When the Harvard Glee Club performed on television in Birmingham, Ala., as part of their 1961 spring break tour of the South, one Black singer was asked not to sing with the group because of bomb threats.

The singer, a third-year student at the Divinity School named Archie C. Epps III, agreed to sit out but insisted the Glee Club adopt a policy of performing only where all its members are welcome.

Epps, now in his 22nd year as the College's dean of students, says much has changed for Black students at Harvard since he first came to Cambridge in 1958.

"Because the Black group has grown, it has become more diverse and there are more varieties of Black experiences at Harvard," Epps says. "One is less noticed because of your race."

Since the first Black student graduated from the College in 1870, the undergraduate Black student population has grown sporadically, numerous clubs primarily for Black students have been formed, and a full department is devoted to Afro-American studies.

Despite this progress, students of both the past and present say a subtle racist attitude pervades the Harvard campus leaving many Black students feeling like, in the words of one student, "second-class citizens."

Frank S. Jones '50 says he only recently has been able to confront the racist attitudes--both subtle and overt--that he faced as one of only three or four Black students in his class.

"I wore blinders," says Jones, who in 1989 took a sabbatical from his post as a professor of urban affairs at MIT to teach at the Morehouse College, a historically Black university. "It's only now that I've taken the blinders off."

Jones recalls one incident from his undergraduate days he thinks was an example of racism. While waiting in line at the Union one day, a server singled Jones out of a rowdy, mostly white line of students and said accusingly, "What is wrong with you?"

"I wasn't making any more noise than anyone else," says Jones. Now, more than 40 years later, Jones says he wishes he had asked, "Is it my blackness that causes you to single me out?"

But Black undergraduates interviewed last week said they have not experienced overt incidents of racism. Still, some say racism persists.

When Donald D. Lewis '95 was walking alone at night from Quincy House to Mather House last year, he says Harvard police officers asked him to stop and empty his pockets.

Lewis says that although he suspects the police officers' actions were racially motivated, he filed no formal complaint. "You can put up a fight and protest," Lewis says, "but you can't do anything to change their nature."

Ignorance, not intention, fuels most facially biased actions, agrees Ahmed A. Yearwood '95. "Most cases involving race issues do not involve someone carrying a KKK flag and wearing a hood over their head," he says. "They simply don't know what they're saying."

Despite these perceived racist attitudes. Black students at Harvard advanced to the upper echelons of campus organizations even when their numbers were few.

William S. Timmons '52 was elected the first--and only--Black president of The Crimson. Aryee Quah (George) Armah '63 led students in forming the Association of African and Afro-American Students (AAAAS), a forerunner of today's Black Students Association (BSA). Jones became the first Black head manager of the football team in the late '40s.