Rice University celebrated 50 years of black undergraduate life with a public forum featuring an alumni panel discussion of Rice in the 1960s and 1970s when the campus and Houston desegregated.
Titled “Reflections of the Past, Promises for the Future,” the forum provided a historical account of Rice’s desegregation and firsthand perspectives on the early years of this transition.
Rice University and the Association of Rice University Black Alumni (ARUBA) welcomed the general public to campus on Feb. 18, 2016.
President David Leebron will presented opening remarks. Centennial historian Melissa Kean and history professor emeritus Allen Matusow discussed the administrative and legal process of desegregating Rice within its historical context. The original charter of the Rice Institute allowed only white students to attend. In 1963 a unanimous Rice Board of Governors filed a lawsuit to allow the school to modify its charter to admit students of all races. Two alumni sued to keep the original charter intact, but in 1966 a state appellate court upheld the modification of Rice’s charter.
A panel of four alumni who graduated in the ’70s also reminisced about Rice during that transitional period: Ronald Arceneaux (1974), Charles Szalkowski (1970), Regina Tippens 1974) and Jan West (1973). Harris County Commissioner Gene Locke will moderate the panel discussion.
The forum was part of a yearlong series of events commemorating 50 years of black undergraduate life at Rice. For more information, visit [ Ссылка ].
