1926: Admittance of Black students
The Summer School’s hesitancy to allow the participation of Black students reflected Bryn Mawr College’s complicated and at times dismal relationship with diversity—M. Carey Thomas worked explicitly to prevent the acceptance of Black students and students of color at large to the undergraduate college, and actively prevented the hiring of professors and faculty that did not reflect her view of a college of white, upper class, and christian individuals. The first Black student admitted to Bryn Mawr College, Jesse Redmon Fauset, was accepted without the College learning that she was not white. Within a month of setting foot on campus in 1901, M. Carey Thomas personally arranged for her transfer to Cornell University to prevent her continued attendance at Bryn Mawr. It would not be until 1927 that Enid Cook would begin to attend classes at Bryn Mawr College, but would be forced to live off campus rather than in the dormitories alongside other students. Thomas’s exclusion of Black students from campus life was deliberate and calculated. It may be of little surprise to readers that proponents of an integrated program were met with pushback in dealing with Thomas. In letter correspondence with Hilda Worthington Smith, Thomas warned the younger about the drawbacks of “mixing causes,” making it clear that her goals in founding the Summer School were not in fact devoted to the raising up and education of all women, but instead only those she deemed worthy of schooling.
Dissent also came from Summer School alumni and workers’ rights groups in the South, who argued that the acceptance of Black students would be at the cost of spots for white students from southern textile and tobacco mills. Through much debate and consternation on the part of the Summer School’s councils, committees, and administration across the winter of 1924 through the summer of 1925, it was decided that students of color would be permitted to attend in the 1926 summer session, with no less than 2 Black students admitted each year. These students in the early years, it should be noted, only came from communities in northern states and were included in the quotas of students from the North only, due to the dissatisfaction of several parties from the South.
Black students attending the Summer School faced difficulties on campus, and the first cohort that arrived had to persuade the School administration to integrate their housing with that of the white students attending that summer. Facing racism and prejudice from some of the other attendees of the Summer School, several women formed close bonds with Jewish students, largely eastern european immigrants, that attended the school alongside them. There was, according to some students reflecting on their time at the Summer School, a kinship among students who were excluded or demonized by others on campus. While several white students recounted the ways in which they unlearned several internalized prejudices they had and the program was billed as a nearly utopian place of worker unity, it cannot be denied that long standing assumptions, prejudices, or biases affected the experience of those students welcomed into the program.
While the acceptance of Black students into a residential program on Bryn Mawr’s campus in 1926 was historically monumental, it is important to note how little material exists on this topic in the records of the Summer School. The five students accepted into the 1926 program were the first Black students to get to complete their studies while living on Bryn Mawr’s campus, but few letters, meeting notes, or firsthand contemporary accounts are available to us in the present; we can at this point only speculate what conversations or experiences existed outside of the archival record. The Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry at its core stood for developing a sense of unity and strength among workers, but this is not to say it was a goal easily won, or one that stood without its opponents.