With the news that the orange ignoramus in the White House recently questioned the constitutionality of federal funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and after Bethune-Cookman University students stood and turned their backs on Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ speech at their graduation, it seems a fitting time to talk about the history of whites and black colleges.
It’s always a little surprising when white friends and acquaintances know so little about HBCUs. Though only a minority of black Americans who go to college attend HBCU these days, most of us who are black have relatives or family friends who do and did. We are as familiar with Howard as we are with Harvard. The list of famed HBCU alums is a long and illustrious one that includes Langston Hughes, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Alice Walker, Spike Lee, and Oprah Winfrey. But few of us are aware of white graduates—like former Sen. Harris Wofford.
Even less well-known is the role HBCUs played in the lives of Jewish refugee scholars who fled Nazi Germany and arrived here in the U.S.
That story was told by Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb in her book From Swastika to Jim Crow: Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges, which was the basis for a documentary with the same name produced by Steven Fischler and Joel Sucher.
Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb — author, poet, activist (1920-1996)
I met Gabrielle when I lived in Washington, DC. She was a central figure in DC arts and progressive politics and she became like a mom to me and many other young activists and artists. Her Washington Post obituary gives a glimpse of her rich life and contributions.
In the mid-1960s, she was Washington area executive director for the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. In the early 1970s, she was public relations officer for the National Welfare Rights Organization, and in the 1980s, she served on the D.C. Civilian Complaint Review Board of the D.C. police. In the 1970s, Mrs. Edgcomb taught history and English at several D.C. high schools, including Eastern and Dunbar. Also in the 1970s, she was a research consultant with the Smithsonian Institution and a research specialist and bibliographer with the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
[...] In the early 1960s, she had been an information officer with the Volta River Authority in Ghana.
Mrs. Edgcomb was born in Berlin and fled Germany in 1936. She lived in New York, Chicago and San Francisco before settling in the Washington area. She was a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she also received a master's degree in the history of culture. [...] She had edited three volumes of poetry, two of her own poems and one that was an anthology.
You can read some of her poetry here.
I remember talking at length with her about her research on Jewish professors who taught at what were then called “Negro colleges” and I put her in touch with my dad, who had gone to West Virginia State as an undergrad. That research became her book:
From Swastika to Jim Crow: Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges
Dismissed from their posts as victims of Nazi racist policies, or for their opposition to the regime, many scholars from Germany and Austria came to the United States where they learned to reassemble the pieces of their lives and careers. This book concerns the stories of these exiled scholars who came to hold faculty positions in historically black colleges. Illustrative stories, anecdotes and observations of the developments between two diverse groups of people, both victims of racist oppression and persecution, are presented to contribute to cross-cultural understanding in American society. Historians and others interested in minority and immigration history and cross-cultural encounters will gain a new perspective on race relations.
This article from the Amistad Research Center provides more background. It's titled "50 Years/50 Collections: Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb and the Refugee Scholars of the HBCUs."
Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb was only fifteen when her mother made the decision to move her family from Berlin to the United States in 1936. In her 1993 book From Swastika to Jim Crow: Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges, she recalls the German schools and social institutions becoming segregated when the Nazis took power. She was separated from many of her friends, and much of her Jewish family emigrated. Luckily, her mother was wise enough to see the tide turning, and remove her family from danger [...]
Inspired by a Smithsonian colloquia, “The Muses Flee Hitler,” organized to mark the occasion of what would have been Albert Einstein’s hundredth birthday in 1980, Edgcomb became interested in researching the stories of the refugee scholars who did not share Einstein’s fame. Knowing that many of these academics worked for Black colleges, she combed the archives of HBCUs across the country to determine how many employed European refugees [...] Ultimately, she identified 51 scholars at 19 historically Black colleges and universities. She was able to interview 21 of these individuals, who taught at Tougaloo College, Hampton University, Howard University, and Talladega College, and discuss with them their thoughts and feelings about their experience [...]
What the displaced academics found upon arriving in the United States was that, unfortunately, relocation did not mean that they were immune to persecution. Though American academics may have been opposed to Nazi political meddling in education in Germany, they feared for the security of their own jobs as Germans and Austrians flooded into the U.S. looking for work. Anti-Semitism and xenophobia manifested themselves at many academic institutions, and many refugees found it difficult to establish new careers in their new country.
Samuel G. Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, wrote:
Of the 1,200 Jewish professors driven from German universities in the mid-1930's, the most prominent, including Albert Einstein, were welcomed in the elite reaches of American academe. Others, Hannah Arendt among them, founded the University in Exile, which became the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. But about 50 of the uprooted, facing a Depression economy and discrimination in hiring at Ivy League schools, landed in such farflung black colleges as Tougaloo in Mississippi and Talladega in Alabama. There they lived what Ms. Edgcomb calls in the film "double exile," sundered both from Germany and from the refugee community and regarded in the South, by whites and blacks alike, as not quite Caucasian.
The documentary is one hour long, and this clip will encourage you to see the entire film.
“Beyond Swastika and Jim Crow” became a museum exhibit.
Professor Ernst Borinski is buried on the campus of Tougaloo College. The school is establishing an endowed chair in his name. This is an excerpt from their brochure:
Throughout the 1960s, Borinski was kept under surveillance by white segregationist intelligence agencies of Louisiana and Mississippi – the Louisiana and Mississippi State Sovereignty Commissions. In 1958, local Jackson newspapers acknowledged this surveillance as a result of his participation as a speaker in a Millsaps College forum with the Rev. Dr. Glenn Smiley of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission’s archives indicate that its Louisiana counterpart reported on Borinski’s speech at an American Friends Service Committee program during its annual Institute of Religion in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Sovereignty Commission and the White Citizens Council (now the Conservative Citizens Council) played a major role in the maintenance of segregation within Mississippi.
As the anniversary of Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb’s death approaches, I am thankful for the gifts she gave to all of us who knew her and were inspired by her life, work, and activism. It’s certain that the many black students whose lives were touched and changed by those professors who found a refuge on black campuses feel the same.