Eight years before Georgia Institute of Technology admitted Black students, a young man hoping to study mechanical engineering applied to go to school there.
The interactions that followed — the cold indifference showed by Georgia Tech, the support that Robert Cheeseboro received from the NAACP and the newspaper articles that detailed his struggles — are archived in the Library of Congress.
Cheeseboro’s daughter, Evelyn Bolton, 53, of Gastonia, knew little about this until she found documents shortly before her father died of dementia in February. He was 87.
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