By Martha Irvine
The Associated Press

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - The protesters who waved Confederate flags and carried "Civil Rights for Whites" signs at Memphis State University are long gone.

So are rules that banned black students from the campus cafeteria and student center, and that relegated them to the "Negro" section at football games.

These days, the University of Memphis - a name taken in the early 1990s to accompany a new image - is one of the most diverse college campuses in the country. Some call it an affirmative action success story, one in which a third of the school's 16,000 undergraduates are black, and where students of many races mingle with little thought of the past.

And still, Errol Harmon, a second-year law student, knows some of his white peers on this quiet campus question his presence, and the university programs that have helped get him there.

Their arguments, muttered in hallways or voiced during class debates about affirmative action, are not unlike those in a case that went before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. The plaintiffs claim that the University of Michigan law school gave spots to less-qualified minority applicants that should have gone to white applicants.

Just under 7 percent of law students at Michigan are black, accounting for about half of the "underrepresented minorities" there.

At Memphis, the law school has about 50 black students, about 11 percent of the total - not as diverse as the undergraduate population but certainly more than it was in decades past, when pictures of graduating law school classes included only a scattering of black faces.

Many of today's black students, including Harmon, got there with the help of the Tennessee Institute for Pre-Law, a university program that helps black undergraduates who are state residents prepare for and win admission to law school.

The program and various scholarships for black students are funded by the state, which is still under federal mandate to desegregate many of its higher-learning institutions.

Survival of fittest

"Without it, I don't think I would've been prepared for this rigorous environment," Harmon says of the pre-law program. "Law school is very, very, very demanding. It's really survival of the fittest, so to speak."

Hard work and a supportive family also have helped Harmon, 30, achieve his goal, one his grandmother always told him was within reach.

"You're not going to be ignorant like I am; you're going to school," Callie Mae Smith, whom he called "Big Momma," often told Harmon.

Harmon's grandparents, descendants of slaves, quit school in their early teens to earn money farming cotton, peas and corn on land just south of what would become Elvis Presley's Graceland estate.

His parents, a church secretary and a landscaper, finished high school. But college opportunities eluded them, too, in an era that saw the hope of the civil rights movement often replaced by heartache - including the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., just a few miles from their home.

But life has been different for Harmon, the youngest of their two sons and the first member of the family to graduate from college.

A football scholarship got him to Austin Peay State College outside Nashville. While there, he says an injury caused him to more seriously consider his career options.

He came home to earn some money working with his father and, eventually, enrolled in the Tennessee Institute for Pre-Law, which students attend over three consecutive summers.

Those who complete the program - and meet grade and Law School Admission Test (or LSAT) requirements - are all but guaranteed admission in one of the state's two law schools (the University of Tennessee in Knoxville is the other one).

Now Harmon is well on his way to becoming a lawyer. Earnest and articulate, he is president of the law school's chapter of the Black Law Students Association.

He also regularly defends the case for affirmative action when white students, such as Cristy Braun, question it.

"It is a wonderful experience to have diversity in the classroom," says Braun, a law student from Florida who sits in front of Harmon in a class about criminal procedure. "However, I don't believe in forcing diversity into an environment by lowering standards ...

"People should be admitted on their merits on an even playing field," Braun adds, noting that neither of her parents finished college - and that, even before she came to law school, she worked as a paralegal to help prepare herself on her own.

Increasing access

Harmon and other black law students argue that the pre-law program simply helps get the word out to qualified students who, otherwise, might never consider law.

"It's almost similar to the slaves being freed - and someone who's never been off the plantation," says Cedrick Wooten, a first-year student who attended the pre-law program while he was an assistant principal for the Memphis public schools. "Access means nothing if you don't know about it."

Tameka Turner-Perry, who attended the pre-law program and graduated from the law school in 2001, agrees.

"Really, the thing being given to us is just a chance," says Turner-Perry, who took a job with a civil litigation firm in Memphis after clerking for a Tennessee Supreme Court judge. "When I got into law school, grades weren't given to me. I earned those."

Not that it's easy for some black students.

University statistics for Turner-Perry's class, for example, show that a little more than half of the black students who began law school with her - 11 of 19 - ended up graduating. That compares with about 80 percent of white students.

Turner-Perry particularly remembers one black student - "a really bright girl" - who dropped out because her family expected her to get a job and help care for her nieces and nephews.

Don Polden, dean of the Memphis law school, says that kind of story is more common for black students who - like Harmon and Turner-Perry - are often the first in their families to attend college. He and his staff recently added support programs to help black students deal with work and family issues once they've been admitted.

"We try to get the best students we can here - and then keep them," says Polden, who believes that creating opportunities for black students is simply the "right thing to do."