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Upending the Ivory Tower. Stefan M. Bradley
Читать онлайн.Название Upending the Ivory Tower
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781479819270
Автор произведения Stefan M. Bradley
Жанр Учебная литература
Издательство Ingram
Change was not reserved solely for the elite institutions. The students underwent transformations themselves during their scholastic journey. The moment and the movements that black learners observed in their time spent in the boldly white environment of the Ivy League made an impression on them. Discussing and participating in protest actions and negotiations with officials helped to develop the students’ black identities. Some students, particularly those who came in the early 1960s and graduated in 1967 and 1968, witnessed within themselves the rise of black consciousness. Scholar William Cross referred to the phenomenon as Nigrescence, which is the process of actualizing blackness that occurs within Americans of African descent. For many students, that included self-identifying as black and not Negro, changing their style of dress and hair to reflect the Afrocentric trends, and choosing to associate with mostly black people whenever possible. If some students questioned their blackness before arriving, they established a racial identity that linked them to what historian Vincent Harding referred to as the river of black liberation and created an ancestral bind between black people who rebelled against slavery and those who fought to advance opportunities at the collegiate level in the postwar era.26 That process informed the remainder of their experiences in the Ivy League and also in life.
In wrestling with their own black development, they looked to the now sacred but then recently released Black Power texts. In addition to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), they read the searing criticisms of institutional racism and economic deprivation in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967), Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Where Do We Go from Here? (1967). By January 1968, Nathan Wright, Jr.’s Black Power and Urban Unrest was available and socially conscious and intellectually curious students read books like The Black Power Revolt: A Collection of Essays, edited by Floyd Barbour. In an attempt to extend their international political understanding, some students were reading Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) and Mao Tse-tung’s Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (Little Red Book, 1964), a favorite of the Black Panthers. Through their reading, students attempted to grasp the meaning of revolution and sought to apply revolutionary principles to their own struggles.27 In viewing themselves as victims of colonialism, some black students even identified themselves as part of the third world.
In considering the sometimes traumatic experiences the students endured, a logical question is why would they stay? Why would they not leave and attend historically black colleges or universities if education was the sole goal? A few students, like Alford Dempsey (who would have been in Columbia’s class of 1969), decided to transfer to historically black colleges and universities.28 The majority of black students, however, agreed that they had the right to be black and human in any space in the nation and they advanced that concept through their demonstrations. The social movements of the time helped them to see what was possible and they applied the rhetoric and methods used in human rights struggles on campus.
It is clear that the black students who attended Ivy League universities between the close of World War II and 1975 greatly influenced black America and the nation in general. The list of black figures who graduated during the period is impressive by any measure. They became high level politicians, captains of industries, health care officials, and thought leaders. A representative example of those black leaders and figures who took degrees from Ivy institutions was the Haverford Group, which met in the late 1960s and early 1970s to advocate racial integration in a moment when young people of the race proposed Black Nationalism and racial separation. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, William Hastie, John Hope Franklin, J. Saunders Redding, M. Carl Holman, Anne Cooke Reid, Phyllis Wallace, and Robert Weaver, who represented nine of fourteen group members, all attended Ivy universities or colleges before the World War II era. They represented a segment of the civil rights generation and the older guard of the movement that contrasted with the newer guard, which cried Black Power and campaigned for Black Studies.29 Black Ivy alumni’s advocacy in the nonprofit sector (including education) is equally as notable as that in the academy, industry, and politics. In addition to achieving in their careers and in society, black graduates continued to push their alma maters to create access for black students who followed them by joining alumni associations.
It bears noting that there has always been within the ranks of Ivy-educated black people a great diversity regarding values, political allegiances, and beliefs about the best course of action for the larger community. For instance, conservative politician and political commentator Alan Keyes opposed the efforts of black student activists at Cornell in 1969 when he was an undergraduate.30 He left Cornell for Harvard, where he continued his opposition to the antiwar and black campus movements. Coming from a military household, he supported the conflict in Vietnam. Thomas Sowell attended Harvard for his undergraduate degree, Columbia University for graduate school, and was a professor at Cornell. Like Keyes, he opposed the actions of black demonstrators at Cornell and resigned his post to leave in personal protest.31 Keyes and Sowell represented the conservative contingent of black students in the postwar era, but there were large numbers of students who were more liberal and an even smaller contingent who were militant enough to demonstrate. They all experienced their time at Ivy League institutions differently. For the most part, Upending the Ivory Tower follows the actions of those willing to join in collective agitation on particular issues affecting black people.
Although the black students who attended Ivy institutions, particularly before the late 1960s, mostly came from middle-income communities, by and large they could not fathom the lives that some of their economically advantaged white peers lived. One black student insightfully noted: “You have to have an awareness of how big the world is in order to really take advantage” of an Ivy education.32 Many of the black students who arrived on the campuses of the Ancient Eight had the opportunity to see intimately how the “haves” lived. Even though most of the black students did not represent the “have-nots” per se, economically they were different than the nation’s most wealthy white children.
By the 1960s, there was a new brand of student attending the elite schools. Scholar Marcia Synnott revealed that “before World War II, children of middle-and upper-class families, predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant, had found it relatively easy, if they possessed minimum academic qualifications, to be admitted to the elite colleges.”33 That did not necessarily change in the period after the war, but there was a notable shift in admissions, with fewer of the traditional prep school students attending. Black students were just a part of the shift. In general, more students from public high schools and fewer from private and boarding schools attended Ivy universities and colleges. There were more working-class students taking advantage of the G.I. Bill benefits. Then, according to Synnott, when considering the “Big Three” (Harvard, Yale, and Princeton) before the 1960s, nearly all-white secondary schools and preparatory academies like Groton, St. Paul’s School, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Phillips Academy Andover sent 50 to 70 percent of students in their graduating classes to those universities.34
Private boarding and day school graduates made up the grand majority of the student body at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and so the Ivy universities focused their attention on recruiting at those few preparatory schools where all but the slightest percentage of pupils were white Anglo-Saxon protestants. There were exceptions, of course, but the student bodies at the preparatory schools mirrored those at the Big Three. That is why the push for and arrival of black students jarred the sensibilities of alumni who clung to notions of tradition, culture, and “standards.” Such reasoning during an earlier period gave way to official and unofficial quotas regarding religion and race. Alumni of these elite institutions created and judged the standards that young applicants needed to meet with college board examinations and personal interviews. Often, potential interviewees got to that point in the application process by way of referral from an alumnus. The alumni of each of the Ancient Eight in the postwar period were also nearly all white. With the shift, the elite institutions still cornered the market on the highest achieving students, as they were ranked among the top 5 to 10 percent of U.S. college students in terms of intellectual abilities.35 Perhaps as much as academic achievement, one’s family name, socioeconomic status, pedigree, and race were all extremely important in terms of Ivy admissions before the 1960s.
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