HUNTSVILLE, Alabama
Jamie Fleming
is like other non-traditional college students in
several ways. He has a strife and a
nineteen-month-old son. He has a full-time
job and he commutes more than 240 miles a
week to attend classes. But until Fleming,
who graduated from an all-white high school
on rural Sand Mountain, Alabama, enrolled at
Northeast Alabama State Community College
on a scholarship, he had never sat in a
classroom with an African American.
Now Fleming, a twenty-three-year-old
junior majoring in secondary education, is
attending historically, Black Alabama A&M
University in Huntsville, Alabama, as part of
a court-ordered program designed to attract
white students. The scholarship he receives is
one of the desegregation remedies that grew
from a case the U.S. Justice Department
brought against Alabama in 1981 in an effort
to eliminate vestiges of segregation in its
colleges and universities.
Three trials and fifteen years later, U.S.
District Judge Harold Murphy told the state
its responsibility includes giving Alabama
A&M and Alabama State University in
Montgomery up to $1 million a year each for
ten years for scholarships to recruit white
students.
Murphy did not ask the mostly white
schools that shared the focus of the 1995 trial
to take further steps to increase minority
enrollment or faculty. As a result, some
officials–like James Cox, a member of
Alabama State’s board of trustees–found
Murphy’s 1,000-page decree a paradox
because little of the burden for integration
has fallen on Alabama’s white
schools.
“None of us are completely satisfied
with the court order,” said Cox, “but we will
adhere to it.”
Scholarships and Enrollment
Alabama State, which offers scholarships to graduate
students as well as
undergraduate, has
increased its white
enrollment to 600 this
past fall–up from 397
in the fall of 1995,
when its enrollment
was more than 7.5
percent white.
In Alabama A&M’s bachelor’s degree
programs, white enrollment has hovered
between 5 and 6 percent in recent years,
officials said. This past fall, approximately
225 of Alabama A&M’s 4,200 undergraduates
were white, according to James Heyward,
director of admissions.
However,
scholarships are not
available to white
graduate students at
Alabama A&M
because for years it has
attracted large numbers
of white students,
many in education, to
study for master’s
degrees and advanced
teaching certificates.
Alabama A&M reports that about half of the
1,500 students in its graduate school classes
are white.
“A scholarship is just a thing to be used
as a catalyst to try to get the university to
resemble the population of society at large in
this section of the state,”
Heyward said.
