My Self-Taught Summer Crash Course on the Black History of Northeastern University

The Northeastern University sign at Krentzman Quad, viewed from Huntington Ave with Ell Hall in the background, often viewed as the center of campus. Taken by Edward Ode on June 1, 2020. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

My name is Hunter Moyler, and I am a HistoryMakers Student Ambassador and an incoming second-year history master’s student at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, where my focus is on public history. In this blog post, I’m going to share a bit of what I’ve learned about the history of African-American students at Northeastern. This is just what I was able to gather entirely remotely in about ten hours of research spread out over a week. I expect my understanding to deepen as the academic year goes on and I actually go to the Northeastern campus. (Barring any more monumental disasters, that is. Let’s all knock on wood, yes?)

Thanks to a recent and ongoing monumental disaster, I have spent all of my time since I started at Northeastern not in Boston but at home in Virginia, taking classes and working remotely. At the time of this writing, I have never actually seen the Northeastern campus! So, when I first received our assignment to begin researching the African-American experience at Northeastern—which came to us in wording that was something like, “research the history of ‘your school’”—at first I didn’t even think of Northeastern. The first place to come to my mind when I read the words, “your school” was the University of Richmond in Virginia, where I attended undergrad. I was once even employed by the University of Richmond’s Race & Racism Project, which aimed to document the history of race on campus. However, I then remembered (not without a bit of surprise, surprisingly), that the school I now attend is Northeastern University—whose campus, like I said, I have never set foot on, let alone learned a single thing about its history in relation to the African-American experience. So, every bit of information that I found out while researching for this assignment was entirely new to me.

As I began my inquiry into the Black history of Northeastern University, one thing became immediately clear: Its Black history was quite different from that of the University of Richmond. UR was founded in 1830 in what was then the largest slaveholding state in the country; Northeastern was founded in 1898 in a state that had decades prior been a hotbed of radical Republican and abolitionist sentiment. UR had enslaved workers (some of whom were buried in a graveyard over which an academic building now stands) and a student body who entirely dropped out of school at the outbreak of the Civil War to form a Confederate regiment; Northeastern obviously had neither of those things. Aspects of Northeastern’s Black history, like a list of its African-American firsts, did not seem to be readily available online like with UR. 

One thing is certain: From my research, it was unclear whether or not Northeastern was ever segregated, or when it would have become unsegregated. It took some digging, but I found this project, “African American Activism & Experience at Northeastern University, 1963-1978,” on the Northeastern library website. However, I wanted to find out a bit about Black life at Northeastern before the 1960s. This was no straightforward task. The historical timeline on the university’s website does not list any significant pieces of history related to the African-American experience. For those visitors seeking a deep dive into the school’s history, Northeastern’s website points visitors to a collection of several digitized books on the Internet Archive. The oldest of these relevant books was Origin and Development of Northeastern University, 1898-1960 by Everett Marston. Although this book covers the earliest history of the university, a brief perusal of it revealed that it did not devote any significant space to the school’s Black history. I used “command + F” to search for keywords in the book, and found that the text did not contain the words “African,” “Negro,” or “colored.” Further, any references to “color” or “black” did not pertain to race at all. That there appeared to be little written about the African-American history of the school before the 60s is curious—did historians of the university simply consider it unremarkable, or are they trying to hide something?

The page on the Internet Archive that the Northeastern website points to for visitors who want an in-depth history of the university to peruse. While these undoubtedly provide a wealth of information, I couldn’t find a good deal of information about the history of Black students. (Source: Internet Archive)

Dissatisfied with what I could find prior to the 1960s, I turned to the HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Searching “Northeastern University” on the Digital Archive yielded 137 stories across 5 pages. One relevant story I found on the second page was a clip from entrepreneur Peter Bynoe. A short analysis of this clip can actually reveal a lot about Northeastern prior to the civil rights movement. Bynoe was born in 1951 and notes that his father came to the United States when he was 13. He further says that his father “went to Northeastern University at a time before it was fashionable I think for African-Americans at a white university” and graduated with an engineering degree in (he thinks) 1936. His father subsequently had difficulty finding work as a Black engineer in Boston due to discrimination. So, we can reasonably conclude that Northeastern did not bar Black people from attending classes and obtaining degrees as early as 1936, despite it being considered a “white school.” This doesn’t tell much about how many Black students there were or anything about the roles they had in student life at the school before the 60s, but it does shed a lot of light on what the racial situation was before the 1960s.

A screenshot of a clip from HistoryMaker Peter Bynoe’s interview in which he discusses his father’s time at Northeastern University. (Source: HistoryMakers Digital Archive)

Satisfied with this information and conscious of the time I had already spent, in vain, looking for more about the Black history of Northeastern before the 60s, I decided to move on. I returned to the project I mentioned earlier,  “African American Activism & Experience at Northeastern University, 1963-1978.” The exhibit was created in 2005, the result of collaboration between the African-American Studies Department and the University Libraries, Archives and Special Collections Department. While a number of different people contributed to the exhibit, as of this writing its project staff includes only Candace Ruby, who graduated from the public history program (my program!) in 2016. A full list of the project’s contributors can be found here.

In 1964, the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Advancement of Education established a scholarship program to allow 25 Boston-area African-American students who wouldn’t normally be able to afford college the opportunity to do so. “The program's goal was to increase business and professional career opportunities for African American youth,” the project reads. Further, Asa Knowles, then president of Northeastern, said that the school’s co-op program (for which it is still known today), would provide “a particularly meaningful solution to the problems faced by young Negroes as well as by employers seeking to hire Negroes.”

Screenshots from Northeastern’s digital exhibit about the Ford Foundation scholarship, including an article written by President Knowles’s. (Source: “African American Activism and Experience at Northeastern, 1963-1978,” a Northeastern University Libraries online exhibition. Boston: Northeastern University Libraries, 2005. URL:
http://www.lib.neu/archives/AfricanAmericanActivism)

There is not a plaque to mark it, but during the 1960s the tree that stands in Krentzman Quad in front of Ell Hall served as the university’s first unofficial African American cultural center. The tree was used as a meeting place where African American students socialized and kept one another informed of university and global news. As time passed, the African American students who met under the tree wanted a home on Northeastern’s campus. Since the university was attended predominantly by commuters, the students envisioned a center that was both community-oriented and student-centered.

The project then moves forward a few years, and notes that although there had been some Black activism on Northeastern’s campus in the 1960s. In 1965, students founded a chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). However, a number of the students found that the organization’s philosophy did not align with their own goals, so they broke away and formed the Afro-American Association (AAA). It was the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 that really spurred the AAA and likeminded fellows into action. The project makes it clear that by the time of King’s death, Black people at Northeastern were at times dissatisfied with their treatment and their place on campus and in the university’s community. In May 1968, five Black students presented President Knowles with a list of 13 demands that had been ratified by about 200 of the school’s 345 Black students. The project reads that with these demands, the students “sought equal status to their white classmates by demanding an increase in African American student enrollment and financial aid, insisting that more culturally related activities and academic courses be instituted,” and demanding that a committee be formed of faculty, admin, and the black student body to ensure the other demands were met. In just four days, Knowles agreed to all of the 13 demands. This, according to the project, “encouraged further activism on campus” and helped lead to the establishment of the African-American Institute, the Department of African-American Studies, and additional scholarships for Black students.

List of 10 of the 13 demands submitted to Northeastern University President Asa S. Knowles in 1968 by African American students in order to redress the white bias that was inherent at NU. (Source: “African American Activism and Experience at Northeastern, 1963-1978,” a Northeastern University Libraries online exhibition. Boston: Northeastern University Libraries, 2005. URL: http://www.lib.neu/archives/AfricanAmericanActivism)

I learned that a tree in front of a building in front of Ell Hall served as a sort of cultural center for the African-American community. It was reportedly a meeting place where students socialized and talked about the news. But, as the years went on, they wanted a more permanent space on campus. Less than a year after students made the first 13 demands, students met with Knowles and submitted a proposal for a African-American center and a Department of African-American Studies. This request, too, was granted. The center was briefly at a building on Forsyth Street, but was moved to its current location at 40 Leon Street in 1971. The new department and African-American Institute probably played a role in the increased Black enrollment that Northeastern saw in the 1970s. By 1976, the number of Black students at the school had risen to approximately a thousand.

Since the 1970s, Black community life at Northeastern appears to have thrived. Today, the campus supports at least 14 Black-centered student organizations and has 7 historically Black fraternities and sororities. Even so, the percentage of Black students at the school does not appear to have changed that much. According to the university’s website, there has recently been about 18,000 undergraduate students, about 5 percent of whom are African-American. So, some quick math tells us that this means there are about 915 African-American students at Northeastern—actually a little bit fewer than in the 1970s. Even taking into account that some students may identify as Black but not necessarily African-American (because, say, their families recently immigrated to the United States from Jamaica or Nigeria), that’s not really a significant portion at all. I’m curious as to why that might be.

Moving back to the Digital Archive, a great many of the HistoryMakers have had some affiliation with Northeastern, either as undergraduate, faculty member, or law student. These HistoryMakers include Ed Bullins, Lt. Gen. Ronald S. Coleman, Jolette Westbrook, Frederic Bertley, James M. Douglas, and Monte Ford. From what I can tell, their experiences were mostly neutral or positive—no dreadful accounts of bold-faced prejudice or anything like that. Alumnus Douglas Holloway, in one clip, says that Black students at Northeastern in the 70s were often looked down upon by those from, say, Brandeis or Tufts, because they typically came from blue-collar backgrounds. This is in line with what I learned earlier about Northeastern’s efforts to provide scholarships to underprivileged Black youth.

Currently, I am endeavoring to become a relative expert on each of the HistoryMakers in the Digital Archive who are Northeastern alums. The first on my list is Monte Ford, who was the senior vice president and chief information officer at American Airlines at the time of his interview with The HistoryMakers in 2004.

Well, that’s about all there is from me this week, folks. I look forward to updating visitors to this blog about my ambassadorship with The HistoryMakers as well as what I learn about Northeastern’s African-American history through the Digital Archive and other means!

The first results that pop up when you look up “Northeastern University” (don’t forget the quotes!) on the HistoryMakers Digital Archive.