Brown University. Brown-Tougaloo Exchange Program.

The relationship between Tougaloo College (an historically African-American college called Tougaloo Southern Christian College from 1954 until 1962) in Jackson, Mississippi, and Brown University was initiated by two Tougaloo trustees with connections to Providence. Rev. Lawrence Durgin, minister of the Broadway Congregational Church in New York (and former minister of the Central Congregational Church in Providence) and Irving Fain, a Providence businessman with a strong social conscience, were members of the Tougaloo Board of Trustees when they appealed to Brown President Barnaby Keeney for assistance with Tougaloo’s fundraising. With help from Brown’s Director of Development, Daniel Earle, planning was begun in 1963 to address Tougaloo’s financial deficit through stronger alumni and foundation relations.

This joint planning process began during the Civil Rights Movement-which was particularly active in the Jackson area-and it drew Brown into a greater than anticipated involvement with the only integrated college of the day in Mississippi. In addition to its financial problems Tougaloo College was facing social and political censure for its active resistance to segregation under the leadership of A. Daniel Beittel. The Jackson press had nicknamed it the “cancer college” because it admitted white students. In 1963 several Tougaloo students had been beaten for trying to sit at the lunch counter of a local Woolworth’s. When an integrated group from the college attended an event on the University of Mississippi campus in 1965, “Ole Miss” students demonstrated. The State of Mississippi, moreover, was moving to revoke Tougaloo College’s charter because, in the words of then-Lt. Governor Carroll Gartin, it was a haven for “queers, quacks, quirks, political agitators and possibly some communists” (Jackson Daily News, 14 Apr. 1964; Box 5, folder 6).

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