The Vanguard 1948 [the first yearbook of Roosevelt College - now University]

The Vanguard 1948 [the first yearbook of Roosevelt College - now University]

The student staff of the yearbook

Roosevelt College

1948

This is the first yearbook of Roosevelt College (now Roosevelt University), a private institution of higher learning in Chicago, published in the third year after the school's founding

Roosevelt College was founded in 1945 with a nucleus of faculty and students who left Chicago's Central YMCA College in protest of the racial quotas imposed on its applicants by that institution. They were led by Edward J. Sparling, the former President of Central YMCA College, who became Roosevelt's first President (1945-63). A year later, Roosevelt acquired the famous Adler & Sullivan-designed Auditorium Building in downtown Chicago, which remains the home of its flagship campus to this day. During an era when Jewish, African-American and other minority groups, including women, were routinely discriminated against in college admissions, Roosevelt, to its everlasting credit, was independent, nonsectarian, coeducational, and fully integrated from the start, while at the same time maintaining high academic standards. This handsome and well-designed 1948 yearbook, the first in the college's short life, eloquently attests that credo. There are many Jewish and African American students and nearly equal numbers of male and female undergraduates. The editor-in-chief of the yearbook, George Coleman Moore, is African American, as is the Vice President of the Student Council, a young and handsome Harold Washington - the future Mayor of the City of Chicago. There is even a Communist Club, apparently with only two members, one Black and the other white. And this was nearly 75 years ago, in the heart of Chicago. I have many "collectible" works of Chicagoana, but none of them inspires me like this simple volume.

John Blew