Pearlie Elloie and Barbara Guillory Thompson knew they wouldn’t be admitted into Tulane University — that’s exactly why they applied.
Tulane’s first Black students didn’t step foot on campus until 1963, nearly a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education declared the doctrine of “separate but equal” unconstitutional.
This was because Tulane’s Board of Administrators argued that desegregation would violate Tulane’s charter.
In 1961, Dillard University graduates Thompson and Elloie joined a team of Civil Rights activists to challenge Tulane’s public-private status. The pair’s application, subsequent rejection and the lawsuit that followed ended over 120 years of desegregation at Tulane.
Guillory v. Administrators of Tulane University
In 1954, about one month before the Brown decision, Tulane Graduate School faculty and staff voted to clarify admission policies so that Black students could attend Tulane.
Seven years later, the Board of Administrators issued a statement asserting that they would allow desegregation at the university as long as it didn’t violate the university’s charter, which included Paul Tulane’s endowment to the education of “young white males.”
“One of the conditions that was placed on the gift that Paul Tulane made at the start of the University was that Tulane should never accept for instruction any Black students,” Robert Westley, LOCHEF professor of legal ethics and professional responsibility, said. “We have always had foreign students or students of different races; it’s just that Black people who were citizens and who grew up here could never be allowed to matriculate at Tulane.”
Rosa Keller, a white Civil Rights advocate and the daughter of A.B. Freeman, teamed up with Dillard University’s John Furey and Tulane professor Henry Mason in 1961 to engineer a lawsuit against Tulane that would, hopefully, lead to the university’s desegregation.
Furey then scouted Elloie and Thompson, to serve as plaintiffs in the case. Elloie graduated magna cum laude from Dillard University. Thompson had earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Dillard and later received a master’s degree in sociology from Louisiana State University.
“[Elloie] wanted an education, and she didn’t want to have to drive to Baton Rouge to get an education. That was sort of one of her driving forces to agree to be a part of the lawsuit,” Tulane archivist Ann Case said.
Thompson and Elloie applied to Tulane’s Graduate School and once they were rejected, initiated the lawsuit against the Tulane Board of Administrators.
Keller financed the $10,000 lawsuit while New Orleans Civil Rights attorney John Nelson and his assistant Katherine Wright represented the plaintiffs in the case.
The team sought to challenge Tulane’s status as a private institution, arguing that because Tulane receives state funding, it should be subject to the Fourteenth Amendment.
“From the very beginning of its founding, Tulane received public money, and my understanding is that it continues to receive public subsidies in various ways, but when the issue of desegregation came to the forefront, Tulane tried to claim that it was an entirely private university,” Westley said.
That same year, U.S. Circuit Judge J. Skelly Wright ruled in favor of Thompson and Elloie, arguing that Tulane was a public institution in relation to desegregation.
Tulane quickly appealed the decision to U.S. District Judge Frank B. Ellis, who overturned Wright’s ruling. That same week, however, the Board of Administrators voted to integrate the university in the 1963 spring semester.
“One of the key factors in the decision to voluntarily integrate was the fact that the big foundations that were helping to fund the university … said, if you’re not desegregated, we’re not going to give you this money that we have been giving you up until now,” Case said.
On Jan. 25, 1963, 11 Black students registered at Tulane. Five of those students received advanced degrees.
In October 2023, eight of Tulane’s early Black graduates, including Elloie, gathered for a panel to recount their experiences at Tulane post-segregation. Tulane unveiled a mural of Elloie, alongside two other early Black graduates of the Tulane School of Social Work, at its Downtown campus in 2022.
Despite the desegregation, Tulane maintains a predominantly white student body. Only 5% of Tulane’s class of 2029 identified as Black, while 70% identified as white.
“Tulane is an expensive school, and part of the subordination and discrimination against Black people has clearly been economic, so that’s an effective way of excluding black students from attending the school,” Westley said.
Westley said the ending of affirmative action and the Trump administration’s attack on diversity, equity and inclusion likely pose challenges to maintaining a Black presence in Tulane’s student body.
“There’s been a permission structure that’s been put in place to allow people to express these really negative views around race again, and so we’re going to have to sort of refight the battles that we thought were already won,” Westley said.