Upending the Ivory Tower. Stefan M. Bradley

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СКАЧАТЬ were castrated,” referring to the fact that black students at Brown (and Pembroke) did not have the same options as their peers in terms of dating, housing, and socializing. Beckham concluded: “The white student can date anytime he wants with anyone he pleases.… He has friends who rent off-campus apartments. He has a car.” In essence, Beckham exclaimed: “The white student is white. He belongs here.”20 The nagging question for Beckham and others like him was whether black students did.

      As the decade progressed, black students at Brown and Pembroke envisioned themselves as representatives of the larger black community, and they made sure Brown officials understood they belonged at the Ivy League institution and society in general. By 1968, black students only made up 2 percent of the university’s total student population of 3,780 students; at Pembroke, black female students made up 3 percent of the nearly 1,200 students.21 Although the black students at Brown and Pembroke were few in number, they, like previous generations of black students, made the most of their opportunity to attend an elite institution of higher education. Furthermore, the black students of the late 1960s were extremely effective in their bids to improve life for black people on campus. They began their protests with campaigns to increase black admissions, which was the typical course of action for black student activists at Ivy League and other predominantly white institutions (PWIs) during the period.22

      The members of the Afro-American Society (AAS), which included members from Brown and Pembroke, led the way in the campaign to increase black enrollments. In 1968, the director of admissions, Charles Doebler, admitted that “We [Brown admissions officials] have had the most marvelous cooperation from our Afro-American Society.”23 Brown needed the efforts of those black students to advance its enrollment campaign. As Doebler explained, “In the years I have been at Brown, all the people who have been involved in getting Negroes to come here have been white. Now it is the Negroes themselves who are involved in it.”24 Doebler could have very well added that those white people who had been involved in getting black people to come to the elite institution could not boast of a record of high achievement.

      By referring to the fact that black students were involved in recruitment, Doebler made a crucial point that marked the arrival of a new era for both elite universities and the black freedom movement. With the advent of Black Power throughout the nation, black people (and black students) sought to do for themselves what white America had been unable to do. In this case, an almost exclusively white institution had been incapable (or perhaps unwilling) to recruit a significant number of black students. To remedy the situation, black students at Brown and other Ivy institutions took it upon themselves to recruit fellow students from their race. As leaders and scholars like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Charles V. Hamilton taught, members of the black community needed to use their collective power to support efforts to advance opportunities. Sometimes that meant voting as a bloc; at others, using the collective power meant demonstrating against racism; and in still other instances, supporting the efforts to advance opportunities meant using the resources offered at white institutions to gain knowledge that would assist in the creation of black institutions.

      The black students at Brown and Pembroke, who devoured the words and ideas of their leaders, believed their role in the struggle for freedom was to create opportunities for black advancement by making their Ivy institution more accessible to the members of the black community. Taking the initiative and responsibility to recruit black high school students placed AAS squarely in the movement. The initial phase of their version of the movement involved the creation of a larger black presence on their campus. Scholars have explained that in the larger Black Power Movement, leaders pushed for the entrance of black people into positions of power and spaces they had not previously occupied.25 The next step required those black students to use the powerful white institutions to acquire skills and knowledge that could benefit the masses in the black community. “You’re going to fight institutionalized racism” Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader Stokely Carmichael told students.26 He was hopeful about the young people who were to take up this battle: “One of the most promising developments in the nation today is the new mood among black college students, who have long formed a conservative group … imitating white America at its worst.” Now, he boasted, “humble appeal is gone; a powerful mood has developed based on a black consciousness.”27 Rather than humble, students entering universities in the late 1960s were determined to make a place for themselves and those who followed.

      For Brown University, there were different phases in the creation of its new identity as an institution that welcomed black people. The first phase required the institution to get beyond its liberal rhetoric and actually increase the number of black people on campus. The next phase involved making resources available to a group of people (black students) who were essentially strangers to institutional white America. The resources came in the form of funding for student organizations, curricular enhancement, and space for the students. In addition, that second phase necessitated changes in the university’s human resources practices. While higher numbers of black students was a coup for the institution, more students without higher numbers of black faculty and administrators might cause them to lose the newly admitted black students.

      As a result of their spring recruitment efforts, Brown students were able to point to the fifty black students admitted in the fall of 1968. Brown’s admission of black students, while impressive by its own standards, was somewhat lower than its peer institutions. For instance, Princeton admitted 76, Columbia and Cornell admitted 80 to 85, Penn admitted 125, Yale admitted 70, and Harvard admitted more than 80.28

      Although Brown and its peers were admitting black students at a higher rate than ever before, the actual matriculation of black students did not grow as quickly. Part of the reason for this was the fact that the accepted black students had made applications to several of the Ivy schools but could only attend one. Also, in spite of efforts from groups like AAS and progressive-minded white administrators, the pool of black students that would matriculate was still relatively small. To that effect, Princeton’s director of admissions revealed: “We’re [Princeton and other Ivy League schools] pretty much admitting guys who are getting lots of good college offers.”29 That was the case with Brown student Spencer Crew, who originally planned to stay in his home state of Ohio. Upon meeting with a forward-thinking guidance counselor and consulting with his cousin who attended Yale, Crew applied to and was accepted at Brown, Cornell, and Penn. He chose Brown, in part, because a representative from Brown came to meet with him.30

      The Princeton admissions director’s statement about competing for the same students pointed to the prospect that the students that Brown and the other schools admitted would have potentially been admitted anyway—that the institution was not in fact extending its search for black students much farther than it had been in the past. Noting this possibility, the director explained that “what we’re doing for the disadvantaged is not enough.”31 That was precisely the point that black students on Brown’s (and Princeton’s) campus had been making since the mid-1960s and why they demonstrated in the latter part of the decade.

      Black students at Brown and Pembroke began the transition to the second phase of their movement (getting black support staff hired). In November 1968, members of the Afro-American Society at Pembroke brought a list of demands to the president of the college that included calls for a black admissions officer to be hired by January and for the matriculation of at least thirty black students by the fall of the next year. This is an important aspect of black student activism during this period because the role of black male activists has been heavily highlighted in the majority of scholarly works, but it is noteworthy that black women like those at Radcliffe or the members of the Barnard Organization of Soul Sisters (BOSS) at Columbia pushed the envelope with regard to the black freedom movement on campus.32 The women of BOSS led the way in the push for a Black Studies program at Barnard College, which had a great influence on the efforts to create one at Columbia University.

      As did consciously black women elsewhere, the Pembroke students took action. On November 18, 1968, they declared: “We, the black women of Pembroke, are concerned about the lackadaisical attitude of the Pembroke Admissions Office towards the case of the black СКАЧАТЬ