Mercer University’s First Black Student Stories His Experience

Sam Oni was Mercer University’s first black student to enroll in classes in 1963. He came to Georgia from the present day Ghana, and found himself in the middle of the civil rights movement.

When he came to Mercer University, he was roomed with Donald Baxter, a white man who was studying to become a doctor.

“It was a bond that happened almost instantanously. I had very little appreciation of the sacrifice he was making, being a white person that had grown up in Georgia,” Oni says.

Both men received threats because of their situation. The school received bomb threats for allowing a black man to study there. Students would not sit at the same table with Oni and Baxter while they were eating.

Even a church they went to, on the first Sunday Oni was living in Georgia, put the pressure on the two of them to leave.

Oni recalled that Sunday, when the pastor was introducing Oni to the congregation.

“In mid sentence he (the pastor) was cut off. A man jumped on his feet. He said, ‘Reverened Moore, I’m not going to sit here and watch you destroy this church by bringing a “N-word” into the congregation.”

But the two men endured and created a lasting friendship, lasting now more than 50 years.

The two credit their faith in God for getting them through those early college years.