How a renowned HBCU survived and prospered under Jim Crow
For much of the twentieth century, Grambling State University was more than a college. In Refuge and Rule, Brian M. McGowan tells the story of how Grambling and its community built and defended one of the South's most remarkable Black-controlled spaces. Together with the predominantly Black town that surrounded it, it became what generations of students remembered as an "oasis"—a place where African Americans could learn, work, worship, and live free from many of the daily humiliations and dangers of the Jim Crow South. Yet maintenance of that oasis required constant vigilance and negotiation.
Drawing on newly uncovered archival sources, the university's student newspaper, and dozens of oral histories, McGowan shows how presidents Charles P. Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones continually negotiated with white state officials and mediated the competing demands of students, faculty, and the surrounding Black community.
McGowan argues that Grambling's greatest strength was also the source of internal tension. The same leadership that protected the university's autonomy also imposed strict codes of behavior, limited protest, and carefully managed student expression to guard the institution against retaliation from the state government. Students challenged those limits, advancing new visions of the "Black University" while creating what McGowan calls a "second curriculum," where Black culture, political thought, and activism could flourish beyond official oversight. A nuanced alternative to the familiar accommodation-versus-resistance narrative, Refuge and Rule reveals the compromises, conflicts, and quiet work that sustained Black autonomy in one of the nation's most celebrated HBCUs.
Brian M. McGowan is assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas and codirector of the Voices of Grambling Project. He previously taught at Grambling State University for fifteen years, where he held the William I. McIntosh Endowed Chair of Liberal Arts.
