During last week's commencement exercises at Fisk University in Nashville, slender Mary Greta Howard, 23, got her reward for two years' graduate study: a master's degree in race relations. Her academic record was topnotch, but she enjoyed an even rarer distinction. All but three of Fisk's 800 students are Negroes. Mary was the first white student to get a Fisk degree since the 1890s and one of relatively few whites who have earned a degree from a Negro college.
Why had Mary Howard decided to study at Fisk? Daughter of a U.S. Department of the Interior chemist, she was born in Washington, where she attended segregated elementary schools, later went to a nonsegregated high school in Albuquerque, studied psychology at Grinnell College in Iowa. The turning point of her college career: a one-term stay as an exchange student at Virginia's Negro Hampton Institute.
There she decided to enroll for postgraduate study at one of three U.S. universities (Chicago, New York University, Fisk) that offer advanced courses in race relations. Fisk offered her a scholarship. With the approval of her parents, she moved into one of Fisk's dormitories, later shared an off-campus apartment with a Negro woman instructor.
Mary got a friendly reception on the campus, although she was always aware that, at Fisk, she was a member of the minority race. "Negroes," she found, "have prejudices like anyone else." Puzzled but seldom hostile, Nashville whites could not understand why Mary was at Fisk instead of a white college. Once police stopped her outside her apartment in the city's Negro section. "They thought I was drunk or lost," she says. "I finally convinced them that I knew what I was doing. They were a little amazed but left me alone." Last year Mary traveled by car to New Orleans' Mardi Gras with five fellow Fisk students who asked her to stay in the car during stops for gas, made her sit on the floor while going through Birmingham, Ala., to "avoid attracting attention."
Her two-year experience at Fisk has given studious Mary Howard a sociologist's dispassionate outlook: "I was experiencing 'reverse integration,' how discrimination feels on the other side of the color line." Hoping for a job with an interracial welfare agency in the North or Midwest, she feels that, despite occasional difficulties, her education was a success: "If I had it to do over again, I would still choose Fisk."