“I Didn’t Know I Was Sending You to a Convent”: Institutional Cultures of Respectability and Student Resistance to In Loco Parentis at HBCUs, 1950s–60s

This paper focuses on the legacy of student resistance against the remnants of the “missionary paternalist” model of education at HBCUs during the late 1950s and early 1960s. First, it provides a general sense of the institutional cultures of HBCUs, paying particular attention to campus codes of conduct that were aimed at regulating women student’s physical mobility and social lives. Secondly, this paper situates the legal fall of in loco parentis within the history of student resistance and movement building at HBCUs during the 1950s and early 1960s. It covers individual acts of resistance and organized campaigns that challenged, in particular, the institutional production of gender normativity and bourgeois strategies for racial uplift at HBCUs. While not all fights against rules and regulations at HBCUs were about gender, this paper demonstrates that before and during the rise of the second wave of the feminist movement and the modern southern civil rights movement, Black women were waging gender fights within HBCUs campus communities. These struggles happened at the same time key legal cases dealt major blows to in loco parentis, and contributed to the momentum against the university having the legal power to govern student bodies without due process. The legal fall of in loco parentis was, therefore, not only fought at primarily white institutions. HBCUs were also key sites in the movement against in loco parentis and their students were instrumental in the grassroots student movement to challenge administrative authority across the nation. Many of the legal cases that made the strongest blows to in loco parentis involved students who were expelled for participating in the civil rights movement. Those particular cases came out of southern Black colleges, where students also challenged campus cultures and administrative authority around gender politics and matters of sexuality.