the Duke Divinity School from 1944 to 1946. There he sought to strengthen Duke University's leadership role in religious education and to strengthen connections between white and African American religious leaders, involving the latter in Duke Chapel services and programs for the first time. Branscomb left the Deanship at Duke to become the fourth chancellor of Vanderbilt University from 1946 to 1963. He obtained support for the university from national institutions and recruited national figures to the Board of Trust, including Harold Sterling Vanderbilt, the great-grandson of Vanderbilt University's founder Cornelius Vanderbilt. Upon Branscomb's arrival at Vanderbilt in 1946, higher education in the South was strictly segregated, and he was told that no Blacks had ever been on the Vanderbilt campus except in a "menial capacity." Branscomb viewed segregation as not only unjust but as a roadblock in Vanderbilt's – indeed the South's – path to national recognition and influence. As a Southerner, he was aware of the resistance to change of the all-white Vanderbilt Board of Trustees, the alumni, and the white Nashville community. Branscomb staked a strategy for integrating the university that was deliberate, methodical, and pragmatic. Early in his tenure, Branscomb broke ground by inviting faculty of Fisk University, an HBCU in Nashville, to attend Vanderbilt campus activities, and he and his wife Margaret included Fisk faculty in social events attended by the more liberal Vanderbilt Trustees and faculty. In 1949, when Vanderbilt Law School received its first application from an African American, the Board directed Branscomb to reply that the application would not be considered, rejecting Branscomb's suggested additional language, "at this time." In the early 1950s, Branscomb raised with the Trustees the fact that the courts had pressured some public universities to admit African Americans and had ordered the integration of the University of Tennessee student body. With no such legal orders directed at private universities the Board did not act broadly, but in 1952 it accepted Branscomb's proposal that students of color at nearby Scarritt College be allowed to enroll in Vanderbilt classes in light of a prior student exchange agreement. Not long thereafter, Branscomb joined the Board of the Southern Education Reporting Service (SERS), created to provide objective reporting on school desegregation that would counter the frequently biased, inflammatory Southern journalistic rhetoric on the topic. In 1952 Branscomb worked behind the scenes with the Vanderbilt Divinity School Dean to draft a letter under