Half a century ago, 17-year-old Ralph A. Long Jr. made history as one of the first Black students to integrate the Atlanta-based Georgia Institute of Technology.
Today, the technology specialist, now 68, can’t help but reflect on the 125-year-old school’s evolution from being one of the last bastions of White privilege to becoming an institutional leader in the number of engineering degrees conferred upon Black students.
“Georgia Tech was non-existent,” Long recalls of the school’s former inaccessibility to Black students. Faced with numerous obstacles at the school, Long transferred. “But now,” he says, “you have thousands of students who have graduated from there. Georgia Tech has proven for Black kids to become part of their educational mainstream.”
Georgia Tech opened its doors to Black students in 1961, the first public university in the Deep South to integrate without being forced to do so via court order. Compared to many other Southern universities, Georgia Tech’s integration occurred in relative peace. In the years since, the school has gone from serving just a few dozen Black students to more than 1,100 per year every year since 1995.
The institution ranks second among schools awarding the most bachelor’s degrees to African-Americans, and third awarding bachelor’s to all minorities, according to Diverse’s Top 100 degree producers ranking for 2010.
Non-White students as a whole currently constitute nearly half the 20,720-person student body. The numbers of Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander populations have more than doubled in the past 15 years, from 411 and 1,157, respectively, in 1995 to 954 and 2,898, respectively, in 2010.
As the complexion of the student body has changed, so has the way in which demographics and equity at institutions of higher learning are viewed and discussed.
