Upending the Ivory Tower. Stefan M. Bradley

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СКАЧАТЬ public. Again, the NAACP joined the conversation to keep equality of opportunity and access a priority. As the controversy became public, the university president had to, once again, reaffirm the institution’s commitment to its mission. The trustees and administration had to confront the reality of racism on campus in the face of their liberal mission of educating everyone.38 By 1939, black women were again having difficulty accessing Sage College with little support from the administration. It should be noted that these students who struggled to find housing still had to attend their courses and compete in the classroom. Ultimately, students who happened to be black shouldered undue burdens while trying to excel in their studies. They learned that racism made education at an elite PWI an expensive endeavor.

      That same racism, however, cost the university as well. Evie Carpenter, who graduated in 1918, dissuaded her daughter, Emily Spencer, from going to Cornell. Spencer was a second-generation college woman who received a bachelor’s degree from Virginia State College and was considering Cornell for graduate school. Carpenter believed her daughter was “too young to be isolated in Ithaca,” where she would have to endure some of the same problems surrounding housing that Carpenter had faced.39 The isolation of Cornell combined with the negative experiences with discrimination caused some black families to rethink sending their children to the university. In future decades, housing issues would again plague black women in the Ivy League and particularly Cornell.

      The decision to place one’s self in such trying circumstances spoke to the value that black students placed on an Ivy League education and the invasiveness of racism in the culture of these leading institutions. As historian Genna Rae McNeil insightfully noted in her seminal biography of eminent civil rights attorney Charles Hamilton Houston, “One did not come to Harvard and forget one’s racial heritage.”40 That went for both black and white affiliates of the university. McNeil referred to the experience of Houston as a law student, who had completed his undergraduate work at Amherst College.

      During what scholars refer to as the Red Summer of 1919, when white mobs attacked black citizens in forty cities and counties, Houston enrolled at the Harvard Law School. During the turmoil of the race riots, black people, some of whom were veterans of World War I, assertively defended themselves and their property. Houston and his fellow veterans understood their rights as citizens, and he especially believed it his duty to make the law work for the most oppressed Americans. That is why he chose one of the most, if not the most, renowned law schools in the nation. Houston’s father was an attorney and Houston himself was already a member of black elite society, having been an officer in the war and a college graduate. He was also a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. Like the founders of the fraternity in Cornell, he recognized racial divisions at Harvard. Just as the Cornell students could not join white fraternities, Houston and other black students could not join the law clubs and societies at Harvard. That sort of rejection led to the creation of the Nile Club on campus, which brought together black students much the same way as the study group at Cornell in 1905 did. The racial rejection also inspired the establishment of the National Bar Association for black attorneys, over which Houston’s law school friend and fraternity brother Raymond Pace Alexander (the first black graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business) eventually presided.41

      Again, members of the black elite banded together to establish parallel organizations to advance their own opportunities but also to deflect white racism. Great Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey personified that effort with the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s Negro World weekly and the Black Star steamship line. Houston and his classmates admired Garvey’s vision to establish a black economy that spanned the world while rebuilding pride in black culture. At a moment when black life was so fragile, young leaders like Houston invited Garvey to campus to meet with the small group of black students and Cambridge residents. If they were to remain mentally and emotionally fit, they had to craft a social and cultural life for themselves.42

      Like so many early black Ivy students, Houston, feeling that he had to represent the race well, excelled in his studies, which earned him a place on the prestigious Harvard Law Review editorial team. Not surprisingly, he was the first of his race to serve in that capacity.43 As an attorney, he revived Howard University’s law school and went on to engineer the desegregation of public education as head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Fellow fraternity brother and protégé Thurgood Marshall, who succeeded Houston, credited the Harvard-trained lawyer with providing the blueprint for the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Incidentally, Houston’s law school friend Alexander used his training to bring social, educational, and economic justice to Philadelphia as part of the NAACP.

      Houston and Alexander were in league with Ralph Bunche, who started his graduate studies at Harvard in 1928. Having attended the University of California, Los Angeles, he had some conception of life at a PWI, but Bunche was still solitary in the political science department and one of few at the prestigious university. He studied colonial Africa and upon graduation enjoyed academic fellowships at the London School of Economics and Capetown University in South Africa. Bunche became arguably the most well-known black man in the world. During World War II, he worked for the Office of Strategic Services, which was the precursor to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and eventually for the State Department. At the close of the war, he was among those (including eventual Ivy presidents Grayson Kirk and John Dickey), who helped to plan the United Nations and construct its charter. Bunche, as an UN mediator, achieved what has not been possible since, a signed armistice between Israel and Palestine. His efforts earned him a Nobel peace prize and world acclaim. Between 1960 and 1965, Bunche became a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers.44

      As Houston, Alexander, and Bunche took the fight for racial equity to the courts and world stage, back at Cornell, black women took the lead in organizing efforts during the Great Depression. In addition to the arrival of black fraternities and later a black sorority (Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.), students organized the Booker T. Washington Club at Cornell. The group delved into conversations and debates regarding segregation and invited speakers to campus to inform their discussions. In 1935, the same year as the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Margaret Morgan took over as president of the club.45 The group did not survive for long, but the seriousness of the students in their approach to the oppression that black people faced on and off campus is noteworthy. So, too, is the leadership of black women in these matters.

      Students at other Ivy institutions shared the travails of the black men and women at Harvard and Cornell. J. Saunders Redding poignantly provided a glimpse into the solitary life of an Ivy desegregator. Redding, who eventually became a prominent literary scholar, arrived at Brown University as an undergraduate student in 1924. He was the second in his family to graduate from the Ivy League university. His brother, Louis, achieved his BA at Brown before receiving his JD from Harvard. Of his time as an undergraduate at the university, Redding remembered there being only four other black students—if that; two of them graduated after his first year. Although he and the remaining student shared what he called a “consciousness,” Redding said: “we took elaborate precautions against the appearance of clannishness.”46 Claiming to emulate the behavior of the black students who graduated before him, on campus and in the presence of white students he attempted not to give off the impression that he was only interested in matters of blackness. This led him to avoid eating with and fraternizing with the other black student in public but only “in the secret of our rooms at night with the shades down,” he revealed. Redding admitted an awareness of himself and his actions: “We were lost.”47 To find solace, Redding and his fellow black Brunonian left campus to engage other black students who were attending New England colleges.

      Even with those cultural outlets off campus, Redding’s schoolmate could not adjust to always guarding his speech and measuring his movements on campus. The other black student, Redding remembered, exclaimed: “There’s something wrong with this” in reference to the way they felt constantly on alert.48 The unsettled student wondered aloud: “There must be some place better than this. God damn it, there must be!” Declaring his desire to leave, the student shared his feelings: “I feel like everybody’s staring at me, all these white guys, waiting СКАЧАТЬ