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The son of educated free parents of Baltimore, Edward Garrison Draper was educated in private abolitionist-leaning academies before entering Dartmouth with the Class of 1855. The sixth Black student admitted to the College, Draper maintained "a very respectable standing, socially, and in his class." He returned home to pursue legal training. Joseph J. Gilman (DC 1838) supervised his private lessons. At the bar examination, he was judged "qualified in all respects to be admitted to the Bar in Maryland if he was a free white citizen." Knowing beforehand the certainty of the outcome, Draper left as planned for Liberia to become its first college-educated Black lawyer. Unfortunately, he succumbed to illness after a year.

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George Rice of Newport, R.I., graduated from Dartmouth in 1869 as "one of the earliest pioneers opening New England colleges, highly respected for his genial manners and scholarship." Anticipating opportunities for educated Blacks in postbellum America, Rice applied to Columbia's medical school but found an unyielding racial bar. Opportunity beckoned in Scotland, and Rice began his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh. He trained with Joseph Lister, renowned as the "founder of modern surgery." Lister appointed him to head the house surgeon staff. Rice settled in England, married, and enjoyed a successful 50-year medical practice outside London. After death, a Black workman found and delivered Rice's papers to nearby Sutton Archives, thus preserving evidence of a rare Black professional in England's Victorian Age.

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At age 12, Champion Waring of Charleston, SC, the son of enslaved parents, was brought north after the Civil War with a Union Army Colonel to live with the Niles family in Post-Mills, Vermont. He prepared at Hampton and Oberlin before entering Dartmouth in 1879. He was a member of the track team and Theta Delta Chi fraternity. After college, Waring taught in Galveston, TX, then moved to Chicago and graduated from Chicago-Kent Law School. Admitted to the Chicago Bar, Waring became a leader among Chicago's Black lawyers, serving a term as president of the Cook County Bar Association and active in local and national Republican politics. He died in 1932, well-remembered as the Dean of Chicago's law community.

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Born in west Tennessee, “Gus” Poindexter always wanted to be a doctor. After graduating from Lincoln University, Dartmouth and Harvard Medical Schools, and specializing in tropical medicine, he earned his Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology at Columbia. Appointed Chief of bacteriology, preventive medicine, and public health at Howard University, Poindexter served as Chief of American Foreign Aid Health Missions in African and Far East countries, and won numerous honors. In his autobiography, he wrote, "I have traveled widely and have some appreciation of why people laugh and cry. I believe that one God, one wife, one Church and one profession are best for me. I believe that the 3-score and 11 years of living, the 900,000 miles of official foreign travel, and 20 years of service to people in under-developed countries when added to the 23 years of professional service here in the U.S. make for a content demise."

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Frederick D. Stubbs wrote W.E.B. DuBois ahead of an invited Dartmouth lecture, "This college of supposed liberal thought has long needed a speaker of your ability to disillusion it from fallacious ideas and concepts." DuBois did not disappoint, nor did Stubbs, who compiled stellar academic records at Dartmouth and Harvard. He became the first Black physician boarded in thoracic surgery. Sadly, Stubbs' promising career ended in sudden death at age 39. Colleagues wrote, "He had won a Phi Beta Kappa Key at Dartmouth, an A.O.A. Key at Harvard; had passed the American Board of Surgery; had become a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons; was Chief Surgeon of Mercy and Douglass Hospitals in Philadelphia. We do not honor him for his accomplishments alone, but for his willingness to join with us in our common problems wherever they arose."

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Charles T. Davis studied American literature at Dartmouth, where some alleged he was denied a Rhodes scholarship in 1939 because of his race. After Ph.D. studies at N.Y.U., he was the first Black granted tenure in the English department at Yale and led its Afro-American Studies program to national prominence. He died at age 63 from cancer. At his memorial service, Yale President Giamatti said. "He never imposed upon you; he summoned you out of yourself. Charles never bid you be his loyal friend; once you met him, you could choose no other course. To be with him or around him was an education in how to be faithful to the best you could possibly be. He brought out, effortlessly, the best you had, and like everyone else, I loved him for it."