Hiram Whittle - Maryland's First African American Undergraduate
- written with Tanya Chakraborty (orginally published by the University Of Maryland's Office of Communications)

Hiram Whittle was not the first African American to be admitted to the University of Maryland 's College Park campus. But he was the first undergraduate, admitted in 1951 thanks to a landmark case brought by the NAACP's Thurgood Marshall. After attending Howard University Law School because he was denied admission to Maryland 's law school in Baltimore, Marshall joined the NAACP. The organization began launching test cases to challenge admissions policies at universities nationwide.

Whittle graduated from Dunbar High in Baltimore in 1949. He came from a large family and worked for tips by carrying home groceries from a local market. Encouraged to attend college, he enrolled at Morgan State - an historically black college - as an 18 year old freshman when he was refused admission as an engineering student at College Park. He soon received a letter from the NAACP looking for individuals willing to take part in a test case for admission to Maryland . That letter changed not only his life, but the life and soul of the University of Maryland .

Whittle filed suit with the NAACP in Baltimore City Court alleging that officials used race as a criteria for their refusal on his undergraduate application to the University of Maryland College of Engineering - a program then not available at his home institution.

In late January of 1951, the University's Board of Regents voted to grant Whittle permission to enroll that spring as an undergraduate engineering major. The State's Attorney General had advised they could not win the case.

Whittle also wanted to live in the dorms. State Attorney General Hall Hammond told university officials "you must make dormitory space available to Negro students under the same conditions and on the same terms as those accommodations that are made available to white students." As a result, he was assigned to temporary dorm 1 with other students (see the picture above from the 1952 yearbook.)

Whittle told a student publication that he experienced pleasant times while attending Maryland . In a 2004 interview with Maryland Newsline, Whittle compared his new fellow students to those back home."Kids [in College Park ] were the same as college kids at Morgan State," he said. Whittle also said that he never experienced any incidents of discrimination at Maryland .

Whittle never completed his studies. In 1952 he withdrew from the University and moved out of state. But his effort to become just another student at Maryland had long-lasting consequences.

Just three years later, prompted by the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the Board of Regents voted to permit academically qualified African Americans to enroll for study on each of its campuses. And in 1956, the Board decided to permit qualified African-American students from out-of-state to be admitted.