In August 1881, Alexander Dumas Jones became the first African-American student to enroll at @Cal. He left before graduating, becoming a customs inspector for the US Treasury Department and a life-long leader among the Black community of the Bay Area and California. pic.twitter.com/hdkRSWfT0R

— Cal Bears History (@CalBearsHistory) August 7, 2021

#OTD in 1964, Auburn University was integrated with the enrollment and registration of graduate student Harold A. Franklin. pic.twitter.com/R7OUQGvHtz

— Auburn University (@AuburnU) January 4, 2017

Today, Dr. Harold Franklin, the first African American student at @AuburnU, was able to walk across the commencement stage - 56 years after he originally enrolled at the university. pic.twitter.com/FdNbo2kwcB

— Auburn Liberal Arts (@AULiberalArts) December 12, 2020

I'm not tackling the topic of integration of predominantly white institutions in the American South in the early-to-mid 1960s, as that topic is likely to go sideways real fast. However, I do have to give Auburn people major props for having to share the state of Alabama with 'Bama fans and their inflated count of Crimson Tide national titles. That's a plight that I wouldn't wish on anybody.

Reading the heading, I expected this thread to be about Noble scholars, or some academic threshold that Cal prides itself in, or our tech alums vs whatever their alums are known for, or a long list of differences starting with well, being on a football board, the difference in football programs, not to mention culture, and all you got is that a school in Alabama desegregated later than a school in California? Well duh. It is not like they deny it and if anything treat desegregation of their school with some respect..

By the way, guess which school has in its name a slave owner? Here is hint, it beings with UC and ends with Berkeley, if I'm stating correctly the latest in a long number of running announcements as what we now call our school for branding purposes. Talk about weak sauce.

And I will save the onslaught of Auubrn fans going after the stupidity of this thread by acknowledging that Auburn has a higher percentage of black students than "Berkeley" currently.

BearBoarBlarney said:

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I'm not tackling the topic of integration of predominantly white institutions in the American South in the early-to-mid 1960s, as that topic is likely to go sideways real fast. However, I do have to give Auburn people major props for having to share the state of Alabama with 'Bama fans and their inflated count of Crimson Tide national titles. That's a plight that I wouldn't wish on anybody.

---

I'll jump in to the desegregation discussion. Segregation was the most visible marker of Jim Crow*. The Deep South was deeply wedded to Jim Crow. White supremacy had been embedded in Southern culture for hundreds of years by the time Brown v. Board was decided. Desegregation and a repudiation of Jim Crow was seen as another assault by the "damned yankees" on "States Rights!" Of course, the "states rights" at issue had now become the right to strip an entire race of people of their constitutionally protected civil rights solely on the basis of a belief in white supremacy.

That Brown only required schools to desegregate with "all deliberate speed" meant the unreconstructed Jim Crow loving South could, as a practical matter, refuse to desegregate while ostensibly "moving toward segregation." In fact, in 2017, a Mississippi school district was ordered by a federal court to desegregate, a full fifty years after the initial case was initially filed.

The fact of the matter is that hundreds of years of brainwashing and indoctrination are not easily remedied. This is especially true when the indoctrination and brainwashing is enshrined as part of Southern "culture" or "heritage" such that demands to change are seen as attacks on Southerners.

Heritage and culture are sacred in the South, provided they're white heritage and white culture.** Heck, when I was in kid in Texas, I remember learning about the Civil War. It was taught as the war of northern aggression. It was a war to preserve/destroy the Southern way of life. What was left out was that slavery was the particular way of life that was meant to be preserved/destroyed. Jim Crow and segregation was a way to maintain the same white heritage and culture of white supremacy that was part and parcel with American chattel slavery.

*It should be noted that Hitler's Nuremberg Laws were modeled in part and took inspiration from Jim Crow laws.

**Other races' heritage and cultures are (or at least were, when I was a kid) dismissed and ridiculed if they were even considered at all.

Hitler's stupidity was also based in great measure on Margaret Sanger, an American who gets celebrated these days despite her asinine racial beliefs.

Germany is not the Germany of the 1930s. Russia is not the Russia of the 1930s. The South is not the South of the 1930s. And lest you think differently, there was plenty of racism in the Bay Area even up to and including the '50s.

When you keep looking behind you, you can't see what you might be headed for.

When we went to Ole Miss 5 years ago, you can't help but notice many plaques like the one above. Officially, institutionally, they are completely open about their racist segregationist past and fully embrace the present. (What goes on in the hearts and minds of individual citizens may be another matter.)

Our guy was a dropout, though.

01Bear said:

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BearBoarBlarney said:

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I'm not tackling the topic of integration of predominantly white institutions in the American South in the early-to-mid 1960s, as that topic is likely to go sideways real fast. However, I do have to give Auburn people major props for having to share the state of Alabama with 'Bama fans and their inflated count of Crimson Tide national titles. That's a plight that I wouldn't wish on anybody.

---

I'll jump in to the desegregation discussion. Segregation was the most visible marker of Jim Crow*. The Deep South was deeply wedded to Jim Crow. White supremacy had been embedded in Southern culture for hundreds of years by the time Brown v. Board was decided. Desegregation and a repudiation of Jim Crow was seen as another assault by the "damned yankees" on "States Rights!" Of course, the "states rights" at issue had now become the right to strip an entire race of people of their constitutionally protected civil rights solely on the basis of a belief in white supremacy.

That Brown only required schools to desegregate with "all deliberate speed" meant the unreconstructed Jim Crow loving South could, as a practical matter, refuse to desegregate while ostensibly "moving toward segregation." In fact, in 2017, a Mississippi school district was ordered by a federal court to desegregate, a full fifty years after the initial case was initially filed.

The fact of the matter is that hundreds of years of brainwashing and indoctrination are not easily remedied. This is especially true when the indoctrination and brainwashing is enshrined as part of Southern "culture" or "heritage" such that demands to change are seen as attacks on Southerners.

Heritage and culture are sacred in the South, provided they're white heritage and white culture.** Heck, when I was in kid in Texas, I remember learning about the Civil War. It was taught as the war of northern aggression. It was a war to preserve/destroy the Southern way of life. What was left out was that slavery was the particular way of life that was meant to be preserved/destroyed. Jim Crow and segregation was a way to maintain the same white heritage and culture of white supremacy that was part and parcel with American chattel slavery.

*It should be noted that Hitler's Nuremberg Laws were modeled in part and took inspiration from Jim Crow laws.

**Other races' heritage and cultures are (or at least were, when I was a kid) dismissed and ridiculed if they were even considered at all.

---

Anyone who wants to learn about the attitudes tied up with slavery in the South should read Been in the Storm So Long, which is Cal professor Leon Litwack's book about the black and white experience in the South during and just after the Civil War. He provides a ton of evidence from diaries, interviews and other direct sources of exactly the attitudes described here.

TomBear said:

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. . . And lest you think differently, there was plenty of racism in the Bay Area even up to and including the '50s.

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True, and even beyond. During the 60s/70s, I was commonly serenaded at school with "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these" in addition to the sing song ching-chong stuff, among other nonsense.
Dunno that we Bay Area folks deserve to start throwing stones.

My Dad (born SF, 1921), was dissuaded by his high school counselor (Lowell HS) from pursuing engineering, because according to him, dentistry or shop keeping were better jobs for orientals, and as such, he was unlikely to be accepted by the other college engineering students, nor to be hired if he persisted. My Dad made it work - retired from aerospace engineering in the 80s after working on the first space shuttle design. There's an old post-war picture of my Dad with his colleagues at NACA in Virginia (predecessor to NASA) - Asian face in a sea of white.

Before my Mom & Dad purchased property to build a home in the South Bay in the 1950s, they walked the street to make sure every resident was ok with people like them moving into the neighborhood.
They had originally wanted to purchase in West San Jose, but the realtor asserted that their office had nothing available to them. They then found a property owner in the nearby foothills who was willing to subdivide his lot. Investment-wise, it worked out a lot better for them than San Jose would have. :-)

When my (Danish/English extraction) wife & I bought a home in the El Cerrito hills in the early 90s, the CCRs carried the original 1954 provision that "non-whites" such as I could only reside on the property in the role of household help. It wasn't binding, of course, and I found it amusing and intended to keep it, but unfortunately my wife purged our old docs after we'd sold the place.

Incidentally, last month we drove our youngest cross-country for her sophomore year at Purdue, with a stop at the Heart Mountain War Relocation center in Wyoming where my Dad was sent in 1942 (pulled out of classes at Cal) with his parents and younger brother. My Dad got early release by enlisting in the Army (Air Corps). I snapped a cool picture of our daughter watching her grandpa speaking on one of the interactive video kiosks.

To paraphrase those1960's Virginia Slims billboards, "We've come a long way, baby"
Journey's never over, though.

bearsandgiants said:

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Our guy was a dropout, though.

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Auburn's first black student, Harold A. Franklin, was admitted as a graduate student there in '64. As various websites put it, he "encountered obstacles to completing his graduate program," but later earned a Master's degree from the University of Denver.

Later on, he received an honorary degree from Auburn U. Not easy being a trail blazer.

bearsandgiants said:

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Our guy was a dropout, though.

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You must be ashamed of all UC Berkeley alums who didn't earn their degrees.

wifeisafurd said:

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And I will save the onslaught of Auubrn fans going after the stupidity of this thread by acknowledging that Auburn has a higher percentage of black students than "Berkeley" currently.

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With regard to demographics, the state of California is ~ 6% black/African American. Meanwhile UC Berkeley's undergraduate student demographic is ~ 4% black/AA.

The state of Alabama is ~ 26% black/AA and Auburn's undergraduate demographic is ~ 5% black/AA.

Interestingly, Auburn's cross-state Iron Bowl rival, the University of Alabama has a student body that is ~11% black/AA. From the outside looking in, I would have thought the AU and Bama student bodies would reflect the same general racial demographic splits.

How many Latinos? How many Asians? This isn't a black/white country anymore. That ended decades ago.

tokuno said:

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TomBear said:

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. . . And lest you think differently, there was plenty of racism in the Bay Area even up to and including the '50s.

---

True, and even beyond. During the 60s/70s, I was commonly serenaded at school with "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these" in addition to the sing song ching-chong stuff, among other nonsense.
Dunno that we Bay Area folks deserve to start throwing stones.

My Dad (born SF, 1921), was dissuaded by his high school counselor (Lowell HS) from pursuing engineering, because according to him, dentistry or shop keeping were better jobs for orientals, and as such, he was unlikely to be accepted by the other college engineering students, nor to be hired if he persisted. My Dad made it work - retired from aerospace engineering in the 80s after working on the first space shuttle design. There's an old post-war picture of my Dad with his colleagues at NACA in Virginia (predecessor to NASA) - Asian face in a sea of white.

Before my Mom & Dad purchased property to build a home in the South Bay in the 1950s, they walked the street to make sure every resident was ok with people like them moving into the neighborhood.
They had originally wanted to purchase in West San Jose, but the realtor asserted that their office had nothing available to them. They then found a property owner in the nearby foothills who was willing to subdivide his lot. Investment-wise, it worked out a lot better for them than San Jose would have. :-)

When my (Danish/English extraction) wife & I bought a home in the El Cerrito hills in the early 90s, the CCRs carried the original 1954 provision that "non-whites" such as I could only reside on the property in the role of household help. It wasn't binding, of course, and I found it amusing and intended to keep it, but unfortunately my wife purged our old docs after we'd sold the place.

Incidentally, last month we drove our youngest cross-country for her sophomore year at Purdue, with a stop at the Heart Mountain War Relocation center in Wyoming where my Dad was sent in 1942 (pulled out of classes at Cal) with his parents and younger brother. My Dad got early release by enlisting in the Army (Air Corps). I snapped a cool picture of our daughter watching her grandpa speaking on one of the interactive video kiosks.

To paraphrase those1960's Virginia Slims billboards, "We've come a long way, baby"
Journey's never over, though.

---

I was the target of the same chants as a kid in Texas in the 80s. To be fair, I think the kids who participated in those chants didn't mean it in a hurtful manner. Rather, it was just something done in fun and without the idea it could or would be hurtful to anyone (let alone a friend, me, of theirs).

That said, I still encountered a ton of racism as a kid in Texas. But to be fair, I also encounter racism in California, today. Heck, just a couple months ago, I was preparing a letter for mailing at the post office after hours. Some random old white guy came in and made a comment that sounded like, "Who would've expected a f--king oriental to be here. The place is being overrun with gooks."

Now, I could've taken offense and threw down with the old guy, but I let it slide. I recognized the dude was probably (1) mentally ill and (2) too old to change his ways. Besides, fighting an old man wouldn't have been worth it for practical/legal reasons (including being sued for any injury inflicted on him and also intentionally injuring a senior citizen).

In 2019 (just before Covid), I was volunteering at a local charity rodeo.* During dinner, I happened to sit at a table with an older white man and his wife. The gentleman asked me about my race, which is technically a micro aggression** but I recognized he didn't mean it to be offensive. After I told him my ancestors were Chinese, he recited the schoolyard chant, "Me Chinese, me play joke." Again, I don't believe he did this with the intent to be offensive. Nevertheless, it is objectively racist. In any case, I replied with the retort that begins with "Me American, me play smart;" this made the old guy laugh and we had a pleasant conversation while enjoying the rest of our dinner together.

I've also been on the end of racism in the workplace. This was actually across state lines while I worked in the SF Bay Area. I was included in an email reply all scenario where the recipient (a vendor trying to get a contract with the company for which I worked) made a stupid joke about me being William Hung based on nothing other than a similarity in our surnames. IIRC, the vendor was based in Texas, but that's really neither here nor there.

In short, racism isn't exactly a thing of the past; it's still very much alive and kicking. Also, my previous post on desegregation wasn't intended to imply that racism didn't exist in California; to the contrary, it was historically very strong here (see, Kearneyism, the Zoot Suit Riots, and the implementation of Executive Order 9066). Heck, because of California's history of racism, we have historic constitutional cases, like Yick Wo v. Hopkins (holding that an ostensibly race neutral law applied in a prejudicial manner violates the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause) and U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (holding that birthright citizenship applies to everyone born in the US*** per the 14th Amendment). Then there's Tape v. Hurley, which was an 1885 California Supreme Court case establishing that all kids (including Chinese-Americans) have the right to an education, even though it also legalized school segregation, which would be chipped away by the 9th Circuit in 1947 in Mendez v Westminster (holding that segregated schools were not legal re kids of Mexican descent) and finally be overturned by SCOTUS in 1954's Brown v Board decision.

*I love rodeos and have loved them since I went to my first one as a kid inTexas.

**Micro aggressions are a real thing and they are a big deal for those on the receiving end. It may not be something those on the giving end don't understand, but micro aggressions, at a minimum, reinforce that the person on the receiving end is an "other" and usually is a "leaser than." Micro aggressions also tend to stack and wear down those on the receiving end resulting in the receiver snapping and responding by either (1) fighting back or (2) collapsing under the strain.

***Exclusive of native americans.

Yeah well Auburn has a lot of obese people and very attractive females. I bet Cal doesn't have that kind of diversity!

ducky23 said:

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The university is not majority white

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To be fair, neither is the State of California.

ducky23 said:

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The university is not majority white

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I'm not sure where @8tiger is going with this, but the undergraduate student body at UC Berkeley, as of Fall 2023, was roughly:

40% Asian
21% Chicanx/Latinx
20% White
4% Black/African American
11.5% International (all races)
3% Declined to State Race
0.5% Native American

Like the state of California, our undergraduates population is diverse and beautiful ***

*** 3 or more drinks in

There is a lot of racism in the Bay Area well into the 60's (ask any surviving Black Panther who was in Oakland in the 60s amd 70s.

And to be honest, the racism continues to thrive all over California to this very day.