A City Divided: Norfolk, Virginia and Public Higher Education in the Era of Desegregation

This thesis examines the 1978 suggested merger of predominantly white Old Dominion University and historically Black Norfolk State College (now Norfolk State University), two neighboring public higher education institutions. That year the Federal Department of Housing, Education, and Welfare (HEW) and the Office for Civil Rights (ORC) claimed that the two universities offered nine duplicative degree programs. According to HEW and the OCR, this duplication was a violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in all public institutions receiving federal aid. The duplication also represented the last vestiges of Jim Crow segregation in the form of a dual system of education. While a formal merger never occurred, this thesis seeks to understand the nature and limitations of the interracial partnership it, and earlier HEW attempts to desegregate public higher education, created among ODU and NSC as they worked together to impede federal intervention to keep their institutions autonomous. In exploring the role of the federal government and their well-intended, one-size-fits-all desegregation policies of the 1970s, this thesis exposes the irony of federally mandated desegregation. Essentially, the suggested merger of ODU and NSC is a vehicle to understand how misguided federal intervention, cross-campus politics, and local interracial alliances ultimately perpetuated segregation in the Civil Rights age. This segregation continues today as both institutions, anchored within the urban landscape of Norfolk, Virginia, are on two different trajectories and rest within racially recognizable sides of town.