Wednesday, October 30, 2024
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2024.1029.0007...
Emile Treville Holley
Emile Treville Holley, center, spring 1922, being congratulated by CCNY classmates.
Holley had been an outstanding student at high school in Flushing, and enrolled in City College when he was only 16. The following spring, Congressman Martin Ansorge nominated him for admission to the Naval Academy at Annapolis. It caused an uproar at the school.
Midshipmen (undergraduates) said he would be “condemned to Coventry” (i.e., socially ostracized). Officers (faculty) expressed sympathy for Holley but said there was no regulation under which they could compel the white students to treat him as an equal.
In any event, Holley did not pass the entrance examination. He transferred to Middlebury College and became its first African-American graduate in 1925, earning a cum laude degree with honors in philosophy and English and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He went on to earn a master’s degree from Middlebury and became a professor of English and philosophy in a number of African-American colleges and universities.
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