and their viewpoints range from the very liberal to the very conservative. Many have gained notice not only for their academic and scholarly work but also as authors of popular books and guests on broadcast media programs.
African American scholars are well represented in the fields of sociology and education. Perhaps the nation's most outstanding black sociologist is William Julius Wilson of Harvard University. Wilson, a past president of the American Sociological Association, is also a member of the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the nation's foremost academic society.
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