“Anything that affects the bottom line is going to get the attention of the leaders,” Mr. Ridgel said Tuesday. “I have to commend them on accomplishing what people this time last year would have considered an impossibility.”

Mr. Ridgel today is a celebrated graduate of the university, with an honorary degree and a fellowship in his name. But that seemed implausible in mid-20th-century Missouri, where efforts to integrate St. Louis swimming pools were met with bat-wielding white youths and educational segregation was enshrined in law.

He gained admission to Missouri’s graduate program in economics in 1950 only after civil rights groups won a court ruling desegregating the university. He decided to attend knowing that one of the black men who had gone to court seeking to break the school’s color barrier had vanished. He lived alone in a two-bed dormitory room in the midst of a campus housing shortage, because no white student would room with him.

Blacks had but one opportunity for off-campus socializing, a coffee shop near the university bookstore. Mr. Ridgel recalled entering a second cafe with three white students: “The man looked up from the counter,” he said, “and said, ‘I can serve you three, but I can’t serve him.’

“And they said, ‘If you can’t serve the four of us, you can’t serve any of us.’ And we walked out.”

He speaks almost matter-of-factly of his past as a path-breaker, and remembers his time at the university, during an era when separate-but-equal was still the law of the land, as surprisingly free of conflict. He said his presence had provoked no racial epithets, like those hurled at the current student body president, who is black, or swastikas scrawled on campus buildings, like the one found in recent weeks.