Oberlin College and the First Integrated Classroom

In eighteen thirty-five, Oberlin College in northeastern Ohio admitted Black students. It was the first college in the United States to do so. It had already admitted women, also a first. The combination made Oberlin, in antebellum America, an institution without a direct equivalent: a place where the social order that governed the rest of the country simply did not apply.

Oberlin became an Underground Railroad station and an organizing center for abolitionism. The town's residents did not merely shelter freedom-seekers; they defied federal law to protect them. On September thirteenth, eighteen fifty-eight, John Price, a formerly enslaved man from Kentucky who had been living in Oberlin, was seized by slave catchers operating under the Fugitive Slave Act. An estimated six hundred Oberlin and Wellington residents surrounded the hotel where Price was being held, removed him through a window, and returned him to Oberlin. The Oberlin-Wellington Rescue became one of the most documented acts of mass civil disobedience in Ohio history. Thirty-seven people were indicted under the Fugitive Slave Act. Charges against most were later dropped, though two of the rescuers served brief jail sentences.

Oberlin College is still in Oberlin, Ohio. It is still a liberal arts institution. The legacy of being first in the country on both racial integration and coeducation shapes how the college understands itself and presents its history.

The town and the college have been arguing about that legacy, in productive and occasionally contentious ways, for nearly two hundred years.