In the fall of 1943, the YMCA, the Young Men’s Christian Association, began bringing black and white male and female students together. Until then, there had been no official contact between the strictly segregated black and white colleges. In Richmond, there currently existed one black church-related college, Virginia Union University, and three white colleges, the University of Richmond, Richmond Professional Institute, and the Medical College of Virginia. The first meetings were held at the Medical College, right in the center of the city, but later meetings were held at Virginia Union University and the Richmond Professional Institute. No meeting was possible at the University of Richmond itself. So we formed the Richmond Intercollegiate Council, which soon expanded to the Virginia Intercollegiate Council to include the black state university in Petersburg, 20 miles from Richmond. We were surprised to have several hundred male and female students attend our events, including many from Richmond and Westhampton College. The blacks with whom we had come in contact up to that time were mostly on the service staff. We elected as president of the council a charismatic, highly intelligent black theology student, Russell Jones, who later went on to a stellar career in the YMCA at the national level; I was elected to the board. The University of Richmond, which today publishes images of its black students and professors in its brochures as a matter of course, continued to resist admitting black students for a long time. When our class of 1964 met after twenty years, I refused to attend because blacks were still not admitted. It was not until 1974, when this had finally changed, that I attended a reunion. At the close of the 1943-44 academic year, the Richmond Intercollegiate Council hosted a social evening, which had also been advertised in the Richmond College student newspaper. That evening, whites and blacks danced together, which had been unheard of at the time and certainly unique in Richmond itself. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)