Impenetrable racial barrier in higher education broken 50 years ago this month!
A few months after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered racial integration of the public schools in "Brown vs. the Board of Education" young Marigold Linton mustered the courage to break an even more impenetrable racial barrier in higher education -- without any fanfare or court decisions.
(PRWEB) September 16, 2004 -- "Brown vs. the Board of Education" wasn't the
only civil rights breakthrough in 1954. A few months after the U.S. Supreme
Court's landmark decision, young Marigold Linton broke a seemingly impenetrable
racial barrier in higher education. But there won't be any fanfare, parades, or
proclamations for that courageous "bright little Indian girl" who in September
1954 became the very first Indian from a California reservation to attend
college.
At one point, Linton was one of just 14 Native Americans to hold
a Ph.D. — her breakthrough eventually led to 169 American Indians earning a
Ph.D. in 2000 alone. In addition to attaining tenure at San Diego State
University and the University of Utah in cognitive psychology, she co-founded
the National Indian Education Association and is now is Director of American
Indian Outreach at the University of Kansas. Co-author of the bestseller
textbook on statistics, Linton has just been named alongside Lance Armstrong as
an example of the courage needed to fulfill your dreams in the book "Dream It Do
It: Inspiring Stories of Dreams Come True" by Sharon Cook and Graciela Sholander
(Planning/Communications, $16.95, 2004, http://www.dreamitdoit.net, 888/366-5200).
"Just as
Lance Armstrong showed incredible courage recovering from his widespread cancer
to become the all-time champion of the Tour de France, the teenage Linton had to
muster all the courage she could to overcome her fears, defeatism, and a whole
new culture to enter the University of California-Riverside in 1954," explains
Graciela Sholander, co-author of Dream It Do It. "Nobody living on an Indian
reservation in California had even entered college, much less graduated.
Everywhere she turned, she faced discouraging words, and nobody on her Morongo
Reservation in Southern California could even tell her what college was. To
flourish in an entirely different world than the one she grew up in, Linton
embodied the same fortitude and courage that Armstrong has displayed 50 years
later."
Fortunately for Linton and the thousands who have followed in her
footsteps, her eighth grade teacher not only knew what college was but
recognized college material. Breaking with the tradition that kept white people
from setting foot on reservation grounds, Linton's eighth grade teacher Mrs.
Adams visited Linton's phoneless mother to tell her "Your daughter is very
bright. You must make sure she goes to college." This visit made a huge
impression on Linton giving her the goal of attending college, whatever that
was.
But it took more than a dream to get to college in the face of the
overt racial discrimination that dominated the 1950s. No other teacher at the
off-reservation, nearly all-white Banning Union High School took an interest in
"our bright little Indian girl." And when Linton's grade point average tied her
with another student for valedictorian, the principal arbitrarily dropped to
Linton second solely due to her race.
"I thought it was unfair but being
stoic, I did nothing about it," Linton recalls. "That's just the way things
were. But I had begun to think, 'Someday, people will realize how remarkable my
performance is.'" Knowing the score, Linton didn't even approach any high school
teachers for recommendation letters for college, instead searching out others
with college degrees, including a town librarian and a local newspaper reporter
interested in Indian affairs.
"The transition to college can be rough on
any child," notes Sharon Cook, coauthor of "Dream It Do It." "But try to imagine
the challenges faced by someone who has lived her entire life on an Indian
reservation. It's a brave new world where, at age 18, she had to suddenly learn
a whole new way of living that everybody around her had learned since early
childhood."
"Everything was traumatic," Linton recalls. "First I couldn't
figure out how to catch the bus and then, wanting to remain as unobtrusive as
possible, I couldn't bring myself to pull the cord to get off. On campus I was
afraid to make a fool of myself, so I never talked. When called on in class, I
would start crying and run out of the room."
She sure wasn't getting any
support from the folks back home who thought they were being kind and giving her
a reality check when they repeatedly told her that she would flunk out before
the first semester ended. Her father reassured her that when she flunked out,
she was always welcome back home. At the shirt factory where she worked to save
for tuition the summer of 1954, her employers tried to talk her out of college.
"They basically said, 'You're going to flunk out anyway, so why bother?" Linton
recalls. "They wanted me to stay and work for them for 50 cents an hour, which
was 90 percent more than what most on my reservation were making. I thought,
'Well, if I'm that good at the shirt factory, I'll try college. And if I flunk
out, I'll go back to the shirt factory." Even though she was terrified of
flunking out of college — and half-convinced that she would — Linton was
determined to try.
Linton's courage and native intelligence won out, and
Linton entered the newly-opened Riverside campus of the University of
California. Foregoing the social and recreational temptations freshmen face,
Linton spent nearly every waking moment studying. Receiving straight A's her
first semester, she marched into the university registrar's office and "told
them that there was a mistake and that they had given me the wrong grades. I was
quite insistent that they should take these grades back and give them to
whomever they really belonged and give me my real grades," Linton recalls with a
laugh. "They thought I was crazy. It took a very long time before I believed I
might succeed."
Slowly but surely, as she learned the ways of a world she
hadn't grown up in, Linton started dating, working part-time, and winning
increasingly larger scholarships. And learn she did, earning her B.S. in
experimental psychology in 1958 and a Ph.D. at UCLA in 1964.
As her
academic career advanced, she could not forget all the struggles she faced
leaving the reservation, leading to her new dream to expand educational
opportunities for other American Indians. At age 50, she left her secure
position as Director of Educational Services in the College of Education at
Arizona State University to become the school's Director of American Indian
Programs and then, two years later, Director of American Indian Outreach at the
University of Kansas. There she has been awarded grants from NASA, National
Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation to bring quality math
and science programs to Indians living on reservations in Arizona.
Today
"our bright little Indian girl" is President-Elect of the Society for the
Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science and a member of the
University of Kansas' Women's Hall of Fame. In 1994, the University of
California, Riverside, the college where Linton became the first Indian from a
California reservation to attend college, named her "One of 40 Alumni Who Make a
Difference." And this year she was named one of 37 role model dream achievers in
the book Dream It Do It: Inspiring Stories of Dreams Come True, alongside
President Jimmy Carter, Maya Angelou, Barbara Walters, Yo-Yo Ma, Tiger Woods,
and Harrison Ford.
But as much as things change, they still remain the
same. Chances that an American Indian growing up on a reservation will attend
college are still pretty slim, explains Linton. "Reservations remain violent.
There's an increasing amount of drug abuse, and there's always been alcohol
abuse. Bizarrely enough, many in the casino-rich tribes still aren't sending
their kids to college because now that they have money. They feel they don't
have to go."
Yet she persists in trying to give American Indian students
more opportunities for academic success. But it's not easy to convince people
that they can achieve when the only environment they've known hammers home
failure.
"People have different needs at different times," Linton notes.
"Within the American-Indian community, those who want to leave the reservations
should. Those who want to stay on the reservations should. But all need to be
given the opportunity to develop skills."
And pursue their
dreams.
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/9/prweb158495.htm