History
It was founded in 1915 by the Sisters of Loretto as Loretto College, and as a Catholic women's colleges. The first male students were admitted in 1962. The Sisters of Loretto transferred the university to a Board of Directors in 1967.
Webster participated in early racial integration battles in St. Louis. During the early 1940s, many local priests, especially Jesuits, challenged the segregationist policies at the city's Catholic colleges and parochial schools. The St. Louis chapter of the Midwest Clergy Conference on Negro Welfare arranged in 1943 for Webster College to admit a black female student, Mary Aloyse Foster, which would make it the city's first Catholic college to integrate. However, in 1943 Archbishop John J. Glennon blocked that student's enrollment by speaking privately with the Kentucky-based superior of the Sisters of Loretto. The Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American newspaper with national circulation, discovered Glennon's actions and ran a front-page feature on the Webster incident in February 1944. The negative publicity toward Glennon's segregationist policies led Saint Louis University to begin admitting African American students in summer 1944. In fall 1945, Webster College responded to pressure by admitting Irene Thomas, a Catholic African-American woman from St. Louis, as a music major.
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“It would be naive to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems.... However, with faith and perseverance,... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace. They can be resolved in the future, provided, of course, that we can think of five new ways to measure the height of a tall building by using a barometer.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
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—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)