Upending the Ivory Tower. Stefan M. Bradley

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СКАЧАТЬ H. Wesley explained that “it was only natural” the founders would turn the fraternity “toward other colleges and universities of the first rank.”22 Additionally, it was important to the fraternity not to admit what one founder called “undesirables.”23 The founders and members of Alpha did not escape notions of elitism even in their good works for the race. Their sentiments echoed those of many from their socioeconomic class during the period. After the founding of Alpha Phi Alpha, students founded other black Greek letter organizations at Howard, the University of Indiana, and Butler University.

      When the founders of Alpha Phi Alpha graduated, they took their place among the race’s leaders and in the professions. Callis, training under the prominent surgeon Daniel Hale Williams, became a physician and charter member of the National Medical Association, which allowed black medical doctors to share information and best practices.24 He had a brief marriage with fellow Cornellian, club woman, and activist Alice Dunbar Nelson, who was formerly married to Paul Laurence Dunbar.25 Chapman became an award winning agriculture professor at Florida A&M, inspiring students and colleagues alike.26 Jones became an executive of a new organization called the National Urban League and a leading figure in the struggle for black rights in New York.27 His son, Eugene Kinkle Jones Jr. graduated Cornell Law School in 1933. George Kelley became the first registered civil engineer in New York and worked on the Barge Canal system.28 He also achieved the rank of second lieutenant in the U.S. Army during World War I. Murray taught at Dunbar High School (formerly the M Street School) and Armstrong High School in Washington, D.C.29 Ogle moved to the nation’s capital, where he worked as an assistant for Republican U.S. Senator Frances E. Warren who headed the Senate Appropriations Committee.30 Tandy became the first recognized registered architect in the State of New York. Also a prominent member of black New York society, he designed the historic St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal church in Harlem and the palatial homes of black millionaire and mogul Madame C. J. Walker.31 Black Cornell graduates achieved in spite of Jim Crow.

      Back on campus, fraternity members became student leaders. The fraternity put together a “Committee on Student Affairs” to address black student needs. The fraternity’s and committee’s duty was to “promote the scholarship of all the colored students of the university and to promote a sympathetic relationship between the townspeople and the students.” As part of the desegregation generation, black students at Ivy schools believed they had something to prove to their institutions and other observers. In performing at a high level, they understood they were paving the way for other black students to attend and for potential social acceptance at PWIs. Aware that they were on a metaphoric stage, Alpha members offered programs and services “in order that the colored student body may get some recognition in the eyes of the university.” It was vital to modify their behavior and to be as respectable as possible, “for outsiders are quick to criticize and [are] severe in their judgments.” That was why they looked to each other to uphold a standard of decorum that was irreproachable.32 Scholars have argued that artists of the Harlem Renaissance took a similar tack in trying to present to the world the best of black people in the hope that white America may accept black people as being as refined as any other American. For members of the desegregation generation in the Ivy League, the burden of respectability and representation was all but light.

      Cornell women especially shouldered the burden of respectability while overcoming other circumstances that called into question their status as ladies. For the black female students of the university, the issue of housing came to the fore. Between 1911 and 1914 black students at Sage College (Cornell’s school for women) faced issues because of the requirement that female students stay on campus. The earliest black students at Sage, including Harlem Renaissance luminary Jessie Fauset, stayed on campus without major event. But by 1905 the college had stopped housing black women.33 The fact that it was compulsory for women (white) to stay on campus when it was not for men spoke to the period’s flawed notions of female fragility and the need to monitor women for their own sake. Ladies (white) deserved a certain amount of accommodation, according to the ideas of the period. The regulation revealed the desire of men (white) to protect women (white) from the dangers of the outside world. Those noble men’s desires to shield women from undue burdens did not, apparently, extend to black women. That a school that professed openness to all students would have a conflict over whether to allow black women to be housed in the same fashion as their white peers illustrates the contradictory nature of the informal and formal policies that black people had to navigate in institutional white America during that period and later. It also illustrates the devaluation of black womanhood that was common at the time; black ladies did not receive the same respect as white women in the eyes of administrators.

      In the minds of some, there was much at stake if black and white students lived together in such close quarters at Ivy schools. According to a white Mississippian who graduated Harvard in 1898, race mingling led to dire consequences. Commenting on the controversy over black freshmen rooming with white peers that was occurring during the same period as that at Cornell, he said, “social equality—marriageability, if you will—is implied in sharing ‘bed and board’ with another.”34 He based his statement on the premise that black and white people were not equal to begin with, and that merely sleeping near white men would entice black men to take on white wives. Aside from being racist, the statement was irrationally illogical. At the root of his and others’ concerns about living in close proximity to black people was the strange fixation that white America had on the prospects of miscegenation. In following the Harvard alumnus’s line of reasoning, racial equality under any circumstances meant a loss of power in terms of reproduction. Perhaps eating separately under the same roof in a dining hall or restaurant was permissible and even inevitable, conceded the Harvard educated southerner, but to “‘sleep with a nigger’—is a horse of another color” and unacceptable.

      As scholars like Komozi Woodard, Jeanne Theoharis, Matt Delmont, and Mathew Countryman have convincingly demonstrated in their works, racial bigotry was not reserved for men of the South and southern locations. When Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of famous white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Harvard alumnus (class of 1893), and founding member of the NAACP weighed in on the issue, compelling Harvard to be as fair as its reputation on the issue of black housing, white northerners raised their voices in opposition as well. A Connecticut alumnus from the class of 1901, in a revelatory statement, called for Harvard’s administrators to be forthright about the issue. He criticized “overseers” for not having the intelligence to innovate creative ways to keep black and Jewish men out of the university. The alumnus asked, “does the possible flare-up of such men as Villard” scare administrators such that they will not return Harvard to being a “white man’s college?”35 Finally, he queried, “why not come out into the open and take the … criticism for a year or so and save our University for our sons, grandsons and for our posterity?” Of course, “our sons and grandsons,” meant future white men.

      The concern about living arrangements continued with the women of Cornell as well. In 1911, two black women, juniors Pauline Angeline Ray and Rosa Vassar, attempted to register for housing on campus, pointing out that accommodating racism had become too expensive. It cost them extra to get to campus by streetcar; their rent was more than what white women paid at the dormitory; and they were at a disadvantage when attempting to attain materials in the library because the on-campus students pilfered them first. When the dean of Sage College met with the students and heard their appeal, a controversy ensued, as the dean suggested that it was not her but the white female students who would have a problem with living with black women.36 Of course administrators, not students, made policy, but the dean was correct in her prediction that white women would protest black residents. Two hundred students of Sage College signed a petition stating that they could not tolerate living with black women and gave it to the trustees of Cornell.37 The New York chapter of the NAACP took up the issue. Subsequently, black women begrudgingly but not consistently were permitted to live on campus. Administrators at Cornell and the other Ivies often valued the comfort of white segregationists more than the human dignity of black learners.

      Unfortunately, the controversy regarding housing continued in 1914 and beyond. When white women in the dormitory confronted first-year student Adelaide Cook, the daughter of a black СКАЧАТЬ