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Oklahoma State University admitted its first Black student in 1949. Back then Oklahoma State was called Oklahoma A&M, and it was a land-grant university—like nearby Langston.
Nancy Davis was that first Black student at OSU. She came from a family that was just one generation removed from slavery when she started college. That is to say her grandparents were slaves. Imagine your papaw or gigi as slaves. Lock that in. Now let's keep walking with Nancy.
I bring this up—this about slavery—because Nancy was reminded of that there were other places for her to go to school when she showed up to enroll at the dean’s office where the registrar added the thought that “blacks weren’t ready to go to school with whites.”
Five years before Brown v. Board of Education, it was the other way around. The upward mobility of Black people was tantamount to criminal activity in 1949.
After all this is the country where Nazi POWs were served ahead of Black veterans returned from fighting a world war defending the very soil you walk on to beat the white supremacists sitting before them and being treated as more worthy than they.
But this insinuation that she shouldn't be at OSU was an especially egregious suggestion to make to a student like Davis who was pursuing her graduate degree at OSU. She’d already earned her undergraduate degree from Langston. She was a teacher.
She pursued her education at OSU anyway, even after she wasn’t allowed to stay in the dorms. She graduated in 1953. One of the dorms at OSU is now named for her: Davis Residential Hall.
The first Black player to letter in football at Oklahoma State was Chester Pittman. After graduating from Wewoka Douglass in 1957, he played his first game for OSU in 1958 at tailback.
He didn’t score a touchdown until 1960. He left OSU averaging 5.4 yards per carry on just 110 carries for his career. Doesn’t sound like much.
But, as Jenni Carlson pointed out, his legacy is breaking the color barrier at OSU without it breaking him.
But, as Jenni Carlson pointed out, his legacy is breaking the color barrier at OSU without it breaking him.
Davis and Pittman are firsts. And being firsts—being pioneers—his hard. The weak die along the way, and the cowards never try. That leaves them.
And, more often than not, being first is soul-crushing. Carrying the hopes of a race always has been, especially at the beginning of integrating schools and school systems.
Dr. Martin Luther King used to say so. The quote folks remember most from him is that of his wanting his children to be judged not by their skin color but the content of their character.
The quote many don’t remember is his warning of what would occur once integration occurred at land-grant universities like Oklahoma State. In conversation with Wally Vaughn, he made clear that fear in his pastor’s study in the early 1960s.
