During the decades around the beginning of the twentieth century, public universities in the United States commonly employed a “certificate system” to establish eligibility for undergraduate admittance. “Certification” meant that between 1877 and 1931 representatives of the University of Wisconsin inspected high schools and had face-to-face interaction with pupils, teachers, and administrators. If they found a school's facilities, curriculum, and teaching to be satisfactory, graduates—with the endorsement of their principal—could enter the University as freshmen without further examination. This process of certification by inspection was part of a broader dialogue between Wisconsin high schools and the state university. The principal inspector during the 1920s, Thomas Lloyd-Jones, brought together strands of both administrative and pedagogical Progressivism, while insisting on the importance of academic subjects in the high school curriculum. By encouraging closer articulation between secondary schools and colleges, it was a central component of what educational historian Mark VanOverbeke has described as a more “stratified and standardized educational system” that developed in the United States between 1870 and 1910.

In the fall of 2001, with posters, tote bags, speakers, and balloons, the University of Pennsylvania launched its celebration of “125 Years of Women at Penn.” Exhibits illustrating the experiences of women students appeared around campus and on the Web, while banners trumpeting the contributions of Penn women waved from lightposts. On the first weekend in November, the University dedicated a four-foot seal marking the “Women's Walkway” in the center of campus and praised the tens of thousands of women who helped shape the University into what it is today. The festive anniversary, more than two years in the making, celebrated, in the words of University Trustee Judith Berkowitz, “the foresight of a great university to take in women when others did not.” The legacy of women at Penn was important to remember, Berkowitz added, because “it's very empowering to know your history.”

Margaret Gillum was distressed. Her sophomore English students in Terre Haute, IN were making “sneering remarks” about “dirty foreigners,” even though she implored them to use language that reflected the principles of “brotherhood” and “true neighborliness.” Pressed into action by the catastrophic world war unfolding around her, Gillum decided to teach her students to be more tolerant of human diversity. Describing her successful lesson to colleagues in a popular teaching journal in 1941, Gillum explained, “There are in my city a number of racial groups gathered into neighborhoods, as one finds them everywhere: Syrians, Italians, French, and a large number of Germans and Jews, as well as three distinct communities of Negroes drifted up from the South.” Hoping to foster empathy for the “racial groups” in her community, Gillum initiated her lesson by asking students to list familiar racial epithets. Her students responded enthusiastically and as Gillum called out the names of different “races” her students shouted back their answers:

And what do we call Italians—Dagoes!
And the Germans?—Dutchmen!
The Irish?—Oh, Pat or Mike!

This article contributes to our historical understanding of student experience in general, and more particularly, to our understanding of developing cross-group relationships within desegregated schools over the second half of the twentieth century. The article draws from a broader study that examines students' evolving relationships within a matrix of intersecting identities in a Baltimore County comprehensive high school in Maryland between 1950 and 2000. The focus in this article is on Miller High students of the 1950s and 1960s during the early years of desegregation. Relationships remembered by graduates bring to light the hierarchical structure that distinguished white students along class and gender lines within an academically tracked system and the limitations and possibilities afforded African-American youth across class and gender as they encountered Miller High established norms for the first time in 1956 when the school desegregated.