Upending the Ivory Tower. Stefan M. Bradley

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СКАЧАТЬ school district for fourteen years and as a lecturer on the university’s campus, made history at Princeton by teaching the university’s first black studies courses. He and his wife Cecelia offered two seminars, one covering Black American Writers and another dealing with Afro-American History. Considering Princeton’s past with regard to race relations, there was little surprise when news outlets noted that the courses were the first of their kind in Princeton’s then 222-year history. It should also be noted, though, that Henry Drewry was teaching a seminar in addition to his teacher placement duties with the university. The dean of Princeton’s college of arts and sciences stated that the introduction of the two courses would help the college in “establishing a more formal, comprehensive program relating to black culture.”66

      Princeton was benefitting from the largesse of black faculty and staff. The Drewrys, a black couple, along with one of Princeton’s first administrators, Carl A. Fields, became default mentors to many of the black students who were experiencing homesickness and racism at Princeton. Fields was first hired in financial aid and then became the university’s first black dean. As is still the case with black education professionals, he became the advocate, confidante, surrogate parent, and champion of many black students who had no one else to whom they could turn. Fields, along with the Drewry family, helped to improve the experience of many students.

      The homes of Fields and the Drewrys, like that of the Rivers family, became shelters. Realizing the importance of those connections, Fields formalized the mentoring relationships and provided safe zones for the students by creating a network of family homes in Princeton. As one student remembered, those families were there to provide “good meals” and a “sympathetic ear.”67 The families provided them with the same kind of hospitality that black families offered black students at Cornell University in Ithaca at the turn of the twentieth century.

      Despite the progress that the university made, Princeton still faced racial problems. In October 1968, black and white students confronted each other in a campus dormitory. Upset about the volume at which white students played music at a mixer, several black students who lived in the dormitory first complained to the dormitory director and then met the white residents in their room. The white residents, according to a university investigation, made several “racially offensive remarks” to the black students, who left and returned to the room with several more of their fellow black students. While in the white students’ room, one of the black students used a knife to slash the stereo speakers. As the situation escalated, nearly fifty students altogether participated in the controversy, but there is no record of violence. While race may not have been at the root of the conflict, certainly race became an issue when the white residents, who hosted the party, used epithets to address the black students. Race may also have been a factor in the dormitory director’s refusal to reprimand the noisemakers or neglect of the situation altogether. To be sure, noise complaints are common in residential settings, but in this instance the race of the residents added a new dimension to the conflict. None of the students faced criminal charges.68

      From the 1940s to the early 1960s black students struggled to even matriculate at Princeton; by the late 1960s, however, Princeton’s black students had established a unique identity for themselves. Because of isolation on campus and a growing black consciousness, black students bonded.69 Out of that bond, in 1967 black students established the Association of Black Collegians (ABC) as a local campus organization. With university funding, the new group attempted to aid in the social and academic acclimation of black students and to initiate dialogue with the surrounding black communities of Princeton and Trenton. The group’s founders viewed ABC “as a bloc, effecting policy both now and in the future.” Taking on the cadence of Black Power rhetoric, an early coordinator explained that “when something is going to be done, we are the ones who are going to have to do it.”70 With regard to the abysmal number of black students enrolled at Princeton, the members of the organization took up that ethic. ABC subsequently visited predominantly black high schools around the country during the winter breaks to recruit for the university.71

      In addition to their high school visitation program, the members of ABC acted as on-campus hosts to potential black students. In February 1968, Princeton, in conjunction with ABC and Jim Brown’s Negro Industrial and Economic Union, sponsored twenty urban youth who visited Princeton. ABC members brought the potential students to the admissions office, where they underwent interviews. One of the most important aspects of ABC’s approach to recruitment was the fact that the members of the college group provided examples of black students who readily navigated what many black youth called the “system.” One of the only black admissions officials explained: “[the visiting young people] learned that ‘they could have higher education without losing their own black identity.’ ”72

      Because the members of ABC took it upon themselves to ensure that Princeton became an option for other black students, in 1968, President Goheen and the elite institution saw the fruits of the black student group’s efforts. That school year, Princeton admitted seventy-six new black students while ninety-seven black men altogether attended Princeton, which marked a high for the university.73 Sociologist Jerome Karabel has argued that even more than the Civil Rights Movement of the South, the urban uprisings and Black Power Movement of the North influenced the decision of Ivy League universities to admit black students. The universities, Karabel asserted, were concerned that the rage of the urban poor might be waged on the elite white institutions of higher education if they did not attempt to improve ghetto circumstances by admitting students.74 As a result, black students, some of whom had witnessed violent rebellions in their neighborhoods and were sympathetic to the tenets of Black Power, arrived on Princeton’s campus.

      Figure 2.2. One of the first black administrators in the Ivy League, Carl A. Fields (center) of Princeton University, attended the inaugural banquet of the Association of Black Collegians in May 1968. Fields is with the association’s president Paul C. Williams (left) and member Alan D. Buchanan. Courtesy of the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.

      Although very able as recruiters, ABC’s larger agenda extended further. The group saw itself as part of the tradition of black students and youth who changed society for the better. With that in mind, ABC, with the help of Carl A. Fields, organized a national conference that involved students from over forty universities and colleges.75 Under Fields’s tutelage, the members of ABC focused on the future of the “Negro undergraduate” with seminars concerning education, economics, politics, and community organization.

      When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, ABC members led students in a boycott of classes.76 In an emotional letter to the school newspaper, the ABC expressed its sorrow and anger with the civil rights leader’s murder: “It is not one man, however guilty he may be, that murdered Dr. King. Rather, it is the society as a whole that we indict.” The group lamented that because of the “injustice of this society, black America is under no constraints to obey white America’s hypocritical laws. It is in America’s best interests that the black man revolts.”77 The ABC declared that “No black student will attend classes! No black student will work any job!” In order to avoid controversy, President Goheen provided his endorsement of the group’s actions.78

      Members of the ABC looked beyond themselves toward the larger black freedom movement and fell in line with other student activists. Following the lead of Malcolm X, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the late 1960s sought to tie the struggle of black people in the United States to that of black people abroad.79 In taking a Pan-Africanist approach to the struggle, SNCC eventually called for an end to European colonization of African countries. As it was, black South Africans dealt daily with the impacts of colonization under apartheid—a racial caste system of governing that not coincidentally mirrored America’s Jim Crow laws and culture.

      In the 1960s many African Americans who battled poverty and racism domestically also chose to denounce South Africa’s racist policies. As the United States officially desegregated, South Africa СКАЧАТЬ