Whiteness as Collective Memory in Student Publications at Midwestern Liberal Arts Colleges, 1945–1965

In this study, I investigated how student publications portrayed whiteness as the dominant feature of the campus environment between 1945 and 1965 among the member institutions of a consortium of elite U.S. Midwestern liberal arts colleges located in rural and industrial towns across Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania. These colleges’ yearbooks and student newspapers informed this analysis of whiteness as property. Through these findings, I demonstrate the ways in which White student publications recorded whiteness as property, entitling White students to the use and enjoyment of their college years. The invisibility of Black students’ structural exclusion rendered whiteness unmarked and offers a new model for understanding and analyzing desegregation and integration in historically White institutions