The Dignity of Man – University of Michigan …

Paul Cornely moved around a lot before being drawn to Ann Arbor.

He was born in the French West Indies to a Chilean mother and West Indian father. The Cornelys moved to Puerto Rico in 1909, when Paul was 3, and stayed for a dozen years. Next came a year in New York City before settling in Detroit when Paul was 16. His dad, Eleodore, went to work in a foundry and his mother, Adrienne, stayed home raising Paul and his younger siblings, Antoine and Lily.

After graduating from Detroits Central High School, Cornely took two years of classes at the College of the City of Detroit, a precursor to todays Wayne State University. He enrolled at U-M in 1926, attracted by its low costs and location close to home. His father had talked him out of studying engineering and pushed him toward medicine, saying a career as a doctor would be more lucrative and sustaining for a Black man.

Cornely joined Omega Psi Phi, the African American fraternity that had a house on Catherine Street. And he became one of the earliest members of the Negro-Caucasian Club, created in 1926 by African American and white students with the ambitious commitment to the abolition of discrimination against Negroes.

Of some 13,000 students at U-M, fewer than 100 were African Americans. Campus swimming pools, dances, residence halls all were off-limits to Black students. Racism was rampant in many areas of the city and the University, Cornely said years later.

With several club members, Cornely sat down at Ann Arbor lunch counters whose owners refused to serve African American diners, claiming their presence would drive out paying white patrons.

Nothing happened.

We sat in, not to wait for service, but to count the number of whites who walked out because they saw Negroes sitting there, recalled club member Lenoir B. (Smith) Stewart. The total count was NONE. This convinced the business people that they had not a leg on which to stand.

Stewart, Cornely and other club members invited prominent African Americans to campus to speak, knowing administrators would never do so. The writer Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes scholar, said young Black people were preparing to challenge racism and fight for equal rights by showcasing their abilities. Robert W. Bagnall, an executive with the NAACP, appeared at Lane Hall. The poet Jean Toomer drew a crowd to the Natural Science Auditorium.

Civil rights leader W.E.B. DuBois called for white Americans to accept Black people as equals, saying there was no redeeming quality to racial segregation.

There is no place where he can go and still have a feeling of friendliness toward the white man, for wherever there is segregation, there is a constant hatred brewing on each side, DuBois told a crowd in the Natural Science Auditorium. There is no remedy by segregation which is possible, and the countries of the world have their eyes on the manner in which the United States solves the problem, so it is indeed an important one to be considered in our life of today.

This was the intellectual swirl surrounding Paul Cornely as he worked his way through pre-med studies.

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The Dignity of Man - University of Michigan ...