Allen Ballard

Allen Butler Ballard Jr. was born on 1 November 1930 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Olive Robinson Ballard, a Philadelphian, and Allen B. Ballard, who was born in Greenville, South Carolina. He attended the legally segregated Joseph E. Hill Elementary School in Germantown and then the integrated Central High School, where he lettered in football and graduated as the varsity athlete with the highest academic average in his class.

In 1948 he and Stanley Jackson of Steubenville, Ohio, became the first two African American students to matriculate at Kenyon College. Ballard played football and lacrosse, was elected student council president, graduated magna cum laude and joined Phi Beta Kappa. He later described the isolation of integrating Kenyon in The Education of Black Folk, writing that for eighteen hours a day their manners, speech and style were on trial before white America.

After a Fulbright year at the University of Bordeaux he served at NATO headquarters in Paris from 1953 to 1955, then entered Harvard's Soviet Union Regional Studies Program as its second Black student and completed a Ph.D. in Government.

Ballard joined the City College of New York faculty in 1961 as a government professor. In October 1966 the New York Times reported that City College had appointed him its first African American assistant dean; he became associate dean in 1967 and later the first African American associate dean at the City University of New York.

With psychologist Leslie Berger he helped found SEEK, which launched at City College in 1965 with 113 students as an anti-poverty admissions and support program. Assembly members Percy Sutton and Shirley Chisholm led the fight for state funding that expanded SEEK across CUNY's four-year colleges. By fall 1967 most SEEK students were Black or Puerto Rican, and by 1968 the program served more than 1,800 students. Close to 40 percent of the 1965 to 1967 City College SEEK cohort had graduated by 1972.

Ballard later taught history, political science and Africana studies at the University at Albany, SUNY, where he was Professor Emeritus and a Collins Fellow. Kenyon College and Tuskegee University conferred honorary doctorates on him.

Ballard wrote three nonfiction books and two novels. The Education of Black Folk (1973) examined the struggle for knowledge in white America. One More Day's Journey (1984) traced Black Philadelphia and the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North. Where I'm Bound (2000), published by Simon and Schuster, was among the first Civil War novels told from an African American soldier's perspective and was named a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year. Carried by Six received a Black Caucus of the American Library Association honorable mention in fiction. His memoir Breaching Jericho's Walls appeared from SUNY Press in 2011.

He lived in the Capital Region of New York, loved sailing and swimming at Lake George (where he had worked as a cook at Silver Bay as a student and once swam across the lake as a teenage lifeguard), and pursued photography, guitar and folk singing. He was a longtime member of Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Albany, serving in the soup kitchen ministry and singing in the male chorus, and later joined Macedonia Baptist Church. He was married to Josephine and had a son, John, a stepdaughter, Alayna, and a stepson, Michael.

Allen B. Ballard Jr. died on 5 November 2026 at the age of 96. A death notice listed Colonie, New York, and care by New Comer Cremations and Funerals. The cause of death was not made public. Calling hours and a funeral celebrating his life were held on 12 November 2026 at Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Albany, followed by interment with full military honors at Gerald B.H. Solomon Saratoga National Cemetery in Schuylerville, New York.

Ballard is remembered as a civil rights pioneer in New York higher education whose work on SEEK helped end racial exclusion in CUNY admissions and shaped opportunity programs nationwide. As a scholar and novelist he brought Black family history, the Great Migration and African American Civil War experience to a wide readership. Generations of students at City College and SUNY Albany knew him as a teacher who, as his family put it, did his very best to prepare them for their journey through life.