The first black faculty members at the nation's highest-ranked universities

For 300 years, America's leading institutions of higher learning observed a strict racial taboo against the hiring of black faculty. Slowly, beginning in the 1940s, the academic rules that restricted appointments to members o f the white race began to change. By the year 1992 blacks had broken throug h the racial faculty barrier at all of the nation's 25 highest-ranked unive rsities. Here are the stories of the pioneering scholars who were appointed the first black faculty members at our nation's most prestigious universit ies.