The Journey to Dartmouth
The Great Migration and Cherry Hill
Map of the Great Migration
Public housing in Cherry Hill (1961)
By 1951, the year Wesley Pugh was born, Black communities were flourishing across the urban north and west thanks to a massive exodus of Black Americans from Southern states towards cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington DC. Often formerly sharecroppers, they fled Jim Crow legislation and searched for better economic opportunity, often in the form of factory jobs. This movement became known as “The Great Migration.”
As Black families continued to travel north, they began to occupy important roles as political, cultural, and economic actors. When Pugh was born in Baltimore, MD, he was already part of a “very supportive,” “all-Black” community. His neighborhood, Cherry Hill, was located on the south side of the city.
Constructed in the 1940’s, Cherry Hill was one of several areas in the United States created as a “racially segregated, planned suburb” for Black veterans and their families (Breihan 39). A mix of public and private housing offered space to a wide range of working professionals including doctors, teachers, factory laborers, and construction workers, like Pugh’s father. This neighborhood, sometimes referred to as the “largest public housing project east of Chicago,” was a prosperous site of civic engagement and Black Pride. Quoting Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Nikki-Rosa,” Pugh remarked, “Black love is Black wealth” when reminiscing about Cherry Hill.
Though Cherry Hill was a safe haven for Black children like Pugh, Baltimore was not at all immune to the issues of segregation (both by law and informally) gripping the nation. Cherry Hill has undergone several cycles of gentrification since Pugh’s childhood. His family left the neighborhood when he was in high school due to “economic deterioration” following attempts at integration. Still, the attitude of Black Pride and Power instilled in the children of these communities became a source of hope for many. As Pugh began his journey to college, the desire for equality and advancement helped propel him to Dartmouth.
Opening the Doors to College: Upward Bound and Recruitment
At the time Wesley Pugh was in high school, Black students did not often attend predominantly white institutions (PWIs) for college. This trend was echoed across the nation, as the barriers to education in place often deterred or directly prevented Black students from attending elite institutions.
But as prominent Civil Rights activists and the Black public demanded equality in education, PWIs could not ignore the call for access. In Upending the Ivory Tower, Historian Stefan Bradley writes, “after World War II, these institutions’ officials, in observing the impediments to freedom that black people navigated, realized that they could not close the iron gates to the desires of young people to change their educational experiences and spaces" (4). As an excellent student and athlete, Pugh was an accomplished, highly qualified candidate for an Ivy League education. Still, he likely would have been barred from attending Dartmouth if the Civil Rights Movement had not been occurring. Pugh notes, “I do think that because of a lot of issues that were occurring in society, somewhat similar to now, that the Ivy Leagues decided to, at least temporarily, open the door.” At 10% of the class population, the number of matriculating Black students in the Class of '73 was by far the largest in Dartmouth history.
A New York Times article highlighting the dramatic increase in the admission of Black students at Dartmouth (1969)
In addition to this social trend, some federally-funded programs also empowered students of color with more tools to apply to elite institutions like Dartmouth. One of these programs, Upward Bound, was created after Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act in 1964. This program offered tutoring and support for college admissions, mainly for first-generation and low-income students. It culminated in a residential summer college program, which Pugh spent taking classes at Johns Hopkins University. Though researchers have determined that the program had mixed effectiveness based on location, structure, and funding, Pugh speaks highly of his experiences and how they prepared him for college, commenting that “Upward Bound provided me with an opportunity” and “works extraordinarily well.”
A photo from the University of Maryland's Upward Bound program (1970)