Black at Baylor

Black at Baylor: Vital Voices of the First Generation explores the stories of thirteen of the first Black students to enroll at Baylor University in the 1960s and early 1970s. Each chapter chronicles an individual student’s account of their lived experience of integration within spaces segregated for over a century at the oldest university in Texas. The thirteen students varied in upbringing, hometown, major, and extracurricular activities and included Waco resident Choice Richardson, the first African American baseball athlete and co-graduate of Baylor Law, and Sandra Minor, a nursing student from Indianapolis who transferred to Baylor from a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in Dallas.

Readers of all backgrounds will be inspired and challenged as these Baylor alumni tell their stories in their own words. Drawn from oral histories in the collections of Baylor’s Institute for Oral History, the narratives in this volume offer intimate glimpses into Black students’ lives at Baylor and shine a critical light on an important period in the university’s development. To date, the process of integration at Baylor University has been underdocumented and underrepresented; the remarkable individuals who voice these Black at Baylor stories seek to change that.