Upending the Ivory Tower. Stefan M. Bradley

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СКАЧАТЬ have termed “racial battle fatigue”—experiencing intense stress as a result of the small racialized slights (called microaggressions today) and behaviors of the dominant (white) race.49 Unable to withstand the pressure further, Redding’s school friend exited Brown and shortly afterward committed suicide. That left Redding to feel as though he was “fighting alone against the whole white world.”50 In 1928, he graduated, earning Phi Beta Kappa honors, and shortly afterward entered the MA program in English. He finished his master’s degree in 1932. Later he took courses toward a PhD at Columbia University without completion.

      During the Depression, the experience of black graduate and professional students at Harvard in some ways mirrored that of Redding. A graduate of Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., William H. Hastie, like his cousin Charles Hamilton Houston, came to Harvard from Amherst College. He earned a Bachelor of Law degree at Harvard followed by a Doctorate of Juridical Science in 1933. He, like Houston, became editor of the Harvard Law Review. After working with Houston, Hastie took an appointment as governor of the Virgin Islands and eventually became the first black federal court judge under the Harry S. Truman administration.51 Shortly after Hastie graduated, premier historian and activist John Hope Franklin enrolled in the graduate school of Harvard to study in the Department of History. In his memoir, Mirror to America, Franklin described taking a loan from his white Fisk University advisor Ted Currier to afford tuition. The son of an attorney in the Tulsa area, Franklin had the advantage that many black students in the Ivy League enjoyed: educated, supportive, and active parents. They worked to ensure he believed he was intelligent and capable of achieving. The value of that singular notion can never be underestimated when students are thrust into racist and racially oppressive environments. Those qualities and beliefs are what Franklin, and so many other Ivy League students, claimed sustained him when he found himself in a space filled with rich whiteness.

      Franklin’s memory of his time in Cambridge represented that of other black students trying to make the best for themselves via education. He remembered: “A day, and often an hour, didn’t go by without my feeling the color of my skin—in the reactions of white Cambridge, the behavior of my fellow students, the attitudes real and imagined struck by my professors.”52 Growing up witnessing the destruction of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa during the riot of 1918, he was fully aware of his blackness; however, the constant reminders of others grew irksome. “Race precluded my enjoying the self-assurance to which most of my colleagues, along with the affluence and influence, were born,” he said. That which had worked in his favor for most of his life, “being ambitious and black,” also attracted the often unwanted gaze of white observers, recalled Franklin.

      Unlike his peers of affluence and influence, the only thing he remembered having was his “determination and a corresponding work ethic to fall back on.” He needed both when his professor told a “darky” joke while Franklin sat embarrassed in class.53 The joke was based on ignorance regarding black people, but the entire curriculum at Harvard and throughout the Ivy League glorified white civilization and supremacy. In part, that is what made those institutions elite. Harvard and its peers perpetuated racial dominance and racist ideology while simultaneously establishing themselves as American stalwarts. Unfortunately for Franklin, life in Cambridge was at times not much better. He told the story of an outing with a black lady friend. The couple waited in a restaurant in the northern city for more than hour without so much as being recognized by the wait staff.54 The North and elite universities were not sheltered from racism.

      Life for Franklin was not all bad, and he had positive interactions with white peers and professors. He always had to be cognizant, though, of the potential for situations to sour because of his race and the racism of others. For many black students in Franklin’s generation, unrelenting determination and work ethic motivated them to succeed academically and professionally. Franklin became the premier scholar of black history while assisting his fraternity brother Thurgood Marshall with research for the Brown v. Board case. Nearly forty years later, Franklin took an appointment to head a presidential commission on American race relations.

      In the pre-World War II period, black students often found a modicum of acceptance at Ivy League universities and colleges as athletes. In higher education in general and the Ivy League especially, athletics translated to privilege in terms of one’s mobility on campus. There is a long history of black athletes entertaining predominantly white audiences in the United States. William Rhoden, author of Forty Million Dollar Slave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete (2007), described black sportsmen in the period of enslavement having to perform to meet the expectations of their masters. If good enough, those chosen few athletes received elevated treatment. During the period of Jim Crow, white Americans loved black sportsmen—as long as they performed their duties on the field or court. Once back in society, however, black athletes faced the same kind of racism that nonathletic citizens confronted. Scholars have called this the “key functionary theory.”55 When applied to race and sports, as long as black people performed their roles in entertaining and amusing white people, they could be applauded and even admired. In the early twentieth century, this was true for athletes racing horses and bicycles as well as boxing and playing football. Perhaps a clear example of the key functionary theory was Jesse Owens. White Americans cheered the gold medal winning Olympian, but he could not stay on campus at his northern predominantly white university.

      The Ancient Eight got the name “Ivy League” because of football. During the early part of the twentieth century, some of the Ivy institutions were more renowned for their sports wins than their academic rigor. For some time, the Ivy League led the way in football competition.56 The names of black players could be found on rosters at most of the Ivies, but Princeton, which did not enroll black students, often refused to even play against teams fielding black athletes. Historian Charles Martin, in Benching Jim Crow: The Rise and Fall of the Color Line in Southern College Sports, relayed a story of a Dartmouth black player who took the field against Princeton only to have his collar bone broken within the first minutes of the game, effectively ending his season. After the incident, a Princeton player said, “We’ll teach you to bring colored men down here. You must take us for a gang of servants.”57 The animosity that the Dartmouth player experienced was not unusual for black athletes, especially when playing teams throughout the South. Princeton was not in the South geographically, but it was well known as a haven for southerners who had a predilection for oppressing black people.58

      In most of the Ivy League, however, black players had a chance to display their talents on the field and court. In the early 1890s, William H. Lewis became the first black football player in the league. Lewis has the distinction of being the first in a number of other categories as well. He was the first black player selected for Walter Camp’s All-Time All-America team. Enrolled in the law school, he played center for Harvard University. There, he also became the first black player to be named captain of the Harvard team. His leadership on the field portended his career as the first black coach in the Ivy League, when he spent eleven years on the coaching staff of the Harvard team. As if his football exploits were not enough to fill a lifetime for Lewis, President William Howard Taft appointed him U.S. assistant attorney general in 1910.59 After his term as a federal appointee, he spent his life fighting against lynching and other forms of racism.

      Joining Lewis in the Ivy League were footballers like the Pollard brothers. Leslie and Frederick “Fritz” Pollard represented Dartmouth and Brown respectively. Fritz Pollard was also a Walter Camp All-American, graduating Brown with a degree in chemistry in 1919. While on the field he met with hardnosed players and racist taunts from the crowd. At one game against Yale, the white students in the crowd sang the tune “Bye Bye, Blackbird.”60 Despite the jibes, Pollard had a successful college career and went on to play and coach professionally. Incidentally, Fritz Pollard also pledged Alpha Phi Alpha while at Brown. While the athletes played football and joined fraternities, black people throughout the United States tried daily to escape racial violence. In spite of their acclaim, black athletes had to keep in mind the threat of lynching and the blatant disrespect of racism in the same way that other black men and women did.

      Cornell University was competitive in football during the depression years. СКАЧАТЬ