In 1960, the College Entrance Examination Board became an
unexpected participant in the movement to desegregate education in
the South. Working with its partner, Educational Testing Services,
the College Board quietly integrated its Scholastic Aptitude Test
(SAT) centers throughout the Deep South. Traveling from state to
state, taking one school district and even one school at a time,
two College Board staff members, both native southerners, waged "a
campaign of quiet persuasion" and succeeded, establishing a roster
of desegregated test centers within segregated school districts
while the historic battle for civil rights raged around them. In
the context of the larger struggle for equal opportunities for
southern black students, their work addressed a small but critical
barrier to higher education.
Shedding light on this remarkable story for the first time, Jan
Bates Wheeler tells how the College Board staff members -- Ben
Cameron and Ben Gibson -- succeeded. Their candid and thoughtfully
written records of conversations and confrontations, untouched for
nearly fifty years, reveal the persistence required to reach a goal
many thought unachievable and even foolhardy. Indeed, their task
placed them in the unusual position of advocating for school
desegregation on a day-to-day basis as part of their jobs. This
positioned Cameron and Gibson squarely in opposition to prevailing
laws, customs, and attitudes -- an ill-advised stance for any
nascent business venture, particularly one experiencing competition
from a new, rival testing organization purported to accommodate
openly those same laws, customs, and attitudes.
Cameron and Gibson also accepted the personal danger involved in
confrontations with racist school officials. The officials who
cooperated with the pair assumed even greater risk, and in order to
minimize that threat, Cameron and Gibson pledged not to publicize
their efforts. Even years after their work had ended, the two men
refused to write about their campaign for fear of compromising the
people who had helped them. Their concerns, according to Wheeler,
kept this remarkable story largely untold until now.
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