The 1950s Education: Chronology

1950:     July 1 The New Orleans Board of Education restores full privileges to married teachers, including the right to promotion (which had not been allowed since the 1930s).

1950:     September 19 African American student Heman Marion Sweatt successfully registers at the University of Texas Law School, where he had been denied admission four years earlier because of his race.

1950:     October 16 The New Jersey Supreme Court upholds the practice of reciting five Old Testament verses each day in all public schools.

1951:     August 18 According to the Associated Press, college costs have increased by 400 percent since the beginning of the twentieth century.

1951:     September 18 Pope Pius XII declares his opposition to sex education in schools.

1952:     March 2 The U.S. Supreme Court rules that "subversives" (those holding communist beliefs) may be barred from teaching.

1952:     April 6 Members of the University of Florida student honor court quit in protest over the reinstatement of two hundred students, including several football players, accused of cheating.

1952:     April 29 With the opening of its coeducational College of Arts and Sciences, the University of Rochester terminates its 107-year-old policy of separate men's and women's colleges.

1953:      The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare is created as part of the U.S. president's cabinet.

1953:     February 9 The Phi Delta Theta fraternity at Williams College is suspended for pledging a Jewish student.

1953:     February 11 The National Council for Financial Aid to Education is established to assist colleges in securing funds from business and industry.

1953:     April 3 Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, becomes the first historically black college to establish a Phi Beta Kappa chapter.

1953:     June 11 For the first time, the Harvard University Law School awards degrees to women.

1954:     January 7 President Dwight Eisenhower proposes that each state sponsor a conference on education.

1954:     May 17 The landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Supreme Court decision overrules the "separate but equal" doctrine; segregated public schools are judged to be unconstitutional.

1954:     June Attendees at the National Educational Association's national convention vote to sanction school integration, declaring, "All problems of integration…are capable of solution by citizens of intelligence, saneness and reasonableness working together.… "

1954:     November 19 The U.S. Tax Court declares research and fellowship grants made by philanthropic organizations to be tax exempt.

1955:     January 18 The Harvard University Divinity School announces that it will admit women.

1955:     May 10 The New York City Board of Education declares that, from now on, students who are two or more grades behind in reading will be held back.

1955:     September 2 The U.S. Census Bureau reports that, during their lifetime, male college graduates will earn $100,000 more than their counterparts with high school diplomas.

1955:     November 28–December 1 The first White House Conference on Education is held. Its purpose: to study present-day problems in education.

1956:     November 26 A Fund for the Republic study determines that blacks show no inherent inferiority to whites in intelligence tests.

1957:     September At attempt to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, results in threats, violence, and national headlines.

1957:     December 7 American workers average 11.8 years of schooling, with 9 percent finishing college, contrasted to 9.3 years and 6.4 percent in 1940.

1958:     March 10 The Vatican Sacred Congregation of Religious Studies sanctions the separation of boys and girls in study halls, sports activities, and classrooms, even in coeducational schools.

1958:     September 2 Congress passes the National Defense Education Act.

1958:     December 1 Ninety students and three nuns are killed by a fire at Chicago's Our Lady of the Angels school.

1959:     October 24 The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare promises to rid the United States of "college-degree mills," alleged institutions of higher learning that grant degrees without requiring academic studies.