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Jordan's Jumpers. On a small but effective scale is the tireless prodding of Isaac H. McClelland Jr. Negro principal of 90% Negro David Starr Jordan High School in a slum section of Los Angeles. McClelland jars his charges with the indisputable fact that interracial colleges clamor to hand scholarships to Negroes—if they can get qualified ones. "Just think," says he, "you can make yourself $10,000 just by sitting here and working with your brain." When he puts it that way, "they usually jump."
The jumpers have landed in some of the West Coast's top colleges. Phillip Peoples, 21, one of ten Negro children supported solely by their mother, is a boy who never dreamed of going to college. But he tested in Jordan's top 10%, and the school pushed him. Scraping up $9 to pay for college board tests, he did so well that California's rigorous Claremont Men's College gave him a scholarship. He was the first Negro ever accepted at Claremont—but Phil had no clothes to go ("and I mean no clothes—just what he had on," says Principal McClelland). Teachers anted up the cash, and at Claremont, where he has had enough to eat for the first time in his life, Math Major Peoples has averaged better than B for three years. He will go on for an engineering degree at Stanford. Whenever Phil runs out of cash, McClelland & Co. pass the hat again: "No use putting them into college unless you work to keep them there."
Help from Nessfeness. Other eager talent scouts include such famed prep schools as Massachusetts' Phillips Exeter, which annually ferrets out 80 "disadvantaged" boys from all over the U.S., gives most of them full scholarships. One such is Nathaniel LaMar, son of a widowed schoolteacher, who wound up as Exeter's senior class poet, graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, won a fellowship to Cambridge University, has since had short stories published in the Atlantic. Exeter also plucked Robert D. Storey from a Negro slum in Cleveland. His father was a drinker; his brother had been in reform school. After Exeter young Storey became a marshal in his 1958 class at Harvard and a friend of John Rockefeller IV, married a Radcliffe girl and is now a Marine first lieutenant.
In hundreds of such cases, the go-between is the pioneering National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students, which began in 1948, when Negroes accounted for only one-tenth of 1% of the students in interracial colleges, v. 1% now. NSSFNS (pronounced Ness-fe-ness) is run by New Yorker Richard Plaut, 57, who sold his "boring" lighting-equipment business in the 1930s and turned social worker. He has since lighted up dark places all over the country.
Supported largely by foundations, Plaut's Nessfeness has scoured the South especially, counseled promising Negroes in big-city schools, and raised $2,500,000 to send 7,000 Negroes to 350 interracial colleges. It has sent another 252 students to 45 Northern prep schools from Kent to Andover. Along the way, it has generated one of the most productive ideas in the whole scouting business.