“The Dignity of Man” | University of Michigan Heritage Project

Paul Cornely moved round so much earlier than being drawn to Ann Arbor.

He was born within the French West Indies to a Chilean mom and West Indian father. The Cornelys moved to Puerto Rico in 1909, when Paul was 3, and stayed for a dozen years. Subsequent got here a 12 months in New York Metropolis earlier than settling in Detroit when Paul was 16. His dad, Eleodore, went to work in a foundry and his mom, Adrienne, stayed residence elevating Paul and his youthful siblings, Antoine and Lily.

After graduating from Detroit’s Central Excessive Faculty, Cornely took two years of lessons on the School of the Metropolis of Detroit, a precursor to immediately’s Wayne State College. He enrolled at U-M in 1926, attracted by its low prices and site near residence. His father had talked him out of finding out engineering and pushed him towards drugs, saying a profession as a health care provider can be extra profitable and sustaining for a Black man.

Cornely joined Omega Psi Phi, the African American fraternity that had a home on Catherine Road. And he turned one of many earliest members of the Negro-Caucasian Membership, created in 1926 by African American and white college students with the bold dedication to the “abolition of discrimination in opposition to Negroes.”

Of some 13,000 college students at U-M, fewer than 100 have been African Individuals. Campus swimming swimming pools, dances, residence halls – all have been off-limits to Black college students. “Racism was rampant in lots of areas of town and the College,” Cornely stated years later.

With a number of membership members, Cornely sat down at Ann Arbor lunch counters whose homeowners refused to serve African American diners, claiming their presence would drive out paying white patrons.

Nothing occurred.

“We ‘sat in,’ to not await service, however to rely the variety of whites who walked out as a result of they noticed Negroes sitting there,” recalled membership member Lenoir B. (Smith) Stewart. “The whole rely was NONE. …This satisfied the enterprise people who they’d not a leg on which to face.”

Stewart, Cornely and different membership members invited distinguished African Individuals to campus to talk, understanding directors would by no means accomplish that. The author Alain Locke, the primary African American Rhodes scholar, stated younger Black folks have been making ready to problem racism and combat for equal rights by showcasing their talents. Robert W. Bagnall, an government with the NAACP, appeared at Lane Corridor. The poet Jean Toomer drew a crowd to the Pure Science Auditorium.

Civil rights chief W.E.B. DuBois known as for white Individuals to simply accept Black folks as equals, saying there was no redeeming high quality to racial segregation.

“There isn’t any place the place he can go and nonetheless have a sense of friendliness towards the white man, for wherever there’s segregation, there’s a fixed hatred brewing on all sides,” DuBois informed a crowd within the Pure Science Auditorium. “There isn’t any treatment by segregation which is feasible, and the nations of the world have their eyes on the style by which the US solves the issue, so it’s certainly an necessary one to be thought-about in our lifetime of immediately.”

This was the mental swirl surrounding Paul Cornely as he labored his method by means of pre-med research.