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Oberlin College is generally thought of as the first institution of higher learning in the nineteenth century to which black youth could gain admission without incumbency. For this reason, Oberlin has long held an esteemed place in black educational history. There, in 1835, by a one-vote margin, members of Oberlin's Board of Trustees committed their institution open to students of color. While blacks were, in infinitesimally small number, admitted to other white colleges before 1835, no college before Oberlin adopted as policy the admission of blacks on an equal basis with whites. However, besides tangential references to student abolitionism at the Lane Theological Seminary influencing subsequent abolitionism at Oberlin College, educational historians have failed to fully explore the taproots of the modern abolition movement that began around 1830.
Particularly absent is any complete understanding of this movement's nexus with the American higher education movement. There is virtually no knowledge of the intense and dramatic period that ignited student activism, not only on the Lane Theological Seminary campus, but on college campuses throughout America. The transfer from the Lane Seminary of students, the so-called "Lane Rebels," to Oberlin College in late 1834, indeed sharpened the antislavery focus on Oberlin's campus. But how and why did these students, the Lane seminarians, develop an interest in abolitionism? There remains, additionally, a lack of clarity as to why the main thrust of antislavery activity was intimately tied to the quest for the higher education of free blacks. It was, no doubt, the emotional surfeit associated with the opening of Oberlin College to black students that has so completely overshadowed the history of the events that preceded it.
The Oberlin vote was a pivotal victory for the cause of abolitionism. Efforts by black and white abolitionists to gain any level of higher educational opportunity for black youth was a formidable undertaking. This was by conscious design. This article focuses on the period 1830-35, and on events that set the stage for the emergence of an Oberlin College. This paper will be devoted partly to a discussion of a series of restrictions forced upon free blacks, which compelled them into nationwide collective action. However, this paper's primary focus is a chronicling of the events that transpired in the...