After nearly a decade of reviewing hundreds of sources, including slips of paper tallying Oberlin College’s historic vote to admit students “irrespective of color” photographs of young Black students like Johnnetta (Betsch) Cole and luminaries like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr striding across campus to deliver the 1965 commencement address, Dr.Roland M. Baumann delivers a story worth telling in Constructing Black Education at Oberlin College: A Documentary History.
In his new book, the Oberlin emeritus archivist and professor of historypainstakingly unravels clues of how the college faced the challenges of establishing a racially and culturally diverse institution from 1835 up to 2007. Diverse talks with Baumann about his book, which chronicles a story of fractured progress and unleashes the voices of African-American students and alumni who celebrate and chastise the educational experience that transformed their lives.
Q: Why was it important to chronicle the history of Black students at Oberlin?
Baumann: I did not believe that the Black education legacy story had received appropriate attention, even among our best historians here. I think a lot people would have perceived this as being parochial history. I saw it as an opportunity to tell a case study about what higher education was like at one liberal arts college in the United States that was a pioneer. We were not the first institution, probably the fifth institution to first admit Blacks, but no other school in the 19th century, as W.E.B. Dubois found out in his Atlanta Study, admitted and graduated more (Black students) than Oberlin College.
By 1900, one-third of all African-American professionals in the United States had an Oberlin undergraduate degree. That’s a striking comment about how an Oberlin education helped to set the way in which one could break the barriers in society and create social change, and create a ripple effect.
Q: What kind of impact do you think your book will have on the Oberlin community as it celebrates its 175th anniversary this year?
Baumann: I chose this story because it was worthy of telling. Not everyone is going to be happy with this book because the evidence is going to say things that some people don’t want to hear. My task was to take the evidence and let it lead to the truth. I try to show the power of relationships that existed within the Oberlin College community and how it was that minority students had to deal with those in terms of creating the gains they sought in terms of their own position within that wider academic community.
