Boston College’s motivations for recruiting black students were both internal and external. The externals included a visit in May by four investigators from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, looking into whether the University was dispersing its federal money in harmony with provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
This followed a 1967 letter to U.S. Jesuits from their beloved superior, Fr. Pedro Arrupe, insisting that “American Jesuits cannot, must not, stand aloof” from the claims and demands of “the Negro.” Arrupe specified that Jesuit universities would need to assist blacks in meeting entrance requirements and provide them with “special scholarships.”
Boston College’s Black Talent program was up and running by the fall of 1968. The program sprang from a “Negro Talent Search” launched earlier that year by outgoing president Michael P. Walsh, SJ, with a $100,000, four-year commitment to scholarships and recruiting—a substantial sum for a University that routinely found itself strapped financially. (A year’s tuition then amounted to $1,600.) According to varying official accounts, the Negro Talent Search yielded between 34 and 48 new black students for that September.
-- Boston College Magazine
http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/spring_2009/features/power-of-the-people.html
