Dillard University

On New Orleans' broad Gentilly Road stand the six neat Georgian buildings of Dillard University, framed by an avenue of young trees and a 65-acre campus. Barely five years old, Dillard is an infant beside other leading U. S. Negro universities (Howard, Fisk, Atlanta). But it is a precocious infant.

To Dillard last week went Negro children from Louisiana's parish schools and Mississippi's bottom lands, Negro artists from all over the U. S., Negro players, musicians, authors, also many an eminent white. All week Dillard held an arts festival. Negro children sang spirituals and Tschaikowsky; the Dillard Chorus sang Haydn's Creation; high-school actors gave plays; Dillard's Players' Guild put on Karel Capek's R. U. R.; Dillard's gallery exhibited prize Negro paintings and photographs. Dillard's president, small, earnest Dr. William Stuart Nelson, beamed with pride.

Dillard was created by a merger of two impoverished old New Orleans schools, Congregationalist Straight College and Methodist Episcopal New Orleans University. The two church boards, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, the Rockefeller General Education Board and leading New Orleans citizens, including Rosenwald Son-in-Law Edgar B. Stern, pledged $2,000,000 to build the new university, opened it in 1935. It was named for an old Virginia blue blood, Dr. James Hardy Dillard, who for 24 years had devoted himself to improving the South's Negro country schools.

Kentucky-born Dr. Nelson, an infantry lieutenant with the A. E. F. in World War I, educated at Howard University, Union Theological Seminary, Yale, the Sorbonne, University of Berlin, became Dillard's president in 1936. Dr. Nelson determined to give his students a useful education, to foster art among Negroes in the Deep South. He sent extension teachers of music and drama to towns in Louisiana and Mississippi to organize singers and players in schools, churches. At Dillard, Dr. Nelson made every sophomore take a course in art appreciation, also required both sexes to take courses in homemaking.

When Dr. Nelson learned that rich Southerners had trouble finding gardeners, he started a four-year course in gardening. Dillard graduates turn their hands to many another job: teaching (favorite), social work, preaching, taxi driving. Of Dillard's 139 graduates, only eleven are unemployed.

At Dillard a dollar goes thrice as far as in most private colleges. Tuition, room and board cost an undergraduate about $270 a year. Today Dillard has a $500,000 hospital (TIME, April 8), an able faculty (most popular: Sociologist Allison "Deepie" Davis, onetime Williams College valedictorian), a picked student body of 347.

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