Upending the Ivory Tower - Stefan M. Bradley

Скачать книгу

the chapter attempts to reveal the lived experiences of the students as outliers. Although they could matriculate at some Ivy schools, they faced what could only be described as Jim Crow and innovated ways to survive their sometimes-hostile environments. Next, chapter 2 examines the postwar era racial evolution of what some have called the northernmost of the southern universities, Princeton University. Princeton openly Jim Crowed black students before World War II. Even though some scholarship has focused on the growth of Princeton in the postwar era, none focuses specifically on what black students did to evolve the institution toward freedom. That freedom included a push to advance the black struggle internationally in an early anti-apartheid campaign. Brown University’s complex relationship to black freedom and education is the topic of chapter 3. Without great fanfare, students pressured the university to allocate substantial resources to achieve racial parity with the population of black people in the United States. This chapter also breaks new ground as there has been little written on the Brown campaigns. Although Dartmouth College’s president, John Sloan Dickey, helped to construct a nationally recognized civil rights document, chapter 4 illustrates the conflict between simply accepting black students and creating a welcoming and inclusive environment. The chapter discusses some of the more extreme recruiting efforts that Ivy institutions made to attract black students. There is no scholarship at present covering the influence of civil rights and Black Power at Dartmouth.

      The final chapters of the book continue to focus on the role of students, faculty, and administrators as agents of change in the way of admission policies and curriculum offerings, but they also incorporate the role of outside residents and intellectuals who played a part in shaping the Ivy League during the period. Urban Ivy institutions occupy space in contested terrains. The push and pull between schools like Columbia University in New York City and the University of Pennsylvania and the surrounding neighborhoods in Philadelphia is the subject of chapters 5 and 6, which seek to expand the scholarly conversation about the obligations and motivations of white institutions in black and brown poor spaces. They attempt to understand the meaning of the “greater good” as these extremely well-endowed universities attempted to create future leaders among those who had the least. Chapter 7 explores the role that black students and faculty members at Yale played in shaping the field of Black Studies and how black militants off campus influenced university developments. It features in-depth discussions and debates of the early proponents and opponents of Black Studies. The final two chapters delve into the more militant struggles for Black Studies that took place at Harvard and Cornell. The campus battles resulted in the premier programs and centers that exist today. It highlights just how far students were willing to go in the Ivy League to change the culture to accommodate black life.

      From their communities and the struggles that arose within them, black students who attended Ivy League institutions in the postwar era carried a history of resistance to racism and a spirit of advancement regarding education that sustained them. Not all of the students sought to fight for the “cause” and still others just wanted to pass their classes. Many black learners, however, became agents of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement. They employed their Black Student Power by using their privileged status as students and alumni, as well as their race, to win victories for the larger black freedom movement. Because they did, the Ivy League remained in the vanguard of higher education. Those black Ivy students, by way of their will, endurance, and ability to see beyond themselves further opened institutional white America to justice and racial progress.

      1

      Surviving Solitude

      The Travails of Ivy Desegregators

      At but not of Harvard.

      —W.E.B. Du Bois

      Very few black students enrolled in Ivy institutions before World War II. They took up the burden of racially desegregating America’s most elite white organizations. As members of the desegregation generation, they had to perform under the intense white gaze of Ivy League students and officials. The new students did so with the hopes of the black masses. There was a small black population in higher education in general, but the number of black learners in the Ancient Eight in the early part of the century was miniscule. To protect themselves, they banded together to create bonds. When life for them on campus turned cold, they sometimes found warm welcomes in the homes of black people in neighboring communities. Many black students in the Ivy League before World War II enrolled in the elite graduate and professional schools, but there were those few who enrolled as undergraduates.

      Life for all of them, undergraduate or otherwise, was lonely and remarkably challenging as they confronted what Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard have termed Jim Crow North; however, they endured. They used tactics of survival and assimilation in their attempts to live a normal college life. They resisted racism, in part, by remaining enrolled, but they did not always directly confront institutional racial bias at the collegiate level in the way that later generations would. Many believed it was their duty to take up the charge of racial uplift after they graduated. This chapter seeks to discuss the experiences of students who went on to comprise the black upper class in the decades before World War II. For as heeled and refined as the black Ivy students were, they were not nearly as exclusive and discriminating as their wealthy and privileged white peers in the elite white universities and colleges of the Ivy League.

      The majority of the nation’s black students who pursued education beyond elementary school attended agricultural and industrial training institutions in the South. Henry Arthur Callis, who was in Cornell University’s class of 1909, noted correctly that at the time “the conflict raged between industrial and ‘higher’ education.” Although some learning institutions were available to African American students, the quality of resources at those black schools did not yet rank with white institutions. As such, Callis continued, “in 1906, for a colored student to be enrolled in an accredited high school was a mark of distinction”; however, “for such a student to enter a reputable university set him apart as ‘unusual.’ ”1 The black students’ distinctiveness at Ivy schools was ostensibly positive in nature. Historian Kevin Gaines, however, wrote about the potential flaws of the upwardly mobile students: “many black elites sought status, moral authority, and recognition of their humanity by distinguishing themselves, as bourgeois agents of civilization, from the presumably undeveloped black majority.”2 Being unusual did not free the young members of the black bourgeoisie from obligations to the larger community and from the pitfalls of their own success.

      Black students had been attending Ivy institutions in small measure since the nineteenth century. Edward Mitchell graduated from Dartmouth College in 1828. In 1850, the year that America was compromising legislatively over the freedom of black people, free Black Nationalist Martin Delaney was the first black student admitted to Harvard (medical school), but Boston’s George Lewis Ruffin was the first to graduate Harvard with a law degree; another Bostonian, Richard Greener, was the first undergraduate student to graduate in 1870. New Haven’s own Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed graduated from Yale with a medical degree in 1857, the year of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. Four years later, Edward Bouchet earned Phi Beta Kappa honors as an undergraduate and then attained a PhD at Yale. In 1877, Inman Page at Brown University became the first to earn a degree. Five years later, the University of Pennsylvania graduated its first black student, James Brister, with a degree in dentistry; that same year Nathan Francis Mossell graduated with a medical degree. William Adger was the first black undergraduate to receive a degree from Penn in 1883. At Cornell University (which was not founded until 1865), George Washington Fields earned a law degree and Charles Chauveau Cook and Jane Eleanor Datcher obtained their bachelor of arts degrees in 1890. The year of the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision, James Dickinson Carr received a law degree at Columbia University, becoming one its first graduates. Princeton graduated its first black student in 1947.

      Perhaps the most famous

Скачать книгу