The ‘First Five’: Duke’s first Black undergraduates

On the 56th anniversary of the Allen Building Takeover, a day that served as a turning point in race relations at the University and has become emblematic of a strong student activist culture on campus, The Chronicle reflects on how Duke shaped each member of the influential First Five and how, in turn, their legacies bent the institution toward a more inclusive learning environment in the present.

Although the first five Black undergraduate students to enroll at Duke all hailed from the Carolinas, they found themselves in a foreign environment when they arrived on campus in the fall of 1963.

For the first time since Trinity College was founded 125 years prior, Black undergraduates would participate in campus academic and social life. However, for Wilhelmina Reuben-Cooke and her peers, the transition to a predominantly white institution came with significant challenges and cultural shocks.

“In the midst of all the other adjustments you had to make, you also had the stress … of being seen as different,” Reuben-Cooke said in a Feb. 11, 2000, article published by The Chronicle. “The kind of support structures that people take for granted were not there.”

Despite growing up in Durham, Mary Mitchell Harris, also a member of the University’s first class of Black undergraduates, found the experience “surreal” when she stepped onto Duke’s campus.

“It was like another world altogether,” she said. “Our presence meant change for everybody.”

Reuben-Cooke and Harris were part of the pioneering group of African American undergraduate students — known as the “First Five” — who enrolled at Duke at a time when the institution had no Black faculty, administrators or trustees.

Not every member of the “First Five” graduated from the University, but they are remembered collectively as trailblazers who broke racial barriers and paved the way for future generations of Black students.

In 1954, the Supreme Court outlawed all forms of segregation in public schools. The following year, Southern universities including The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill began admitting Black undergraduates.

Under increased pressure from the federal government, as well as some students and faculty, Duke’s Board of Trustees voted on March 8, 1961, to end its racially exclusive admission policy for graduate and professional schools. On June 2, 1962, the University officially opened admissions to all undergraduate applicants “without regard to race.”

Finding the five

Attending Duke was a dream-come-true moment for Harris, who decided in 10th grade that she wanted to enroll at the University.

The Durham native graduated as valedictorian of her senior class at Hillside High School, a historically Black high school where her guidance counselor urged her to consider Duke. Harris followed her advice, and she was soon offered a place in the Class of 1967.

Nathaniel White Jr. attended Hillside High School alongside Harris. When he chose Duke, White knew his social circle would be smaller than if he enrolled at Hampton Institute, his father’s historically Black alma mater — now known as Hampton University — and where White planned to attend before he received the invitation to become a Blue Devil. But the opportunity to go from an all-Black learning environment to a predominantly white one represented “an appealing challenge” for the young student, he later recounted.

Three counties westward, Greensboro native Gene Kendall was faced with a conundrum: attend a historically Black college, Princeton University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Duke. His hometown community was “ecstatic” when he decided on Duke after he was offered a full scholarship.

A graduate of James B. Dudley High School, then a segregated school, Kendall remembered that the University was “genuinely interested” in him.

“I was treated with kid gloves, and there were instances of special treatment,” Kendall said in a Jan. 11, 1983, Chronicle article. “But Duke was characteristically laissez-faire. I was not simply a token.”

Cassandra Smith Rush first applied to Duke as a junior at St. Anne’s Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school in Winston-Salem. At the time, the University was still segregated, and her application was rejected.

After learning that the Board of Trustees had voted to admit Black applicants a few months later, Rush reapplied, was accepted and earned a scholarship to attend.

The eldest of six children, Reuben-Cooke embraced the values of education, community and social change at a young age. Her father, Rev. Dr. Odell Reuben, served as president of Morris College in Sumter, South Carolina, and her mother was a member of the faculty.

Reuben was himself one of the first three Black students to enroll in a Duke graduate program, and it was his adviser who encouraged Reuben-Cooke to apply to the University. But a year after her father received his degree, Reuben-Cooke still wasn’t convinced to attend — until she visited the Bull City and fell in love with the Sarah P. Duke Gardens and campus scenery.

From ‘a novelty effect’ to trailblazers

Even though his family lived just three miles away from campus, White discovered that it was “like going to a whole new city” when he first arrived at Duke.

“We [Black undergraduates] were a novelty effect because we were new; you know, ‘What are they really like?’” White wrote in a 1992 Duke Magazine feature in which the First Five reflected on their experiences as students and the University’s future direction.

Harris described her welcome on campus as largely positive, noting that she was treated as somewhat of a curiosity but that students were well prepared for her arrival.

“It wasn’t unnerving at all,” she said. “It was great receptiveness.” 

Still, the experience of the First Five was not without its challenges.

“Some of the students would cross the quad rather than speak to me,” Rush wrote in the Duke Magazine feature. “Or they would look the other way when they walked past.”

Raised in a “very sheltered environment,” Rush recalled that she felt “really hurt” by such slights and that, for a long time, she had to “put it out of [her] mind because it was so unpleasant.”

While Harris had little problem acclimating to the academic culture, she admitted to experiencing moments of anxiety when she wondered whether her high school preparation could measure up to the standards of her peers at Duke. Nevertheless, she made the dean’s list at the end of her first year.

Harris often sought out spaces that felt more welcoming on the unfamiliar campus, expressing a particular sense of comfort with the workers at Duke’s dining and residence halls, most of whom were African American. She described the relationship as “friendly, but loose and detached.”

“Once I was there, it was like being in a world inside a world I’d known all my life,” she wrote in the Duke Magazine feature.

Duke ultimately brought Harris more lasting connections. Her sophomore year, she fell in love and decided to marry Michael William Harris, a graduate of North Carolina College, now North Carolina Central University.

Kendall, however, struggled to find his academic footing. Although he was top of his class in high school, he found that his previous studies left him ill-prepared for his University coursework in math and science.

When Kendall received a low grade on his first physics exam, he knew he was at risk of losing his scholarship. He was “devastated by [his] failure” and asked himself whether he was “as smart as everyone says [he was],” he wrote in the Duke Magazine feature.

He dropped out of Duke in his sophomore year, trading college for a career in the U.S. Navy.

“In retrospect, my chances at Duke were very, very slim,” Kendall later reflected.

Reuben-Cooke knew that coming to an all-white college would be no “easy task,” but she believed that it was her “responsibility to create the environment [she] desire[d].”

“[Y]ou can’t criticize what you don’t participate in,” she asserted in the Duke Magazine feature.

Accordingly, Reuben-Cooke immersed herself in student life, joining the Young Women's Christian Association and the Freshman Advisory Council and being selected for Phi Beta Kappa. She wrote that “Duke made it a comfortable possibility” for her to get involved in the campus community and that even though reflections on her years as a student trailblazer often take a serious tone, her overall experience as a Blue Devil “was always fun.”

Reuben-Cooke was one of the University’s most popular undergraduates by the time she completed her degree. In addition to being listed in a “Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges,” the senior was elected May Queen by the overwhelmingly white student body in the Woman’s College, becoming the first African American student to receive the honor.

For many at Duke, Reuben-Cooke’s “crowning” symbolized progress towards racial equity, with one alumnus penning a letter to then-President Douglas Knight that her selection marked “a step towards interracial accord.”

Not everyone was thrilled for Reuben-Cooke, though, and news of her victory sparked backlash from some influential voices. Trustee C.B. Houck expressed concern that Reuben-Cooke’s election would make for “poor and critical relationship[s] among many people, particularly in the South.” Fellow Trustee George Ivey found it “nauseating to contemplate” that students voted for an African American “as a ‘beauty’ to represent the student body.”

But Duke’s student body was quickly changing.

Civil Rights take center stage

In 1966, three years after the First Five first moved onto campus, C.B. Claiborne would become the first African American basketball player to attend Duke and play for the Blue Devils. But crossing the racial line on the court meant troubles off the court for Claiborne, who often faced harassment at Duke and on the team due to his race.

Claiborne wasn’t the only Black student to face indignities inside Cameron Indoor Stadium at the time. White, a fan of the men’s basketball team, remembered that it was a long-standing tradition during games to play “Dixie” — a popular Southern tune at the time but one with ties to serious harms perpetuated against the African American community — as the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy. So while fans at the games would stand up and sing along, White organized sit-downs in protest.

“We eventually had a whole section that wouldn’t stand when [Dixie] was played,” White wrote in the Duke Magazine feature. “They finally stopped playing it. They were beginning to learn.”

He said he encountered relatively few significant incidents of racial conflict while at Duke — which he attributed in part to the lack of Black students on campus that rendered their presence “fairly negligible” for the rest of the community. Nevertheless, White found himself dealing with entrenched discriminatory racial attitudes and customs that pervaded the University, despite the official policy of desegregation. He recalled an instance when a professor altered the entire grading system so that White would receive a C in the course, despite being the only student to earn a perfect score on the midterm.

Racial discrimination extended beyond the classroom to the University’s administration. When White urged an athletics administrator to recruit Black athletes, he received a lecture on how Duke maintained a high academic bar. In response, White told him that “[he] didn’t think [he’d] gotten in without meeting those academic standards.”

According to White, racial tensions on campus became more visible with the enrollment of more students of color. He recalled a bomb threat made during the Class of 1967’s commencement ceremony when people learned that members of the First Five were among the graduates.

Harris remembered the classroom as being largely disconnected from contemporary social issues, noting that discussions typically focused on shared experiences outside of race.

“We didn’t have open conversations about racial issues, not even informally,” she wrote in the Duke Magazine feature. “I guess me just being there was enough of a statement. It really was.”

One of Kendall’s fondest memories of Duke was the tight bonds he built with his African American first-year classmates; he noted that because there were only five of them, they forged deep connections with one another and frequently spent time “listening to each other’s problems.”

Caught in the tides of social and political change, Kendall helped found a chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an interracial civil rights organization, on Duke’s campus. Rush joined the group, which organized a sit-in protesting a segregated restaurant in Chapel Hill where several members — including Rush — were arrested and charged with trespassing and resisting arrest.

Reuben-Cooke’s commitment to social justice and equality also drove her to the Civil Rights Movement, and she participated in a number of demonstrations in Durham and Chapel Hill. She signed an open letter protesting against several Duke administrators and faculty members’ membership at the segregated Hope Valley Country Club.

“I had a sense of personal commitment; It was the [‘60s] and the quest for change and civil rights was gaining momentum,” Reuben-Cooke wrote in the Duke Magazine feature. “It seemed to all of us that we had a role to play.”

Kendall described the First Five’s achievement as “a stepping stone that had to be planted” at a Jan. 25, 2013, ceremony marking 50 years of integration at Duke. 

"Somebody had to do those things, and it was what I was supposed to do, and I went off to do it," he said.

After Duke

After earning her degree from Duke, where she studied on the pre-med track, Harris served as a performance counselor at Georgia Tech University. She later transitioned to education consulting and became the president of Harris Learning Solutions. She died in 2002.

Over the course of his 35-year career in the Navy, Kendall was the commander of three ships and eventually rose to the rank of rear admiral in 1996, becoming the 12th African American in U.S. history to achieve the feat. His leadership and service was honored with two Legion of Merit awards and three Meritorious Service Medals.

He shared that his Duke experience was a turning point in his life that helped “put things into perspective,” later writing that “it taught [him] to look for whatever [he] was uncomfortable with and work on that, rather than assume everything is okay because the surface seems fine.”

Encouraged by the Navy to return to school, he enrolled at the University of Kansas to pursue his bachelor's and master’s degrees. While Kendall originally hoped to return to Duke, the military only agreed to send him to UNC-Chapel Hill due to tuition expenses. He felt there was little point returning to North Carolina if he could not attend Duke and refused the offer.

Today, Kendall serves as CEO of Admiralk Consulting and resides in Fernandina Beach, Florida, with his wife and two sons. He is the last surviving member of the First Five.

With initial aspirations of a medical career, Rush was a zoology major before a rigorous anatomy course prompted her to switch to French. She left the University in the middle of her junior year and began working for the U.S. government in Washington, D.C., holding positions at the Federal Reserve and Navy before receiving an employee scholarship to return to college. She graduated from Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1979.

Rush later worked as a staff specialist for Southern New England Telephone in New Haven, Connecticut, and as an instructor at Adult Education in the New Haven Public School System. She died in 1996 at age 50.

After graduating with a degree in mathematics, White entered a career in public health when he was accepted as commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service in 1969. For two decades, he worked as a consulting statistician, conducting clinical trials and research design in epidemiology. In 1993, White became director of the Public Health Sciences Institute and director of the Office of Sponsored Research at Morehouse College. He died in 2021 at the age of 75.

After getting married, Reuben-Cooke graduated from the University of Michigan Law School in 1973 and practiced communications law as an associate attorney for a law firm in Washington, D.C. She went on to become a law professor and senior administrator at various institutions, but maintained close ties with her alma mater, serving two terms on the Board of Trustees and as a trustee for The Duke Endowment until her death in 2019 at the age of 72. In 2011, the University honored her service and legacy by presenting her with the Distinguished Alumni Award.

Miles to go

Rush later reflected on the differences between her generation and her children’s, who came of age in an integrated society.

“They grew up in an environment where we didn’t label people Black, white, Chinese, whatever,” Rush wrote in the Duke Magazine feature. “Consequently, they fit right in and feel they’re entitled to the same rights as anyone else.”

Today, about 65% of Duke’s undergraduate population consists of students of color — a milestone made possible by the barriers broken by the First Five. However, the road to racial justice and equity on campus would span decades, extending well beyond the First Five’s departure from campus.

The first major show of civil rights activism on campus took place the same year members of the First Five graduated. The University’s continued use of segregated facilities off campus came to the forefront of campus debates, and when the administration failed to clarify its official policy, students took matters into their own hands by organizing a “study-in” outside President Knight’s office in the Allen Building on Nov. 13, 1967.

Civil disobedience accelerated in the aftermath of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. the following year, with a peaceful occupation of Knight’s house, followed by a four-day sit-in that came to be known as the “Silent Vigil.”

In October 1968, students of color presented a dozen “concerns” to the administration, which included demands for the establishment of a Black studies program and increased hiring of Black faculty and enrollment of Black students, among others. When the administration made little headway, student frustration heightened, culminating in the occupation of the Allen Building on Feb. 13, 1969. Students refused to vacate the building while their demands remained unmet, eventually causing a confrontation with police officers who fired tear gas upon the students.

Although students were largely unsatisfied by the ensuing negotiations with administrators, the University’s African and African American studies department was eventually established in 1970. In 1983, the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture opened with a mission to preserve and enhance Black culture at Duke and promote the recruitment of Black students to the University. The Reginaldo Howard Memorial Scholarship Program was established in 1979 to cover full tuition, room and board for selected Black undergraduate students to honor the legacy of Reginaldo “Reggie” Howard, the first Black student government president who died in an automobile accident during his sophomore year.

In 2013, the University established a scholarship to pay tribute to the First Five and promote diversity on campus, funded by a $1 million gift from Jack Bovender, a white classmate of the First Five who asserted that “[t]heir bravery changed Duke forever.” The same year, Reuben-Cooke, White and Kendall, then the three surviving members of the First Five, returned to campus for a ceremony commemorating 50 years of integration at Duke.

“African American students are such a central part of what this university is,” Reuben-Cooke said in 2013, reflecting on the First Five’s role in making Duke an inclusive learning environment and noting that she was impressed by how the increased diversity of the student body.

Although Reuben-Cooke has emphasized the importance of increasing the enrollment of African American students, she has also explained that diversity in education relies on more than just numbers.

“The demographics of the [21st] century will be far different than today’s,” she wrote in the Duke Magazine feature. “And part of our responsibility is to educate students on how to live and work with other people.”

In fall 2021, the Sociology-Psychology Building was renamed in honor of Reuben-Cooke, making her the first Black woman to have a campus building named for her.

“When the building that now bears Professor Reuben-Cooke’s name first opened, she would not have been allowed to enter it as a student,” President Vincent Price wrote in a Sept. 26, 2020, announcement to the Duke community renaming the building. “From this day forward, anyone who passes through its doors will carry on her legacy of accomplishment, engagement and lasting impact.”

Also in fall 2020, Black student group leaders came together to organize the Mitchell-White House in honor of Harris and White. Today, it hosts a Black Cultural Living and Learning Community, which was founded to cultivate a residential community among Black students on campus and lost its previous home when Central Campus was closed in 2019.

However, the 2023 Supreme Court landmark ruling prohibiting higher education institutions from using race as a factor in admissions practices may impact the University’s diversity efforts. In April 2024, Duke ended the Reggie Scholars program, replacing the merit scholarship with a new leadership program open to all undergraduates, regardless of race. 

The University has faced scrutiny over the demographics of the Class of 2028, which showed a six-percentage-point drop in the proportion of Asian students compared to the previous class.

Despite continuing challenges surrounding race relations and equity on campus, much of the progress of the past six decades would not have been possible without the First Five and the doors they opened for historically underrepresented groups on campus.

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