As an engineering student at IIT, Frank Crossley could appreciate the value of an experiment. When he joined a United States Navy V-12 Program in 1944 that paid for his tuition and led to a commission as an officer, he became part of the experiment—the Navy had no black officers at the time, and the commanding officer of the IIT unit told him the government was interested in testing whether white military personnel would take orders from black officers.

It worked. Crossley was assigned to the U.S.S. Storm King at the tail end of World War II, and soon had 36 men reporting to him, including one officer. For two days he felt like a curiosity to his fellow crew members, but soon, he remembers, the enlisted men regarded him like any other officer. A fellow officer even overheard a sailor telling a friend that, “All the officers on this ship are S.O.B.s except Mr. Crossley.” Crossley’s success, along with that of the other African Americans in the program, influenced President Harry S. Truman to outlaw discrimination in the military in 1948.

Crossley’s impact didn’t stop with the Navy. As a renowned metallurgist at aerospace firm Lockheed Martin in the 1970s, he received a patent for inventing a new class of titanium alloys.

Crossley is one of many African-American graduates of IIT who have made landmark contributions in professions ranging from engineering and architecture to law and journalism. Along the way, IIT’s African-American alumni have also been at the forefront of the struggle for civil rights in America.

First, there are the pioneers. Ida Platt, who earned her law degree from Chicago College of Law in 1894, is believed to be the first African American woman to pass the bar in Illinois. (Chicago College of Law and Kent College of Law merged in 1900, and became IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law in 1969).

Charles Pierce, a 1901 graduate of Armour Institute of Technology, was the nation’s first African-American graduate in chemical engineering. Pierce later taught at DuSable High School in Chicago while Crossley was a student there. (Armour merged with Lewis Institute in 1940 to create IIT.)

Then there’s Gloria Ray Karlmark, who had already done her pioneering when she arrived on campus. The 1965 graduate came to IIT from Little Rock, Ark., where she was one of the famed “Little Rock Nine”—the nine students who attended previously segregated Little Rock Central High School under the U.S. Army’s protection in 1957.

The university’s highest-profile African-American alumnus may be Robert Abbott (LAW 1900), who founded the newspaper The Chicago Defender. Through the Defender, Abbott campaigned against racial injustice; his suggestion that southern blacks move north to escape discrimination helped draw more than 50,000 southern African Americans to Chicago between 1915 and 1920.

IIT has consistently graduated African Americans who are leaders in their fields. Other notable alumni include Henry McGee (PA ’49), who became Chicago’s first black postmaster in 1966; Stephen Burks (ID ’92), who the New York Times Style Magazine hailed in 2005 as “the first African American to make an impression on the rarefied world of international industrial design”; Perri Irmer (ARCH ’81), who runs U.S. Cellular Field as chief executive officer of the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority; and Dorothy Brown (LAW ’96), current clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, who became the first African American to hold that position when she was elected in 2000.

In the 1940s and ’50s, there were fewer black students, but those who attended say the culture at IIT was supportive because they and their work were regarded on par with fellow students, regardless of race.

“I don’t know how long I was around IIT until anyone in the administration knew I was black,” says David Sharpe (ARCH ’60, M.S. ’62), who came to IIT as a student in 1956 to study under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and joined IIT’s architecture faculty full-time in 1982 after a 20-year career at Chicago architecture firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM). While at SOM Sharpe also taught part-time at IIT. “[Race] just wasn’t something that was important to Mies, so it didn’t come up,” he says.

Over time, the university attracted more black students, who supported and challenged one another.

“We had a drive to succeed that came from an understanding that our success or failure would impact the perception of the African-American students who would follow us,” says Jeff Carroll (ME ’94), who works in business development at Siemens Business Technologies in Chicago. “If a classmate was feeling like they couldn’t cut it, we would reach out to them, encourage them, help them with their understanding of the curriculum—whatever it took for all of us to graduate.”

Two important programs that drew minority students to IIT and into the engineering and science professions were initiated in the 1970s and 1980s. IIT’s Early Identification Program, headed by Nathaniel Thomas, worked to increase the number of African-American students at IIT to nearly 12 percent of the undergraduate student population and Hispanic students to nearly 10 percent. The Early ID program lost federal funding in the late ’80s.

The Chicago Area Health and Medical Careers Program (CAHMCP, pronounced “Champs”), a State of Illinois-sponsored consortium of Chicago-area medical and dental schools, IIT, and several health-focused community groups, was started in 1979. The program works as a pipeline to identify and recruit underrepresented minorities—as early as in the seventh grade—into medical professions. Led by Reggie Jones and John Bradley, CAHMCP is housed on IIT Main Campus and continues to serve as a novel approach to minority recruitment.

“Both the Early Identification program and CAHMCP have single-handedly been responsible for IIT’s efforts to help create trailblazers in the underrepresented minority population,” says Kevin Smith (CS ’89), executive director of the Office of Multicultural Student Services (OMSS).

Some of IIT’s African-American alumni, like Crossley, see themselves as barrier breakers and standard bearers for fellow African Americans. Others have viewed race as playing a less predominant part, as Sharpe notes, “I’ve never had a desire to be anybody’s role model. I’m just interested in doing good work.” In all cases, they’re part of a legacy of success at a university that has long sought to foster limitless discovery and achievement in all of its students.

Diversity on Campus Today
The community of African-American students at IIT is small but close-knit. The university wants to increase its numbers and is looking to do so by both recruiting more minority students and retaining those already studying here through programs that allow them to acclimate and succeed.

Local recruitment efforts include partnerships with Chicago Public Schools (CPS), where 52 percent of students are African American. Each semester IIT partners with 8–12 CPS high schools to provide students campus tours that showcase the unique IIT educational experience through lectures and Interprofessional Projects demonstrations. The university also co-hosts college fairs that introduce CPS students and their families to the college admission process. Through the Advanced Mathematics Program, IIT offers Jones College Prep students advanced calculus courses at the university, providing tuition waivers and covering the cost of books. And launched in academic year 2007–08, the Collens Scholarship Program awards full-tuition scholarships to talented CPS graduates whose annual family income is less than $40,000.

The Department of Mathematics and Science Education (MSED) continues its collaboration with CPS through programs that foster engagement in math and science at the middle school and high school level. The Way2Go summer program introduces science concepts to students entering the eighth grade. In its second year, the CPS High School Transformation project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, pairs MSED with The Field Museum and Glencoe Publishing to provide teachers professional development in science. Through their teachers’ enhanced science knowledge and teaching ability, students obtain an improved understanding and achievement in the subject, and increased awareness of science as a career.

For students outside Chicago, IIT’s Office of Undergraduate Admission has piloted and plans to expand a Fly-In Program that underwrites the cost of travel, enabling newly admitted students with financial need to visit campus before the beginning of their freshman year. This and other minority recruitment initiatives are being studied and developed by the offices of undergraduate admission and financial aid, and also by a designated subcommittee of the Retention and Student Life Task Force. IIT has also created a new Committee on Diversity, which will take a lead role in improving diversity university-wide.

Retention is as important as recruitment, and the Office of Undergraduate Admission in conjunction with the Office of Undergraduate Academic Affairs is launching a new campaign to help retain minority students. Through a rigorous advising platform, students’ academic success and career goals will be monitored, with additional counseling, mentorship, and support services offered for students needing them. On-campus living is also important to these retention efforts, according to Herek Clack, a member of IIT’s minority student retention committee and an African-American member of the engineering faculty.

“Our African-American students now are more flexible and better able to maneuver in an environment where there are few students of color than those of my generation. They’re reporting that even where they may be the only black student in class, they’re reaching out and forming friendships, forming study groups,” says Clack. “If you live on campus, you’re far more likely to form those social bonds and join those groups.”