ABSTRACT

With the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education a decade earlier, black Americans had the opportunity to attend historically white as well as historically black colleges and universities. For African Americans attending college after the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement, the explicit quotas meant to keep them out were gone, and affirmative action and financial aid programs had been implemented to usher them in.1 Despite the presence of these formal policies, the historically white college campus was often a difficult place for black students to be.