In May of 1968, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., black students staged several demonstrations (including a sit-in at Lowden Hall) aimed at pressuring President Rhoten Smith to address their grievances.
They were few in number (less than 300 out of more than 20,000 students); they lived on a mostly white campus in an all-white town; and they felt the daily sting of racism. They lacked faculty and administrative role models, and they believed their small numbers were a result of admission practices that disadvantaged many talented black students.
Rhoten Smith listened – and agreed.
Among the immediate changes Smith made was the appointment of McKinley “Deacon” Davis to a special role aimed at recruiting disadvantaged students.
Davis, a basketball star at Freeport High School and the University of Iowa, joined the Harlem Globetrotters from 1955 – 1957. During his travels across the country, he visited inner-city high schools and began to envision a program that could begin to level the playing field for underprepared and disadvantaged students.
The program Davis and Smith created in 1968 was called CHANCE, the acronym for Counseling, Help and Assistance Necessary for a College Education. Based on Davis’ observations about what it takes to help disadvantaged students “catch up,” CHANCE focuses on recruiting talent, providing holistic support from counselors and tutors, and getting students past obstacles to graduation day.
From the outset, CHANCE was self-funded by NIU, unlike many programs at other universities that were discontinued as soon as federal grants dried up.
It was this institutional commitment that attracted Davis’ successor and long-time CHANCE director Leroy Mitchell. Working in a similar educational opportunity program at a college in New York, Mitchell leapt at the opportunity to concentrate on student support instead of grant writing.
The first CHANCE class in 1968 numbered just 50 inner-city students; today there are 1,500 – 2,000 in any given year. And while CHANCE did at first concentrate on bringing more African-American students to campus, it has evolved over time to include substantial numbers of students from all racial and ethnic backgrounds. CHANCE graduates are doctors, lawyers, business leaders, teachers, heads of non-profits, artists, performers and much more. More than half a century later, over 15,000 Huskie alumni succeeded in college because NIU gave them a CHANCE.
Click on photos to enlarge
