As the University of Illinois prepares to commemorate the anniversary of Project 500, its ambitious fast-tracked minority recruitment program of 1968, alumni and faculty say they remain gratified by its legacy.
Patricia McKinney Lewis didn’t even consider applying to the University of Illinois as a high school senior in the late 1960s. She had heard it was too hard to get admitted to the Urbana-Champaign campus because of the high standards for the application process. Although she was all set to attend Southern Illinois University, she had second thoughts after a personal appeal from a U of I student who had attended her high school.
One day after school in the spring of 1968, she drove to the university with a mentor, Ms. Florida Gee, to complete an application.
That fall, Lewis was one of 565 minority freshmen to enroll as part of a massive recruiting drive to increase the numbers of Black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination.
The Special Education Opportunities Program (SEOP), known as Project 500, was the most ambitious minority recruitment program in the country at the time. Forty years later, as the university prepares to commemorate Project 500, alumni and faculty say they remain gratified by its legacy.
Since the early 1960s, officials had initiated efforts to build a more diverse student body at the state’s flagship institution. But by 1967, only 67 Black freshmen had enrolled, and there were just 330 Black students in total — barely 1 percent of the total enrollment. That figure had remained virtually static for decades. Officials made plans for a gradual enrollment increase, setting the goal of 500 to 600 freshmen students by 1973.
