Scholars have long debated the complicity of Southern white women after the Civil War in helping create a racialist and racist regional identity and denying or delaying civil rights for African Americans. These studies have largely focused on the activities of elite white women property owners, club members, and writers. Yet few scholars have examined college women's activities in this regard, particularly those public colleges for women established in the South between 1884 and 1908. To what extent were students at Southern public women's colleges complicit in contributing to what Joan Marie Johnson has called the "culture of segregation" promulgated by racialized constructions of Southern, American, and female identity? What role, if any, did these colleges play in breaking down racial divisions and promoting interracial understanding? And how did students' racial attitudes change over time? To address these questions, this article explores student attitudes on race through the lens of their public writing. To better allow the setting of these student voices against the context of their schools' histories, this article focuses largely on two of these institutions, Florida State College for Women (FSCW) in Tallahassee and North Carolina College for Women (NCCW) in Greensboro, with supplementary evidence from the remaining campuses to provide both corroboration and counterpoint. Although students express a continuum of attitudes, both within and across institutions, this article finds that student treatment of African Americans in their writing often offers a more sympathetic range than that of contemporary elite white clubwomen and professional women writers. (Contains 64 footnotes.)