Spring 2002 volume 98 issue 2 : letters
Anita Hemmings
I was very pleased to read the winter Quarterly article on Anita Hemmings and to learn that Dr. June Jackson Christmas had come to Vassar in the fall of 1940. Some of us who had worked in 1939-40 to encourage African-American students to come to Vassar had never heard that any had been admitted that early.
I would like to add a little more history. The annual Political Association Conference was held the first weekend of November 1939 on the South whose agricultural, economic, voting, health, education problems were being emphasized by the Roosevelt administration. The conference had several national leaders as speakers or panel participants, including Tennessee Valley power officials, NAACP president Walter White, the poet Sterling Brown and several Vassar graduates working with education projects in the South.
The next issue of the Vassar Miscellany News, November 8, 1939, highlighted a letter from Ruby T. Norris, Economics Department professor, "...it would indeed be a suitable and moving tribute to the effectiveness of this Conference, if as an aftermath, Vassar College would move to admit more Negroes..." She suggested Vassar offer Freshman scholarships to able Negroes. An editorial in the Miscellany News supported Mrs. Norris, followed by several later editorials, and then by an effort to persuade able African-American high school seniors to apply. As I recall three students, including Walter White’s daughter, came to visit the college, but decided to go to Smith or other colleges where there was, as Mrs. Norris said, "a habit of having a Negro group." The Misc. editors who had graduated in June thought we had failed. It is good news to hear the Community Church with Rev. Robinson was successful.
Nancy McInerny Wagner ’40
Accokeek, Maryland