Charles Jordan

Charles Jordan A69 was the first Black student to attend the prestigious Hawken School in Ohio before he entered Tufts in the fall of 1965. By his junior year, Jordan was a campus leader for Black students after he helped lead the newly founded Afro-American Society at Tufts; he also taught a course about Black life in America at the Ex College. Jordan spearheaded the Afro-American Society’s three goals: increasing the Black student population at Tufts, the creation and maintenance of a Freedom School in Roxbury, and the establishment of tutoring services for Black or other marginalized students at Tufts. He served as the liberal arts representative to university committee on diversity and pushed back against the administration on the needs of Black students.

In 1968, Jordan spoke out about some of his concerns to the Weekly. He pointed out how limited Tufts’ academic programs, especially in the liberal arts, were when it came to including Black voices and said that this harmed both white and Black students. In the same article, other Black students shared their own experiences with racism at Tufts, including slurs from other students, what would now be considered microaggressions from professors and peers, and a lack of support from administration. That same year, Jordan helped form Students Concerned About Racism, or SCAR.

SCAR formed after a confrontation with the administration over concerns about hypocrisy and the lack of outreach to Black high school students. After a memorial service to Martin Luther King Jr., Black students, including Jordan, demanded that the administration meet a goal of enrolling a total of twenty Black students to Tufts and Jackson each year. Jordan and 150 other students agreed to work with the administration to help reach out to and recruit Black high schoolers to Tufts.

Under Jordan’s leadership, SCAR reached out to nearly 300 Black and low-income students in the 1968-1969 school year; twenty of these students ended up enrolling in Tufts. As the university could not guarantee funding for these students, Jordan and other SCAR leaders convinced half of the faculty to donate a set percent of their salaries and 600 students to donate the cost of meals from the meal plan toward these scholarships; they also were able to get the Board of Trustees to earmark $50,000 of financial support for the twenty students. However, SCAR’s goals went deeper than recruiting Black students and helping with financial aid. As they were unable to dismantle a culture of racism at Tufts, SCAR disbanded in 1969.

Jordan won the Donald A. Cowdery Award and the Senior Award from the Tufts University Alumni Association for his leadership with SCAR. Following his time at Tufts, Jordan went into the financial world, founding both Charles Jordan & Co., LLC, a securities brokerage firm, and Niagara Capital Advisors, a hedge fund in 1994. Jordan is a Hawken Fellow and a recipient of the Richard W. Day Award from Hawken School, a former Board of Trustee member at both Wilberforce University and Pace University, and served on the Tufts University Alumni Council and the Black Alumni Association.

Biography written and researched by Cat Rosch.