This article tells the history of Harvard becoming racially discriminating. They were discriminating against Jews.
The first things they did were require references and pictures.
This is just what my undergraduate college did, back in the late 70s-long after the Civil Rights movement, to limit blacks.
I know they were attempting to limit blacks because one of my friends’ mothers called and had her son accepted over the phone. Apparently she didn’t sound black. When she sent the picture in, they called back to say that there had been a mistake. She told them she would sue, so R was in.
It was the fall of ’84 when blacks were admitted without discrimination. I went to the school and unexpectedly found myself in the “black corner” of the campus center. (I didn’t know there was such a thing.) But there were several hundred blacks in the area. I don’t remember if there were any whites, but there weren’t many. I was shocked. I mean, the college had still been righteously proclaiming its discrimination policies in the campus newspaper when I left school in ’82. Now suddenly there were hundreds of blacks enrolled.
Unfortunately, I don’t know what happened to them. When I returned to the school in January of ’86 there were only a handful of blacks on campus. Did they all leave? Were they all re-discriminated against? I don’t know.
This is 2005. I have not been back to the school in a year or two, so I don’t know if the campus is more racially diverse than it was when I left again in ’93, but I doubt it.
I found the article by Malcolm Gladwell via Discriminations