Few blacks were part of the MIT community in its early years, even though founder William Barton Rogers, who married into an abolitionist family, had shown a keen interest in issues relating to race. The earliest evidence of blacks at MIT dates from the 1870s though there were no black faculty and no black students at MIT at the time. There were, however, black staff; "Jones' Lunch," a small cafeteria located at one end of the gym, was run by a black caterer named Jones, with the assistance of a small staff of black cooks, washers, and waiters.
The first black student to attend MIT appears to have been Robert Robinson Taylor, who enrolled in 1888 and graduated in 1892. Taylor went on to become a distinguished professor and administrator at the Tuskegee Institute. In April 1911, Taylor was the lone black speaker at the Congress for Technology, MIT’s 50th anniversary celebration. It was not until 1955 that MIT hired its first black faculty member—Joseph R. Applegate, a linguist.
While by most accounts, today’s MIT student body can be characterized as diverse, MIT’s progress to attain a diverse faculty has been slow. The 2010 Report of the Initiative on Faculty Race and Diversity recommends ways to strengthen recruitment and retention of under-represented minority faculty.
Left: Taylor as a student at MIT, ca. 1890. Photograph courtesy of the MIT Museum.
Right: A page from Taylor’s thesis, A Soldiers Home (Arch, 1892, S.B.), courtesy of the Institute Archives and Special Collections. Available online in DSpace at http://dspace.mit.edu.
Object of the Month: February 2011
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