Taken in, but not a token

ATLANTA (AP) — From his first day at Morehouse College, the country’s only institution of higher learning dedicated to the education of black men, Joshua Packwood has been a standout.

He was elected dorm president as a freshman; he was a fashion-show favorite; he was a Rhodes Scholar finalist; he landed a job at the prestigious investment banking firm Goldman Sachs. But his skin has made all of this an anomaly.

This month, Mr. Packwood will address his classmates as the first white valedictorian in Morehouse’s 141-year history. The 22-year-old from Kansas City, Mo., will graduate Sunday with a perfect 4.0 grade-point average and a degree in economics.

He could have gone elsewhere, to a school such as Columbia, Stanford or Yale, but his four-year journey through Morehouse has taught him a few things that they could not.

“I’ve been forced to see the world in a different perspective, that I don’t think I could’ve gotten anywhere else,” he said. “None of the Ivies … none of them could’ve provided me with the perspective I have now.”

When Mr. Packwood applied to Morehouse, he had frequent conversations with George Gray, an alumnus who was a recruiter at the school. Mr. Gray spent months trying to talk the sought-after senior into choosing Morehouse.

After several conversations, Mr. Packwood began to suspect that Mr. Gray, now director of admissions at historically black Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark., had no idea that he was white. His suspicions were confirmed when one of Mr. Gray’s calls caught Mr. Packwood in the middle of track practice.

“Don’t let the white kids walk you down,” Mr. Gray quipped.

“Wait,” Mr. Packwood responded. “You know I’m white, right?”

Silence. Uneasy laughter. Confirmation. For Mr. Packwood, knowing that he had been picked on his merits, and not as a token white recruit, made the difference.

“That said I could come here and, ironically, be accepted for who I am,” Mr. Packwood said.

It was not as if this were the first time Mr. Packwood experienced life in the minority. He was among the few white students in his class at Grandview Senior High School in Kansas City. He has mixed-race siblings and his mother was married to a black man.

As Morehouse embraced him, Mr. Packwood became an unlikely ambassador for the school. Wendell Marsh, a junior English and French major who is black, said that talking with Mr. Packwood as a high school senior helped him decide on Morehouse.

“Right now we live in a time where people say the black institution is obsolete, that you can get a better education at a majority institution,” Mr. Marsh said. “To see a white guy who had declined Harvard for Morehouse, I figured it was good enough for me.”