Early Efforts for Student Diversity
By Mary Hendriksen

In 1941 the world of higher education was asegregated one–as was American society in general. Only two years earlier, the Daughters of the American Revolution had cited a "white artists only" policy in refusing to allow acclaimed singer Marian Anderson to sing at Washington, D.C.'s, Constitution Hall. Not until 1948 would President Truman issue his executive order integrating the U.S. Army, and Brown v. Board of Education was an entire decade away.

Yet, in 1941, Saint Mary's President Sister M. Madeleva Wolff, CSC, took a bold stance and
decided to enroll Saint Mary's first African American student. As she relates in her autobiography, My First Seventy Years, that decision occurred when a Southern monsignor "met me in the corridor [during a liturgical conference] with the abrupt, 'Sister, will you accept Negro students at Saint Mary's?' For years I had been waiting for this question. I knew only one answer, the right one. If it emptied the school, we would enroll Negro girls in residence. My answer to Monsignor was simply, 'Yes, Monsignor, we will...' That ended discussion of race problem as a school policy."

Carmelita Desobrey's enrollment in the fall of 1943 was met with a storm of protest–mainly
from parents of current students. Yet, Sister Madeleva stood firm, and her superiors backed her. Desobrey quickly became a top student. "By the third semester, she stood first on the Honor Roll, with a major in science," Sister Madeleva wrote.

As Gail Porter Mandell, a professor in the Humanistic Studies Department, relates in her biography of Sister Madeleva, "by ones and twos" other African American students followed, "their number soon augmented by international students of color from Africa, Southeast Asia, India, and Central and South America. Late in Madeleva's administration, foreign students at the College represented 38 nations. Madeleva justified the many scholarships granted to international students with the comment that to fulfill the Christian obligation to go forth and teach all nations, the College must improvise and 'bring all nations to us.'"

By the late 1940s, with a handful of students of color enrolled, a student group took the
initiative to further integrate the school. One of their number, Ramona Oppenheim '50 recalls
that efforts on this front were encouraged by Sister Maria Pieta '22, CSC, the moderator of the "staff students," those Saint Mary's students who worked their way through college. Led by Mary Mackey '49, the members of a core group proposed that all Saint Mary's students contribute "a penny a day" to the Martin De Porres Student Scholarship Fund and so fund the education of "a Negro girl." The student newspaper, The Static, reports that "the student body voted overwhelming approval of the project" and students were issued small banks labeled with the "Penny-a-Day" logo. Publicity of the scholarship fund on local radio stations spurred
contributions from community members as well, and more than $500 was collected in the first two months.

Current sophomore Kimberly Hodges researched enrollment of African American students at
Saint Mary's as part of her Introduction to Communication class. She discovered that the Martin de Porres scholarship funded 16 students and continued until 1967. Hodges concluded that while Sister Madeleva and Sister Maria Pieta "pushed the envelope" of race on campus because of their conviction that their Catholic faith demanded it, "their vision of a diverse Saint Mary's was never realized because of the small number of African American students on campus at any one time." In her interviews with three of the Martin de Porres students, Hodges says, she found that "although these alumnae believed they received an excellent education in Saint Mary's classrooms, their lives outside that sphere were lonely.

Despite the student body's enthusiasm for funding the scholarship, all three experienced a subtle but painful feeling of exclusion. These women stayed on because their families and communities depended on them, and they knew that a good education required a great personal sacrifice on their part."

Mary Hendriksen is a freelance writer and frequent writer for Courier.