Originally published on February 27, 2023 (Episode 305)
Introduction
In 1835, Oberlin College in Ohio made the radical decision to admit Black students as a matter of explicit policy. While a few other institutions allowed occasional Black enrollment, Oberlin’s stand was unique in its clarity and purpose. For decades, Black and white students there—and later at Berea College in Kentucky—stood together first in the cause of abolition, and then in the fight for civil rights.
Yet following the collapse of Reconstruction, even these campuses that once stood as bastions of equality began to draw color lines. Black students remained in the classroom, but discrimination crept into every other aspect of college life: housing, extracurriculars, and the informal networks that shaped campus culture. As John Frederick Bell demonstrates in his new book Degrees of Equality: Abolitionist Colleges and the Politics of Race (LSU Press, 2023), the shift amounted to a moral counterrevolution. Colleges originally founded to create a community of principle instead compromised their ideals, mirroring the retreat from equality in the nation at large.
About the Guest
John Frederick Bell is Associate Professor of History at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts He is a social and cultural historian of the United States specializing in race, education, and the Black freedom struggle. Degrees of Equality is his first book.
For Further Investigation
John Frederick Bell, Degrees of Equality: Abolitionist Colleges and the Politics of Race (LSU Press, 2023)
John Frederick Bell, “Early Black Collegians and the Fight for Full Inclusion,” Black Perspectives (May 24, 2022)
Nat Brandt, The Town That Started the Civil War: The True Story of the Community That Stood Up to Slavery—and Changed a Nation Forever (Random House, 1991)
Kabria Baumgartner, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (NYU, 2019)
Ronald Butchart, Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861–1876 (UNC, 2013)
Christi Smith, Reparation & Reconciliation: The Rise and Fall of Integrated Higher Education (UNC, 2016)
Adam Harris, “The Little College Where Tuition Is Free and Every Student Is Given a Job,” The Atlantic (October 2018)
Related conversations
• Douglas Egerton on Reconstruction
💬 Listen & Discuss
How should we interpret Oberlin’s and Berea’s retreat from racial equality after Reconstruction? Was this a story of institutional failure, or of broader national collapse? Share your reflections in the comments—and forward this episode to a colleague or student interested in the history of higher education and race.
