Letter from A. D. White to C. H. McCormick regarding African-American students at Cornell

Draft of letter from Andrew Dickson White to C. H. McCormick, September 5, 1874
Copy of letter sent
In answer to your letter first received, I would say that we have no colored students at the University at present but shall be very glad to receive any who are prepared to enter. Although there is no certainty of the entrance of any such students here during the present year, they may come and if even one offered himself and passed the examinations, we should receive him even if all our five hundred white students were to ask for dismissal on that account.

The first African-American students, Charles Chauveau Cook, Jane Eleanor Datcher, and George Washington Fields graduated in 1890.