CUNY DIGITAL HISTORY ARCHIVE

In this 1965 statement Professor John A. Davis demands that his colleagues at City College take action to increase minority representation at the school. He writes that two years had “passed since various units of City College have been considering ways of increasing the presence of Negro and Puerto Rican students in this college.” Yet, he complains, “the college has been able to do nothing” while other colleges have acted. As a result, Davis proposes: 1) a desegregation program to immediately admit fifty students based on teacher recommendations as well as GPA/SAT scores, 2) beginning summer programs for “culturally deprived” high school juniors and seniors and then admitting them to City College with the help of “guidance and tutorial centers,” and 3) helping to improve the public schools through City’s School of Education.

Davis grew up in Washington D.C. where, in the 1930s, he organized effective black boycotts of racist white businesses, setting off a legal fight that ended in a 1938 Supreme Court victory upholding the picketing rights of civil rights protesters, (New Negro Alliance v. Sanitary Grocery, Co., Inc.) Davis joined City College as a political science professor in 1953-- the same year he assisted the NAACP team in the Brown v. Board of Education case.