It was a hot June morning in 1964. We were hungry. The six of us—four black high-school students, my wife, Phoebe, and I, a white Dartmouth dean—had left Birmingham, Alabama, at 6 a.m., heading north in the VOX2 College car. Our first stop was the Athens, Georgia, Holiday Inn restaurant.

In the large dining room huge menus claimed the teenagers’ attention. When the waitress approached, instead of taking our orders she said, “We cannot serve you.” To my “Why not?” she asked if I would like the name of the manager. As I was writing it on a paper napkin, he appeared. “We’re not allowed to serve you,” he told me. “It’s against the law. If the government makes me, then we’ll have to do it. Now you have to leave.” The dining room fell silent as Phoebe and the kids exited. I spoke briefly with one sympathetic diner before following them.

Once outside 13-year-old William Burns raised his arms, fists clenched. Tears streaming down his cheeks, he shouted, “Someday we’ll throw them out.” The teacher in me struggled for the right response. I think I said something like, “That’s not the answer.”

As the United States struggled in the 1960s to find the right answers to address racial inequality, Dartmouth President John Sloan Dickey ’29 had responded to a request for help from President John F. Kennedy with an innovative outreach program he called A Better Chance (ABC).

In collaboration with a group of private boarding and day schools, ABC would prepare academically promising minority students from disadvantaged circumstances for the rigors of prep school. This would be done by means of a summer program at Dartmouth. Admission to the private schools would be contingent upon satisfactory progress in that program. William was one of 55 academically talented minority students invited to the College to participate.

Because I was downstairs in the Parkhurst dean’s office and because I had taught at Andover, Dickey had asked me to develop and lead the program. As a teacher I knew firsthand the potential benefits of preparatory school education, but also its hazards for ABC students—risking estrangement from family and friends, trading success in their former schools for possible failure in their new schools, accepting evenly and cheerfully each new situation without knowing whether to expect tolerance, rejection or lasting friendship.

Barry Jones ’73 was the youngest of the 55 students who attended Dartmouth ABC in the summer of 1964, immersed in a program we had structured to closely mirror boarding school routines. “I was happy, sad, unsure and a bit afraid of what the future would bring to me,” he later wrote me. “When I left Hanover on August 21, 1964, [to attend Groton] I felt like a new person—one who would be forever grateful for being so fortunate as to have been in Project ABC. June 1965 found me leaving one year of prep school behind me. I’d done as well as I could—no, as well as I thought I could at the time. I was a class officer, somewhat of an athlete, well liked, on the honor list. I realized I hadn’t been the model prep school boy, far from it, but I’d tried. And that’s what counts.”

His work at Groton earned Jones admission to Dartmouth, where, as a protégé of professor John Rassias, he concentrated on languages and literature. At graduation Jones was selected to give the class oration, which he closed by saying, “The experience of this college may or may not be idyllic. In either case it does not take place in a vacuum. To eradicate racism in all its forms on a worldwide basis demands a constant, concerted and personal commitment from each one of us, because no one is uninvolved.”

Jones has lived up to his words as a French teacher at Groton, civil servant and regional activist in his Rustburg, Virginia, hometown.

By 1966 qualified ABC applicants far exceeded available places and financial aid at the private schools. That fall, in a unique public-private collaboration, we started the first public school ABC program at Hanover High School for eight students.

Among them was Jesse Spikes ’72, from McDonough, Georgia, who also went on to earn a Dartmouth degree. An English major, he became a Rhodes scholar and graduated from Harvard Law School. One of the first black partners in a premier Atlanta law firm, he ran for mayor of Atlanta in 2009.

“After that first summer at Dartmouth I came to understand what ABC was about and what I ought to be trying to get out of the program,” Spikes says. In addition to his studies he learned to play soccer, hiked in the White Mountains and formed a friendship with future U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich ’68, an ABC resident tutor.

Like many of the pioneering ABC students, Spikes was not entirely happy about having to travel so far from home for his “better chance.” Homesickness was a constant ailment, but he appreciates his Hanover High experience and the support he received from ABC mentors: “There was the concept of a family in the house,” he says. “There was an extended black community, because you had 20 or 30 black students at Dartmouth.”

In launching ABC’s first public school program I had recruited friend and Andover math teacher Tom Mikula to move with his family into the Hanover ABC house, modeled on a private school dormitory. We had bonded at Andover over a shared set of priorities and values. I promised my friend he would be supported by two Dartmouth undergraduate live-in resident tutors. Bill McCurine ’69, who had come to Dartmouth from a middle-class, African-American family, was one of them. He and Mikula made a profound difference in the lives of those first eight ABC students who attended Hanover High School. Two years later Mikula joined the Tucker Foundation and started 36 ABC public school programs across the country. Twenty-two of them are still going strong.

“One of the things I remember so profoundly was the depth and richness of our relationships in the ABC house,” says McCurine, who preceded Spikes as a Rhodes scholar and went on to become a federal judge. “It had a Three Musketeers quality: all for one and one for all. The racial and geographic diversity helped create that richness. That first year the house included whites, Hispanics and blacks. We came from the Midwest, Southeast and Northeast. Some of us had no siblings, some had multiple siblings. Very few high schools or colleges had such intimate diversity in that 1966-69 period. We learned not only how to live together, but how to love each other. We learned to rely on each other for help, encouragement, wisdom and fun.”

Dartmouth student tutors got as much from the program as those they helped. “My grades got stronger and stronger during the two years I lived in the ABC house because our young men had mandatory study hall,” McCurine recalls. “So I also had mandatory study hall. I not only had to study, but I also had to set an example of how to study.
I became an even more diligent student. The earnestness of the ABC students caused me to regard my own privileged Dartmouth education with greater seriousness and gratitude.”

With encouragement from President Phil Hanlon ’77 and support from the Tucker Foundation—which remains linked to ABC through its Summer Enrichment at Dartmouth program—Dartmouth is hosting an ABC reunion on July 10-11. The event will preview a major portion of a documentary film about ABC’s first 50 years, a project undertaken by my film-director son, Tom, that has taken us from Boston to Birmingham, Alabama, Harlem to Berkeley, California, and Natchez, Mississippi, to Taos, New Mexico, as we’ve filmed ABC’s pioneers and their families. The film will be completed with footage taken of reunion and symposium participants. It will be their story.

American education continues to be starkly unequal, most especially for those from low-income families and under-resourced communities. Recent affirma-ive-action deliberations make clear the continuing challenges for those most at risk.

At the outset ABC was a bold experimental program that took the long view and has thus far changed 14,000 lives dramatically. In my pantheon of ABC heroes there will forever be a special place for the first students and their families—for the courage and perseverance with which they faced the unknown. One hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, ABC students and privileged white Americans gave one another a better chance.                                        

Charles Dey served as associate dean of the College, 1960-67, director of Project ABC, 1963-66, and dean emeritus of the Tucker Foundation, 1967-73.