Upending the Ivory Tower. Stefan M. Bradley

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 black Ivy alumnus was W.E.B. Du Bois. After graduating Fisk Institute, “Willie” Du Bois continued his scholastic trek to the educational jewel of the nation, Harvard. As would be the case at other Ivy League institutions, black students coming with degrees from historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) needed to prove themselves by taking undergraduate courses at Harvard. Du Bois entered the college in 1887 with another black student, Clement G. Morgan. They grew close to each other while attempting to navigate the world of snobbery and exclusiveness that was Harvard. Du Bois was rejected membership to the glee club and made few white friends; however, his intellectual acumen caught the attention of white professors who took care to train him.3 Although he regaled his education, Du Bois always felt that he was “at but not of Harvard.”4 He would not be the last black Ivy student to feel that way.

      In the early part of the new century, not much in the way of admissions to higher education institutions changed. On the whole, during the period between 1900 and 1945, college was not an option for most Americans. This was especially true for black citizens. The majority of black people lived in rural areas of the South, and many still worked as sharecroppers or other capacities in agriculture. That period saw high rates of lynching and other forms of racial violence, but it also observed the solidification of a black middle and elite class.5 In some ways, members of the black elite had the opportunity to enjoy the privileges of their white peers that included taking advantage of higher education. In other ways, even the black elite could not be fully human. By that time, the institutions most available to black learners were the HBCUs: Howard, Hampton, Fisk, Morehouse, Spelman, Tuskegee, Wilberforce, Lincoln (Pennsylvania), and Florida A&M were among the top choices for the black college bound. What today are called predominantly white institutions (PWIs) comprised less of an option to black students, particularly those not from elite socioeconomic backgrounds. As historian Robert Harris Jr. observed, by 1910, only fifty-four black students (men and women) graduated with their bachelor’s degrees from elite PWIs, which included universities such as Columbia, Yale, the University of Chicago, Harvard, Stanford University, University of Michigan, Penn, and Cornell. Black graduate and professional students by and large looked to the Ivy League for their degree options. As of 1939, thirty-five black students graduated from Columbia, twenty-eight from Penn, twenty-five from Cornell, twenty-five from Harvard, and ten from Yale.6

      At that historical moment, considering the educational options at the secondary level for most black people, even fifty-four black undergraduate degree earners in 1910 was miraculous. In terms of public secondary options there were a finite number of schools that prepared black students for work at elite higher education institutions. Of those secondary schools, the M Street School (later renamed Paul Laurence Dunbar High School) in Washington, D.C., is one of the most (if not the most) acclaimed. With its faculty holding an impressive number of advanced degrees, the black prep school in D.C. trained some of the most influential black figures in the history of the nation. Of its early graduates, 80 percent earned degrees at the collegiate level.7 Many went from the M Street School to the Ivy League. Famous black educators such as Carter G. Woodson (alumnus of Harvard), Anna Julia Cooper (alumna of Oberlin), and Mary Church Terrell (alumna of Oberlin) worked as teachers or administrators at the prep school.8

      Although Dartmouth and Harvard had accepted black students earlier, Cornell became an attractive educational home for black college students. Unlike the other Ivies, Cornell did not get its start until the nineteenth century, at the close of the Civil War. When founded as a land grant institution, Cornell’s founder and the new president indicated that the university should provide educational opportunities to all students regardless of religion, gender, and race. That was a departure from most of the Ivy institutions that started with religious underpinnings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Where informal quotas for black students existed at places like Harvard and Yale, there were seemingly none at Cornell. Black students who could afford it attended at will. Between 1904 and 1943, nearly 150 black students matriculated at Cornell.9 For Cornell’s short history, the number of black matriculants was notable in contrast to other institutions in the Ivy League.

      Aside from the fact that the institutional mission was more liberal than those of its peers, Cornell featured other qualities that made it alluring to black students. That it was in the North was a positive attribute. Before the Civil War, enslaved people running for their freedom to Canada used Ithaca, New York, as a stopping point. Despite the cold winters and remote geographic location in the Finger Lakes Region, a free black community developed. Ithaca’s location gave the town an appeal that New York City or Philadelphia did not have: very few distractions. That was an advantage for serious black students who could use the off-campus community for support and the quietude to study.

      Cornell and its affiliates were not always welcoming. In 1900, a white student from West Virginia withdrew from the university in protest of two black students who were enrolled in his agriculture СКАЧАТЬ