BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Colenthia Hill Hunter looks across the campus in Wilberforce, Ohio, toward a neat green rectangle of grass and trees. In its place, she sees rose bushes and peonies, a slowly preceding line of black mortarboards and proud, solemn faces.

It is a June day in the early 1960s, and "Pomp and Circumstance" rings out from the Galloway Hall clock tower. Colenthia Hill is one of 150 Central State College graduates. Editor of the college yearbook and newspaper. Member of the student senate. No one says a word in the commencement march, including Miss Hill. Her mind races with thoughts of what the last four years have meant to her. Indeed, what they have done to her.

Then, she saw Central State as a door to a different life. Today, she believes it was a door to a different self, the real self that had to be hidden as a black child growing up in white Madison, Wis.

Those days, too, were hard to forget, but for different reasons. No black teachers and few black classmates. The quiet that roared through the gymnasium when, in fifth grade, she won the school spelling bee, an honor expected to go to a sixth-grade white girl. The thumping that rose from her chest when students were forced to choose sides for a recess game. "Whoever got the last pick," she says with a slight smile, "always got me."

A college scholarship

Academically, she shined as brightly as she was allowed. Guidance counselors encouraged black classmates into trade schools. She received college scholarships. She chose Central State, a historically black university in rural Ohio.

She came, she says, "to find out what it meant to be black." "In school in Madison, there were no blacks in the textbooks except slaves picking cotton, braids sticking up all over their heads," she remembers. "You just wanted to crawl down in your seat."

Central State offered another picture.

There were black drum majors and cheerleaders, black students working on Homecoming floats, a black president of the student senate and, in every classroom, a black professor.

Her first day on campus, she was with two other coeds when one lit a cigarette. A dignified woman drove by, stopped her car and walked toward them. She was Elizabeth Anderson, dean of women. "Young women at Central State do not smoke in public, and as long as I am dean of women, they will not," she told them crisply. Later, when freshman Hill explained she had simply been a bystander, Dean Anderson told her, "Be selective of the company you keep."

People cared about everything here. One's grades, one's past, how one dressed for Sunday dinner. It was culture shock, amazing, overwhelming, and at Christmas, Colenthia Hill almost withdrew.

Lessons in success

In January, she tried again. At a basketball game, she took in everything around her. Five black players on the court; stands full of black faces. "I'd never seen anything like it in my life," she says. Suddenly, "I opened my hand and my heart, and I became a part of it."

She attributes much of her later success - a doctorate, a 35-year career in Cincinnati Public Schools, civic honors - to the lessons of Central State.

Galloway Hall's chimes rang through it all. But now, on her return visit, the hands stand frozen at 11:50 even though it is 3 o'clock. The university admittedly has much to fix, nearly $9 million in debt with poorly maintained buildings and dinged-up public confidence. State legislators have ordered cuts in curriculum and outside oversight, wondering openly whether the beleaguered institution should survive.

Colenthia Hunter believes that it must, that black students still search for a place where they can not only fit, but lead. A place where "finding out what it is to be black" is still a legitimate academic goal.

"Outside the circle of Central State, you were just a spectator, but inside it, you were a participant. Black students still need that today," she says.

There are no roses on this visit, and the air is empty of chimes. Still, Colenthia Hunter smiles.

"When I was here three years ago, there was just grass. Now there are bushes and trees," she says. "A class needs to adopt it, plant flowers again.

"But it's still beautiful," she says quietly. "And it's still here."

Krista Ramsey's column appears in The Enquirer on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202 or fax at 768-8340.

RAMSEY ARCHIVE