Mary Jean Price Walls wasn't admitted to a Missouri college 60 years ago simply because she was black. Now, the school is righting its wrong by giving her an honorary degree.
Mary Jean Price Walls graduated second in her class in 1950. She had high hopes when she applied to attend a local college, Southwest Missouri State College (now called Missouri State University), longing to become a schoolteacher—but after sending off her application, she spent months waiting for a reply. It never came.
Worse than simply being denied admission, the school hadn’t bothered to reply to her at all. It wasn’t a matter of her school records, but of her skin color: Walls is African-American, and in those days, that fact alone closed a lot of doors.
“I was sad, I was hurt,” Walls told ABC News. “Say that you had been a good girl and your parents had promised you a special treat or something. Then, when you thought that you had been the best girl that you could, and then when you got ready to sit down to eat that cake, it was gone. How would you feel?”
Four years later, the Supreme Court struck down the right for schools to discriminate against African-Americans in the historic Brown v. Board of Education case—but it was too late for Walls. She’d moved on with her life, becoming a wife and a mother, and working an elevator operator. Later, she worked as a janitor, and only retired a year ago, at the age of 77.
She stayed quiet about the discrimination she’d faced from Missouri State, but recently, her son Terry went through school records and verified that she’d been the first black student to ever apply to the college. Today, four percent of the school body is African-American—including Terry, who is studying for a degree in criminology.
Although it’s too late for Missouri State to change the past, the school is awarding Walls with an honorary degree from the school. While she knows it’s too late for her to change the course of her own life with the degree, it’s a chance for her to show her family that Missouri State—and society in general—has changed in the last 60 years, and there’s not a single door closed to them anymore.
