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3 “Beating Onward, Ever Onward” A Critical Mass, 1910–1954 Droves of migrants to northern and urban areas; the modernization produced by two world wars; cultural renaissance in popular cities like Harlem, St. Louis, and Chicago; the Great Depression; and the intensification of mass mobilization for citizenship rights all had great impacts on black women’s college experiences in the third wave of educational attainment. While the growing majority of black women attended undergraduate colleges in the South, the access to graduate studies, though slow, again drew them to northern urban institutions like the University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, and Columbia University in New York. Like her predecessors, the third-wave graduate often left her school state after graduation to find a teaching job, and her final location often depended on what type of degree she attained.1 Measuring Attainment between World Wars As the Progressive era advanced, so too did the educational status of African Americans. The 1910 Atlanta University study estimated that 5,000 black students had earned diplomas, certificates, and degrees in normal, vocational , college, and professional areas, with 2,964 completing college-level work. However, these numbers, like Cooper’s, did not stand up to research conducted in later years. In Charles Johnson’s The Negro College Graduate (1938), the estimated 1910 numbers were 9,828 African American graduates , including 3,856 completing college-level work. The 1910 Atlanta study counted only 658 black women who had earned a bachelor’s degree compared to 2,999 black men. Though Johnson’s study did not calculate pre1910 numbers by gender, surely his numbers were drastically higher than Du Bois’s given the difference of 4,000 in the number of estimated total students.2 At the end of World War I, the numbers of African American degree earners had swelled to 7,304 bachelor’s, 145 master’s, and 25 doctorates. Though black women’s annual college attendance rate was higher than men’s, their 58 Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850–1954 attainment of B.A.s from top-ranked schools was woefully behind that of African American men and white women. As universities expanded and the campus became less of a community and more of a conglomerate, honors programs, like honors societies, became a haven of intimate interaction. As a “revolt against the impersonalization,” honors programs, starting in 1922 at Swarthmore College, attempted to return some sense of an aristocratic ideal in the face of the popularization of higher education.3 Black women generally did not have entree to such programs or the preparatory classes that determined eligibility. They were also kept out of the more prestigious schools that would offer preparation for graduate school. Civil rights activist Dorothy Height recalled how she was kept from entering the Barnard class of 1933 because they had a quota of two black girls per year. Though her qualifications made her a clear choice for admittance, when she appeared at the interview and they found she was black, her application was denied. She ended up attending New York University, graduating with a B.A. in religion and earning an M.A. in educational psychology from Columbia University. Overall, black women were on average thirty years behind black men and white women in earning the bachelor’s, thirteen years behind in the master’s, twenty-four years behind in high honors like Phi Beta Kappa, and fifty years behind in earning the Ph.D.4 Charles Johnson, a renowned sociologist, painted a detailed picture of the development of blacks in higher education between world wars. He surveyed 116 PWIs and 56 HBCUs that identified 25,923 living black graduates who had earned bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral, law, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy , law, or theology degrees. Like the earlier Atlanta studies, Johnson’s 1938 research supplemented institutional statistics with a survey sample of 3,518 men and 1,994 women graduates. Of the 43,821 (cumulative) college degrees earned by black students listed in Johnson’s study, 71 percent of the degrees were academic and 29 percent were professional. Graduation from HBCUs totaled 37,397 (85 percent), which far outnumbered the 6,424 (15 percent) graduating from PWIs. This era also represented a vast increase in what became community-college education . Though many attended colleges that were not high-ranked or even accredited, postsecondary education became an ever-more attainable goal. Johnson found that most African Americans in the study earned their degree between 1926 and 1936, with...

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