LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

first arriving at these schools; demanding higher numbers of black students and faculty; pushing for the enrichment of their traditional college curricula with the study of black people; and finally, creating a welcoming environment for black people on and off campus, these students became activists for the black freedom movement. Their efforts to advance the cause of black liberation forever changed those leading American institutions. The cases of these elite colleges have added to what scholar Ibram Rogers (now Ibram Kendi) referred to as the black campus movement and the racial reconstitution of higher education. The accounts of the campus campaigns at the elite schools explain how students blackened the Ivy League with respect to admissions, curriculum, and culture.

      In the 1960s and 1970s, there were significant student protests and demonstrations that occurred at public universities. The 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the 1968 push for Ethnic and Black Studies departments at San Francisco State University were both monumental in their brashness and influential on the Ivy League in their methodologies.10 Equally significant were lesser known protests that took place in the late 1960s at institutions like City University of New York, Rutgers University, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Until recently, the traditional history of the student movement has done little to include campaigns at historically black colleges and universities such as publicly funded South Carolina State College, Southern University, and Howard University. Scholars such as Kendi, Joy Ann Williamson, Jelani Favors, Martha Biondi, Jeffrey Turner, and Robert Cohen have worked to fill that particular historical gap.

      Unlike public higher education institutions, the members of the Ivy League were private, elite, and unabashedly exclusive. Scholars of Ivy institutions such as Marcia Synnott, Jerome Karable, Wayne Glasker, Donald Downs, James Axtell, and most recently Craig Wilder, have shown that these colleges and universities did not have to answer directly to state legislatures and executives who controlled much of the funding for public institutions. Instead, Ivy institutions had to report to large donor alumni, whose contributions often determined the fate of their alma maters. Further, the board of trustees at Ivy institutions had considerable influence on the overall operation of the schools and society. The board members’ status and affinity for the cultures and traditions of their beloved institutions often put them in direct opposition to the proponents of the bourgeoning Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement.11 Where some scholars have focused mostly on black presence and admissions in the Ivy League, Upending the Ivory Tower delves into the activities and activism of black students.

      Civil rights and Black Power activity did not just exist in the streets and within the headquarters of traditional organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Congress of Racial Equality, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Revolutionary Action Movement. Scholars like Peniel Joseph, Rhonda Williams, Hasan Jeffries, and Jeffrey Ogbar in their respective works have shown that the conceptions of space—in terms of regions, landscapes, and infrastructure—that scholars typically have for these movements must expand. Upending the Ivory Tower takes a similar tack by showing how the black freedom movement invaded the racially and economically exclusive Ivy League. It follows the path created by scholars like Komozi Woodard, Jeanne Theoharis, Matthew Delmont, and Matthew Countryman, who argue that the narrative of the black freedom movement must include northern struggles. Although these Ivy institutions were squarely in the North, the isolation, embarrassment, mistreatment, benign neglect, and outright segregation that black students experienced at some of these schools was as bad as that experienced in many southern institutions.12

      Institutional white racism lived within the policies and cultures of those elite institutions. It propagated and accommodated segregation in housing and social activities and in some cases even admission. Harvard, historically known as one of the most liberal of the Ivies in terms of admissions, struggled to resolve issues of housing for black students when it became a requirement in the early twentieth century that all freshmen stay on campus. That meant that black students would ostensibly have to stay in the dormitories with white students. That was not practicable for Harvard’s leadership, which asked black students to lodge elsewhere so as not to cause problems for, what university president Abbott Lawrence Lowell described as, the other “99½% of the students.”13 That was the practice at Harvard as well as several other Ivies. In The Half-Opened Door, scholar Marcia Synnott highlighted the offenses that the fledgling members of the black bourgeoisie had to endure. Even the most exceptional black students coming from the most esteemed families could not live among their peers because of the belief that black people would innately invite problems for white students and officials. In spite of the fact that his grandfather became the first black person to serve a full term as a U.S. senator and that his father was an alumnus of Harvard himself, Roscoe Conkling Bruce, Jr. was denied housing at Harvard in 1922.14

      Iterations of the Bruce scenario unfurled at each of the Ivies throughout the twentieth century, as it did not matter how high one was able to go outside the ivy walls and gates of the universities; while inside, one’s race still mattered. Carl A. Fields, the first black administrator at Princeton, best summed up the coping mechanisms of black students at Ivy institutions before the mid-1960s. The first was to “forget that he was a Negro”; the second was to “be quietly but militantly Negro”; and, the third was to keep to himself [or herself].”15 Although there were minor adjustments made to admissions policies, not much changed for black people until the mid-1960s. By 1963, according to Synnott, “the new elite was still overwhelmingly white (about 98 percent).”16 Elite universities did much to open themselves to diverse white ethnicities and religions, but still lagged in terms of the admission of black students.

      In the late 1960s, after cities burned and the streets filled with distraught citizens fighting oppression, white administrators finally believed it was important to fully integrate black students with respect to admissions, housing, and other aspects of college life. Having witnessed the deaths of citizens fighting for civil and human rights as well as the local and national reactions to the urban rebellions that occurred in the nation’s northern and western cities, a contingent of black students turned the tables on white administrators by demanding black curricula, residences, and spaces on campus. After generations of dejection, some members of the Black Power generation decided to extend the coping mechanisms that Fields had described earlier. They raised the levels of their voices and militancy and some even decided that it was better to live among black people so that they could live without the stress of constantly educating their white peers and “masters” of the residence houses. Those pushing for separation were not always in the majority of black students, but their campaign was a direct response to the ills of institutional racism and a departure from the methods of earlier generations of black students.

      Just as the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement did not manifest themselves the same way in the different regions of the United States, the black student movement took on varied shapes on different campuses. The students at San Francisco State College, Merritt College, or Howard University did not have the immediate need to protest for a higher number of black students in the same way that Princeton and Brown black students did. Although all institutions of higher education stake claim to the advancement of knowledge, part of the identity of Ivy League schools is the awareness that in addition to the advancement of knowledge, they produce the world’s leadership class. Upending the Ivory Tower covers what happened when black people joined that class in larger numbers. In response to the arrival and agitation of young black learners, Ivy institutions worked to respond to their separate emergent needs but also, in ways, banded together to envision outcomes that could satisfy protesting students and the institutions’ desires to remain elite.17 As they competed for black students and professionals, the officials at Ivy schools maintained communication to ensure the league maintained some cohesiveness.

      By analyzing civil rights and Black Power in the Ivy League, Upending the Ivory Tower attempts to add nuance to the movements. Scholars have for years painted Black Power as part of the “bad 1960s,” where violence and destruction reigned, whereas the “good 1960s” featured integrationist leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Whitney Young, Jr. Using this model, those who challenged the white power structure outside of the bounds of traditional marches and boycotts—leaders like Huey Newton and H. Rap Brown—were demonized as narcissistic militants. That rendering is, of course, skewed and simple. With that in mind,

Скачать книгу