College to honor first black applicant 60 years later - USATODAY.com: It was the summer of 1950, and Mary Jean Price, the salutatorian of Lincoln High School in Springfield, Mo., hoped to enroll at a hometown college and become a teacher.But this was four years before Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared denying black children equal educational opportunities was unconstitutional.
At 18, Price was, school records show, the first black student ever to apply to Southwest Missouri State College (now Missouri State University) in Springfield, was denied admission.
'I did the best I could in high school to get to college, but as soon as I got to the front door, they didn't let me inside,' she says.
