Douglass was almost exclusively white until the 1970s. Though it received federal funds from a program that prohibited racial discrimination, Julia Baxter Bates was admitted in 1934 only because admissions officers believed she was white. Realizing their mistake, school administrators tried to discourage her from registering, then prohibited her from living on campus. She became the first African-American student admitted to Douglass College, and later graduated magna cum laude in English with hopes of becoming a high school instructor.
After earning a master’s degree from @columbia and then being denied the right to teach in New Jersey’s high schools because of her skin color, she became an instructor at @dillarduniversity. She then headed the research component at @NAACP headquarters for two decades in New York, where she worked with powerful civil rights leaders Thurgood Marshall, W.E.B. DuBois, and Walter White. Her research influenced Supreme Court decisions that outlawed discri...