AIHP Assistant Director Greg Bond’s poster titled, “‘I Could Feel that My Presence There was Looked Upon as an Intrusion’: African-American Students at Predominantly White Schools and Colleges of Pharmacy, 1842-1925,” recently earned 1st place in the poster competition at the 44th International Congress for the History of Pharmacy in Washington, DC.
Bond’s poster documented and explored the experiences of the first generation of African American students who attended predominantly white schools and colleges of pharmacy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Early black students frequently faced unwelcoming educational environments, ranging from the indifferent and unsupportive to the hostile and exclusionary. Despite such opposition, hundreds of African-American pharmacy students—male and female—persisted in their education and earned pharmacy diplomas from predominantly white institutions in this era.
Bond’s poster used yearbooks, contemporary newspaper and magazine articles, unpublished manuscripts, autobiographical writings, and institutional records to explore the battle over the color line in pharmacy education and the difficulties and obstacles experienced by African-Americans on integrated campuses at both public and private schools of pharmacy from Massachusetts to California and from Washington state to New York.
By documenting and providing statistics about the black students who integrated pharmacy education before 1925, as well as the schools and colleges of pharmacy who enrolled and educated African-Americans, Bond’s poster hoped to reclaim and to highlight the forgotten long histories of African-American students at predominantly white schools and colleges of pharmacy.
