Oberlin College: The Radical Experiment

When Oberlin College opened its doors on the third of December, eighteen thirty-three, it was already an experiment in defiance of convention. Founded by two Presbyterian ministers on the edge of Ohio's Western Reserve, it admitted both men and women from the start, an almost unheard-of arrangement for a serious institution of higher learning in antebellum America.

But the more dramatic rupture came two years later. In eighteen thirty-four, about fifty students at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati had staged what became known as the Lane Debates, a marathon eighteen-night public discussion about slavery and abolition. When the seminary's trustees tried to silence them, the group, soon called the Lane Rebels, walked out. They needed somewhere to go. They agreed to enroll at Oberlin on one condition: that the college open its doors to Black students as well as white ones.

Oberlin's trustees agreed. In eighteen thirty-five, the college admitted its first Black students, including Charles Henry Langston, whose younger brother John Mercer Langston would later become the first Black man elected to Congress from the state of Virginia. Oberlin became one of the first predominantly white institutions in the United States to racially integrate higher education.

The consequences were immediate and lasting. The town of Oberlin became a major station on the Underground Railroad. Students and faculty sheltered freedom seekers making their way toward Canada. The college educated abolitionists, missionaries, and teachers who spread through the South during and after the Civil War.

Famous alumni range across American life: Mary Church Terrell, the civil rights activist who co-founded the National Association of Colored Women, and Clarence Darrow, the great defense attorney. The conservatory, founded separately in eighteen sixty-five and eventually merged with the college, became one of the leading music schools in the country.

Oberlin was not perfect, and its record on race was complicated in ways that historians still debate. But in eighteen thirty-five, it made a choice that no other American college had made, and the reverberations lasted for generations.