Upending the Ivory Tower. Stefan M. Bradley

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СКАЧАТЬ and rearing, he said, made him uncomfortable with black people being in the classroom. He knew his parents would not appreciate the fact that he sat in the same learning space and swam in the same pool with black students.10 The white student who withdrew was not typical of all Cornell students, but his behavior represented an aspect of life that black learners had to endure at elite PWIs.

      Segregation, as restrictive and insidious as it was, forced black people to innovate in many ways. In 1905, men could not live on campus at Cornell. Most white homeowners would not board black renters so housing became an issue for black students. Black families like the Nelsons, Cannons, Newtons, and Singletons worked service jobs in town and on campus while supplementing their income in other ways. Edward Newton and William Cannon worked in fraternity houses on Cornell’s campus. Archie Singleton worked as a butler for a prominent white businessman in Ithaca and Singleton and his wife owned a business.11 These families opened their homes to black student boarders. The situation provided additional income for the black homeowners but also a secure place for the students to live.

      Since enslavement, people in black communities revered formal education and they attempted to assist black learners who sought it. As historian Kevin Gaines put it, “African Americans have, with almost religious fervor, regarded education as the key to liberation.”12 In that way, those homes became more than support centers that allowed students to be human; they were incubators for black civil rights and intellectual leadership. The students appreciated the hospitality their hosts showed. “The social life among our group was carried on in the many comfortable homes of the Negroes [in Ithaca]. Nearly every Friday night, we were welcomed at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Wm. Cannon where we could meet their charming daughter and the other young women of the community. We were allowed to dance and good eats were always served us,” remembered Cornell alumnus George Kelley (class of 1908).13

      While black students dealt with social isolation on campus in Ithaca, further north black leaders convened to address the rights of black people in general. Racial violence and political disfranchisement threatened African Americans wherever they resided. In Niagara Falls, Canada, black Harvard alumni Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter (Du Bois PhD and Trotter BA in 1895) organized a group of nearly thirty other progressive activists. By the end of the 1905 meeting, the group declared that their race deserved total freedom, which included the right to participate in the democracy and to be treated as social equals in all realms of society. Many scholars agree that the Niagara Movement was in many ways a precursor to one of the most influential civil rights organizations in the twentieth century: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

      Students with a desire to attend Cornell and other Ivy institutions were well aware of the glacial pace of racial progress and understood that by achieving education they helped uplift the community. They also instinctively knew that they would not be able to depend on the liberal notions of white administrators to succeed. Even though some elite universities allowed excelling black students to attend, those places were often all but welcoming. In the early twentieth century, Harvard’s president Abbott Lowell provided insight regarding the position of many liberal elite administrators: “We owe to the colored man the same opportunities for education that we do to the white man; but we don’t owe to him to force him and the white man into social relations that are not, or may not be, mutually congenial.”14 Some race leaders (particularly those who participated in the Niagara conference in 1905) agitated against that attitude. Booker T. Washington, who received an honorary master’s degree from Harvard in 1896, bolstered the opinion of the president with his famous Atlanta Cotton States Exposition speech of the same year, in which he accommodated racial discrimination by explaining that social segregation should be acceptable as long as mutual progress was respected. Thought leaders like Du Bois and Trotter vehemently opposed this viewpoint. Black students who attended the Ivies in the early twentieth century attempted to push the envelope beyond the accommodation of racist treatment.

      The activities of black Cornellians best exemplified the more assertive campaign for racial equality that students made in the new century. Keeping in mind that at least five black students had not returned to Cornell from the previous semester, in the fall of 1905 some remaining students took the initiative to create their own support network. In addition to socializing, the early group members worked to improve their academic opportunities by studying together. The students borrowed a study technique from the members of white fraternities on campus. They banked the tests they took so that black students who took the courses in the future would know how and what to study.15 Current institutions of higher education expend millions of dollars to recreate the academic and student affairs retention models that these isolated black students conceived of for their own survival in 1905–1906.

      Soon afterward, some of the men in the social/study group suggested that it become a literary society that surveyed and discussed the works of black intellectuals. The idea of a literary society was profound in the sense that so many Americans were either illiterate or had little or no time for leisure reading.16 That these black collegians enjoyed such a luxury is telling. Although the members of the group were amenable to adding literary discourse to their meetings, they could not agree on what to name the society. Some members of the group who had been working in white fraternity houses to support themselves wanted to use Greek letters. One group member, a graduate student, disapproved of the idea, claiming that there were no Greek signifiers that could be used for African Americans. After some debate and research, the leading members of the society came up with the name Alpha Phi Alpha.17

      Within months of naming the literary society, at the home of the Singletons on December 4, 1906, seven members established Alpha Phi Alpha as the first collegiate fraternity for black men.18 With the help of members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, students held their first fraternity ritual in an Odd Fellows masonic lodge. The fraternity followed the trail that the founders of Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, Inc., also known as the Boulé, had blazed in Philadelphia.19 The founders of the Boulé represented the black elite in the professions, with members having attained education at Phillips Exeter, Penn, Harvard, Columbia, and other elite institutions. After their college and academic training, they entered professions in medicine and dentistry while using their status to create more freedoms for people like them. At the collegiate level, the founding members of Alpha Phi Alpha organized around principles of scholarship, uplift, and service to the black community.

      To be sure, the founders of Alpha were the sons of relatively established families, but the students were still only one generation removed from slavery. Various members of their families had served in the Civil War, attended college, taught at the collegiate level, were ministers, and owned businesses.20 The founding members included Henry A. Callis, Charles H. Chapman, Eugene K. Jones, George B. Kelley, Nathaniel A. Murray, Robert H. Ogle, and Vertner W. Tandy. Two were from the South, and the remaining five were from either northern states or the nation’s capital. Of the seven founders, the parents or another close family member attended college at institutions like Hampton, Howard, and Harvard. Two of the founders had attended the M Street School, and two others had attended HBCUs before arriving at Cornell.21 In making the fraternity’s motto “first of all; servants of all; we shall transcend all,” the students were quite aware of their elite status in officially creating a brotherhood for black college men.

      The fraternity also expressed the need to establish networks of fictive kinship on university campuses. Fictive kinship was a survival tool that black people employed for generations. Although universities claimed to adhere to the concept of in loco parentis, black students had to engineer their own family models while on campus—often without the help of their schools’ institutional parenting. When the Cornell administration recognized the fraternity, the members made it a resource for black intellectualism and community progress within and outside of the university. The fraternity quickly expanded to other institutions, creating another chapter on the campus of Howard University and then another at the University of Toronto, making Alpha the first national and international black collegiate fraternity. By the 1920s, the fraternity established chapters at six of the eight American Ivies. In spite of declarations of uplift and service to the community, the founding members wanted to remain СКАЧАТЬ