Facing Hostility, Finding Housing: African American Students at the University of Iowa, 1920s-1950s

Abstract

m e r ic a n S tu d e n ts a t th e U n iv e rs ity o f Io w a , 1 9 2 0 s -1 9 5 0 s b y R ic h a rd M. B re a u x I n 1921, an African American law student in Iowa City wrote to James Weldon Johnson at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: "The conditions in this city are at present almost unlivable for a colored student.The attitude of hostility is felt most keenly in the matter of housing.No one will rent to colored fraternities and no one will sell in a livable locality/'The University of Iowa law student, William Edwin Taylor, related how a local property owner had broken a contract with Taylor's fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi, when members of the local Ku Klux Klan organized to outbid the black students."I have been in this city long enough to note the crystallization of sentiment against us," Taylor concluded."There is an organization of the Ku Klux Klan here, and I have not the least doubt but that they are financing the scheme to effect our ruin."Some African American women students in Iowa City earned their room and board by working as livein domestics in faculty homes.As the Iowa Bystander described it, these students "ran to school in the morning without a chance to glance in the glass, hurrying back at noon to help with the mid-day meal, then another run to school.When the evening work was done, they were [too] tired to study."Being an African American college student in the 1920s was challenging enough.Race-based housing restrictions made it even more so.An unwritten University of Iowa policy, for instance, prohibited African American men and women from living in the two campus dormitories.Fed up with having their housing rest on the whim of property owners' racial views, several women students from the university traveled to Marshalltown in 1919 to request help at the annual meeting of the Iowa Federation of Colored Women's Clubs.The result was the Federation Home