Up one level[Excerpt from: Erica Layne Whittington. From the Campus to the Globe: Race, Internationalism and Student Activism in the Postwar South, 1945-1962. PhD dissertation. The University of Texas at Austin, May 2012. Page 131. https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/41456/whittington_dissertation_20122.pdf?sequence=1]
"While the Sweatt case worked its way through the courts, other Southern universities attempted half-measures that theoretically desegregated public graduate schools, but in actuality constructed a “second-class” experience for black students. The University of Kentucky read the writing on the wall and admitted John Wesley Hatch as the first black student to enroll at the UK Law School in 1948. Due to segregation laws, his professors taught him individually at a separate campus, in a style reminiscent of UT’s hastily assembled “separate but equal” law school for blacks. In 1949, a court order forced the University of Kentucky to admit black students to the main law school in Lexington. Hatch could attend lectures with white students, but he was never able to forget his separate status. In the library, he had to sit alone at a special table. “Segregation was a fact of life in Kentucky,” Hatch recalled.“It was a stressful situation to be set apart like that.”78. This pattern of partitioning the first black students in academic facilities was common until the Supreme Court ruled against this kind of segregation within academic facilities in 1950 in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents.
[Reference 78 is Robert Bruce Slater, “The Blacks Who First Entered the World of White Higher Education,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 13 (July 1, 1994): 53]
See also Interview with John Wesley Hatch, May 1, 1994 at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries, Interviewers: Lauretta Byers and Terry L. Birdwhistell. Interview accession: 1994oh059_af532. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/catalog/xt7ncj87m141
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