Only one person of color, African American Harvey Gantt, who desegregated Clemson in 1963, is identified as one of the institution's "Notable People."

On January 28, 1963, Harvey Gantt became the first African American student to enroll in Clemson University since its founding in 1889. Gantt’s enrollment not only opened up opportunities for African American students to attend and earn degrees from Clemson through his successful class-action lawsuit but for African American staff to have more employment opportunities and for the hiring of African American administrators and tenure-track faculty.

The university rarely discusses the fact that Gantt's admissions resulted from a class-action lawsuit that the intuition fought to the US Supreme Court. Moreover, most people know very little about the first decade of integration at Clemson as the university's African American student population slowly grew from one student to almost one hundred. Most were Black males. Clemson had become coeducational in 1955 to avoid closure as white male interest in attending a military college waned after the brutalities of World War ll. When Gantt desegregated Clemson, he enrolled in a higher education intuition that was not only all white but pervasively white male - administrators, faculty, staff, and students, many of whom had grown up in the Jim Crow ear of white male supremacy in South Carolina.

Gantt's activism and enrollment paved the way for other African American students at Clemson. Later, Gantt became Mayor of the city of Charlotte, established an influential, multicultural architecture firm, and created an arts center.