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TRAILBLAZERS
FIGHT FOR EQUALITY
Boilermaker sisters led campaign to integrate student housing
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P U R DU E A LUM N U S
lived only a few minutes apart in the Milwaukee
area for all but a few years of adulthood.
“They stayed together,” says Winifred Parker
White’s youngest daughter, Adrienne WhiteFaines. “They were like a duo.”
Because of their fight for equity in the 1940s,
the Parker sisters are also forever linked in their
alma mater’s history. After enrolling at Purdue in
the fall of 1946, the sisters and their parents led
the campaign that compelled Purdue to integrate
its student housing. When the University ended
its segregated housing policy in January 1947, the
Parker sisters were among the first Black women
to move into the Bunker Hill residence halls.
If not for the Parker family’s persistence—particularly that of the sisters’ father, Fred—their
attempt to convince the Purdue administration
to reconsider its housing policies might have
been unsuccessful.
When the Parkers first enrolled, Purdue denied
their application to live in University housing,
P U RDU E U N I V E RS I T Y
VERY MORNING, JUST BEFORE 6, the telephone would ring in Walter (S’48) and
Winifred Parker White’s (S’50) home.
In many cases, a call at that hour might
be cause for alarm. The Whites, however, always
knew who was on the other end of the line: Winifred’s sister, Frieda Parker Jefferson (HHS’50).
“They would get up and start preparing breakfast, and they would call and talk to each other
before everybody showed up at breakfast and
took off and went to school and everything else,”
says Frieda’s son Ralph Jefferson III (ChE’80).
“That was their habit.”
“And then the last phone call of the evening,
11 o’clock at night, Frieda and my mother,” Winifred’s eldest daughter, Winifred White Neisser,
recalls with a chuckle.
Born 10 months apart, the sisters were inseparable for nearly their entire lives. Not only did
they grow up together and attend Purdue University simultaneously from 1946 to 1950, they
