August 10, 1964
Page 18842
"PROJECT '65"
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, one of the most significant but least publicized developments in the present struggle for equal rights in this country is occurring in the higher educational field.
Education is a basic -- indeed, the paramount -- instrument for achieving the goals of a free society. To our educational institutions at the primary, the secondary, and especially the higher levels, falls the responsibility for enabling our young people to understand, to support, and to defend the ethical and legal concepts which our political system has now created. Yet Negro enrollments in many of our colleges and universities are small or nonexistent.
In this connection, I wish to call attention to a unique effort organized by the students, faculty, and administration of Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine. To bridge the vast communications gap that exists between most predominantly white colleges and the talented Negro students in depressed areas, "Project '65" was launched during the past academic year. By contacting principals, guidance counselors, and students in such areas, Bowdoin students, with the cooperation and assistance of the college administration, pioneered in closing the information gap which constitutes one of the major barriers to achieving greater equality of opportunity at the higher education level. Bowdoin has directly benefitted from this experience, and other colleges have been assisted indirectly.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have inserted in the RECORD this account of the commendable undertaking by Maine's oldest institution of higher learning.
There being no objection, the account was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
BOWDOIN COLLEGE STUDENTS CONDUCTED NEGRO TALENT SEARCH
BRUNSWICK, MAINE, August 9. -- When the incoming class of 1968 arrives at Bowdoin College in September, it will have in its ranks three men who hadn't dared dream of advancing their education.
Like the rest of the student body at Bowdoin, they come from vastly different geographical areas, and, like the others, they have passed the rigid Bowdoin entrance requirements.
They differ from the rest because they come from some of the most deprived Negro sections of the country. And they are going to the Brunswick, Maine, liberal arts college for men in the fall because of a dream created by the students of Bowdoin and nurtured into a full-scale undertaking by students and college officials.
Known on campus as "Project '65," the enterprise was planned originally to close the gap of "inequality of information" by contacting principals, guidance counselors and students in deprived areas to make them aware of the educational opportunities at Bowdoin.
"If there were in fact equality of opportunity," said Foster S. Davis, one of the student-organizers of the project, "if communications between Negroes and predominantly white colleges were in fact as complete as between whites and those colleges, then I would say we should not lift a finger to encourage Negroes to apply to Bowdoin." Proof of the inequality of information, according to Davis, is shown by the low number of Negroes who apply to Bowdoin, a college that doesn't ask an applicant's race or require his photograph.
Project '65 was conceived last December by Davis and two other Bowdoin students, Elmer L. Beal and Michael R. Ince, as an organized program of visits to Negro high schools near students' hometowns during the Christmas vacation.
Assisted by Robert C. Mellow, associate director of admissions, and Prof. Daniel Levine of the history department, the three sponsored a discussion about the project at the student union to test the feelings of their fellow students. The students reacted with vigor. And so did college officials.
In the words of Bowdoin President James Stacy Coles, "An immediate and pressing national need is to provide status for the American Negro equivalent in stature and dignity to that of other Americans. This need can be met only as the Negro more generally achieves equivalent economic and cultural advantages, both of which are dependent upon educational opportunity. Because the State of Maine is somewhat remote from the deep emotional trauma accompanying the desegregation process where segregation is inbred, Bowdoin is in a position where it can contribute significantly in making equality of opportunity available."
President Coles said special efforts will be required and added, "This is not only an institutional responsibility but an institutional opportunity which Bowdoin and other colleges must accept. Otherwise the national welfare is in jeopardy."
The college's director of admission, Hubert S. Shaw, noted that Project '65 "continues a 140-year-old tradition of concern for Negro progress at Bowdoin." That concern began in 1826, when Bowdoin graduated John Brown Russwurm, one of the first two Negroes in America to receive a college degree. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard, who served as commissioner of the Freedman's Bureau after the Civil War, and who helped establish Howard University for the education of Negroes, graduated from Bowdoin in 1850. And it was while her husband was a member of the Bowdoin faculty that Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
The Bowdoin men visited 25 schools in their home towns during the Christmas vacation. When they returned to the college and compared their notes, just one thing was clear -- much more had to be done. It was obvious from the visits that Negro awareness of opportunities in education was scant. A significant amount of talent in segregated southern and deprived urban schools was not being encouraged toward college because of poor communication between colleges and these schools and between guidance counselors and students.
"You can see the vicious cycle," said Mr. Mellow. "The colleges do not visit the schools since the schools do not encourage the students to go to college because the colleges do not visit." Project '65 was one step forward in trying to break the cycle.
Davis and his fellow students saw that no admissions office could afford the staff to cover these needy schools properly without cutting back drastically on its normal school visit program. What was needed, they decided, was a special task force to visit such schools and encourage qualified Negro candidates to consider Bowdoin College.
Together with the admissions office they began to expand the concept of Project '65. The students would raise the money to flnance the project, and a full-fledged campaign of "student ambassadors" would be launched during spring vacation to visit Negro schools, not just near students' hometowns, but in as many areas as time and funds would allow.
After several planning sessions, Mr. Shaw observed, three purposes of the project became clear:
"To offer a source of information about the nature and benefits of higher education in the liberal arts to talented students who would not normally consider such a program;
"To offer a vehicle for direct and positive action by Bowdoin undergraduates in the face of the present crisis in higher education for Negroes and other traditionally deprived groups;
"To create a greater awareness of Bowdoin as a fine educational environment for Negro candidates."
With these goals firmly in mind, the Bowdoin men set about raising enough money to finance the ambitious campaign, and by their departure date collected $1,088.29 from campus and Brunswick area supporters.
Schools to be visited were selected through the Bowdoin admissions office with the guidance of the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students, and the superintendents of schools, NAACP and Urban Leagues in the areas being visited. Appointments were arranged by the admissions office for the Project '66 ambassadors, and three groups prepared to depart.
Davis, a senior from 62 Main Street, Concord, Mass., and Andrew Seager 1966, a native of South Africa, making up the first team, traveled through Virginia and North and South Carolina.
Ince, a senior from Burnett Lane, Brookhaven, N.Y., and Edwin Bell 1966,15 Wakullah Street, Roxbury, Mass., and Kermit Howe, Jr., a senior from Abington, Conn., made up the second team that talked to students in Chicago, St. Louis, and Louisville, Ky. Members of the third team that traveled to Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Cincinnati were Brian Rines, a 1963 Bowdoin graduate from Pownal, Maine, and Richard Bamberger 1967, of 24060 Shaker Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio.
In a week’s time the three teams visited 61 schools in deprived Negro areas of the country. When two Bowdoin students studying in the South reported visits to four schools in Memphis and Nashville the total reached a coincidental 65. The Bowdoin men, Charles Toomajian in 1965, of 621 Hoosick Road, Troy, N.Y., and Steven Kay 1965, of 356 Archer Street, Fall River, Mass., spent their spring semester with four classmates studying at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga.
At the same time, six students from the Negro college spent a semester in Brunswick.
The Project '65 teams talked to 214 Negro students. The original plan of operation for the three groups was to talk mostly with high school juniors and a few freshmen and sophomores. Seniors, it was assumed, would have already been accepted to colleges if they were going to continue their educations. As a matter of fact, the project got its name from the intention that it would help increase Negro applicants for the Bowdoin class entering in the fall of 1965.
What the student ambassadors found on their trips was quite a different story. At least 29 high school seniors in the schools they visited were prepared for college but for one reason or another, mostly financial, they would probably never get the chance.
In describing some of the situations the student ambassadors found, Mr. Mellow reported: "One boy is from a large, depressed area urban high school from which he graduated last January. He is now working as a clerk as he has no money with which to go to college." The boy graduated first out of 93 in his class, Mr. Mellow said, and "was president of the student council and president of his senior class."
"Another boy is first in his class of 270 of a good sized segregated southern high school," Mr. Mellon continued. "His mother died last year and he did not know whether to go on to college or not because of the financial circumstances of the family. The boy who ranked second in the class of 270 has secured admission and financial aid at Harvard, Princeton, and Duke, as well as others."
As a result of Project '65, officials decided several of the qualified high school seniors ought to be helped, and the strongest candidates among them were encouraged to apply to Bowdoin. Of the seven who did, Bowdoin found funds to support three, and helped two others gain admission and financial aid at Oberlin College.
Project '65 uncovered several problems standing in the way of "significant encouragement of students from deprived and segregated southern schools," according to Mr. Mellon, and one of the biggest is money. "We can expect to find a median family income of less than $4,000," he said. "This means that a candidate will need virtually absolute aid to attend Bowdoin or a comparable college -- financial aid which presently does not exist."
What about next year?
"The Bowdoin admissions office can assume some of the obligations that have come out of Project '65," Mr. Mellon says. "In Chicago and St. Louis particularly, the schools can be handled as a part of the normal travel schedule," he points out. "It may also be possible to add Louisville, Columbus, and Cincinnati to the admissions office travel schedule."
Contact with Negro schools in other areas of the country still needs to be made, Mr. Mellow hastens to point out; schools in the Deep South, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana. He'd like to see contact made with Negro and Puerto Rican students in Harlem, and someone "should go to Harlan County, Ky., and to West Virginia among the stricken coal miners and Appalachian hill people to see what we can do to get able students from this depressed area to think of college."
In short, he'd like to see a "Project '66."