The Hidden Ones
During his first year at Phillips Exeter Academy, there were times when Nathaniel LaMar of Atlanta, Ga. thought he would never make it. The son of a widowed schoolteacher, he had gone to a Negro elementary school that left him unprepared for the stiff competition at Exeter. Had it not been for an organization called the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students, he would never have bothered to apply for Exeter at all. But young LaMar gradually found his bearings. Eventually he i) was elected senior class poet at Exeter, 2) graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, 3) won a fellowship to Cambridge University, 4) published short stories in the Atlantic Monthly, and is now on the way to finishing a novel.
In 1948 when NSSFNS (pronounced "./Ves-jfeness") began ferreting out hidden talents such as LaMar's, Negroes accounted for only one-tenth of 1% of the students in interracial colleges. To three prominent New Yorkers--Dean Harry Carman of Columbia College, Mrs. Felice Schwartz, and Pastor James H. Robinson of the Church of the Master--this seemed not only an injustice but a waste of brainpower. Though too many boys and girls of all races were missing their chance for a full education because of poverty or bad training, the largest group affected was the Negroes. Deciding to go to the rescue, Dean Carman & Co. hired Richard Plaut, a personnel expert, to be Nessfeness' executive vice chairman. Last week, in a small booklet called Blueprint for Talent Searching, readers could learn just how much Plaut has accomplished.
Nessfeness' chief tasks have been not only to find hidden talent but to interest promising students in higher education. Now supported largely by College Campus Chests all over the country, the service talks to hundreds of students and parents a year, guides them in choosing a college best suited to their needs, arranges for the necessary tests, provides them with money to supplement whatever scholarships they win. Since 1948 Nessfeness has placed 4,000 boys and girls in 300 interracial colleges. In only two years its Southern Project, which concentrates on the Deep South, has placed 520. At the same time, the service has begun sending promising students to Eastern prep schools. The students have done astonishingly well: of the 520 Southern Project students, only four had dropped out for academic reasons by last June. Some Nessfeness case histories:
<1 Carole Waters, whose widowed mother works as a U.S. Treasury Department messenger in Washington, D.C., managed to earn only a B-minus average at Illinois' Rockford College, but she made such a hit with her schoolmates that they elected her president of the Student Government Association.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.