50th Anniversary of Integration

As part of Mercer’s extension program, members of the University faculty instructed African-American students at Macon’s Central City College in a variety of courses.

The Supreme Court issues the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, overturning Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and declaring that with regard to public schools, “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

U.S. District Judge William Augustus Bootle, a Mercer graduate, trustee and former dean of the Mercer Law School, ordered the University of Georgia to admit Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter, thereby ending 160 years of segregation at the institution.

President Rufus Harris announces that Mercer has received “one or two” applications from African-Americans, but none of the applicants were qualified for admission. “We would have not accepted the students if they had been white,” he told The Macon Telegraph. President Harris states that when a “Negro student does qualify for admission, his application will be referred to the board of trustees,” and added that he favored the admission of African-Americans to the University.

The Mercer Law Alumni Association passes a resolution that reads, in part, “Be it resolved, we do register our objection to the integration of the educational facilities of Mercer University, if being the feeling that to so act would be contrary to the best interest of the University and student body.”

Under the leadership of Mercer President Rufus Harris, admission to qualified students without regard to race, color of skin, creed or origin was declared official by the University’s Board of Trustees. Sam Jerry Oni of Ghana became the first Black student admitted to the University.

Civil rights activist and Mississippi’s NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Wiley Evers is assassinated in Jackson, Miss.

A bomb explodes at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four girls attending Sunday school.

Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ends discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender and religion.

Mercer is an early participant in the federal Upward Bound program, which emerges from the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and the Higher Education Act of 1965. The program is designed to prepare lower-income high school students (both Black and white) for college entrance.

Ronald Myrick becomes the first Black student to graduate from Mercer’s Southern School of Pharmacy in Atlanta.

Andrew Young and Sam Oni visit in the spring of 1968 during a Poor People’s Campaign stop in Marks, Miss. The campaign was organized by Martin Luther King Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and was carried out in the wake of Dr. King’s assassination.

Fifty-five Black students start the Black Students Alliance at Mercer. The Alliance was open to any fulltime Mercer student who pledged support to the principles of the organization. As stated in the Alliance’s constitution, the purpose of the organization was to “maintain the Black identity on Mercer’s campus by creating a self-conscious Black community promoting knowledge of Black culture and heritage, and serving as a forum for the expression of Black ideas and goals.”

Mercer faculty approves an interdisciplinary program in Black Studies. The 1971-72 Bulletin includes courses such as “The American Black Experience,” “Civil Rights and the Black American,” “Manifestations of Prejudice,” and “Christian Social Ethics.”

Jerry Boykin, J.D., is the first African-American to graduate from Mercer Law School.

Sam Oni stands before a packed Willingham Auditorium audience at the University’s commemoration of the 30th Anniversary of integration. He received three standing ovations and was so impressed with what he deemed “the new Georgia” that he moved back to the state that same year.