"Open Door Policy Draws Comment" headline and student quote from the article, by Dick Johnson, The Meteor, Charleston, South Carolina, December 11, 1967, courtesy of Special Collections at College of Charleston. (View full article here).

Once the Trustees announced the “Open Door Policy” in 1967, white students and faculty had a wide range of responses to the changes coming to campus. Some welcomed African American students. Others expressed disgust. One white student told the College’s newspaper, “I think [the Open Door Policy] will lower the morale of the students. It will destroy what remaining pride we have in The College, by lowering the standards and taking in lower-quality people.” A member of the faculty, Professor George Heltai, also remarked, “Probably more Negro students will be able to enter The College. Taking these students out of their environment will help social democratization.” Implicit in both quotations was the patronizing and white supremacist assumption of Black inferiority. Whereas that student assumed African American students would lower the educational quality of the institution, Professor Heltai assumed that, by virtue of being among white people, Black students would receive a better education.

Black graduates from Avery who applied to the College of Charleston in the 1940s—and all the other African American applicants since then—were not seeking proximity to whiteness or an escape from Black institutions because the institutions were Black. They sought a quality education and the resources that were disproportionately allocated to white institutions like the College of Charleston. Despite limited and often inadequate resources, Black schools were safe havens that often encouraged radical organizing among Black students, teachers, and administrators. Knowing they might have to endure rejection and harassment at schools like the College, Black students nonetheless left the safety of their communities and applied to white schools in order to access facilities, libraries, classroom materials, and other resources that they would have otherwise been denied. In the Charleston area, many local Black students also wanted to attend a college closer to home since the closest Black college was in Orangeburg, South Carolina, nearly 80 miles away. With a variety of motivations, these students’ actions—whether political, practical, or both—challenged the lingering “badges of servitude” and supposed Black inferiority that white supremacy and Jim Crow segregation intended to reinforce