Upending the Ivory Tower. Stefan M. Bradley

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СКАЧАТЬ of a dislocation from the black community” while on campus.22 He argued that they needed to “legitimize, inwardly as well as publicly, their presence at Harvard [or other Ivies] while other blacks remain in the ghetto.” The battleground for this war within themselves, then, became the pristine campuses.

      In the eyes of the students, little in the Ivy League indicated that black people had been there before or had done anything that mattered to the world. Had they not struggled for Afro-American Studies and to increase black admissions and to create welcoming spaces, they would have been vulnerable to the criticisms of those from the black underclass who labeled the students as materialistic agents of the bourgeoisie who sought no advancement but their own. The students also felt a need to prove to other black students that they were committed to the cause. Ivy students were aware that their peers at state colleges and universities saw them as the most privileged. If activists at South Carolina State College were dying and agitators at San Francisco State College and Howard University were demonstrating on behalf of Black Power, then there was pressure for students in the Ancient Eight to do so as well. The intention of Black Power was to empower black people even if that meant using the wealth and tools of white institutions to do so. The Ivy activists believed they were obligated to create access to their schools and more beneficial structures for those who followed. That is why they activated.

      It is reasonable to expect that Black Power would take hold in black neighborhoods and in predominantly black spaces, but Upending the Ivory Tower shows how young black people became a conduit of Black Power in white spaces. Along those lines, it attempts to point out that the Black Power Movement, which was born out of an effort to edify the most disfranchised of the black masses, also took root in the hallowed halls of America’s most esteemed institutions of higher education—spaces that few people in the world could hope to occupy. Writing during the moment that black learners were activating en masse on white campuses, founding director of Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center James Turner said: “Black students have begun to take a leading role in challenging and changing the status of higher education.”23 By penetrating what was traditionally the “exclusive domain of White America,” he wrote, they joined the movement for black liberation. Black students “feel a keen sense of themselves as an extension of the Black community,” Turner observed of the period. They were “going through a period unlike any their parents experienced—it is a renaissance and rebirth” of black resistance and rebellion.24 In this way, members of the black community’s intelligentsia took up the trope of Black Power to bring the interests of the black powerless onto campus. In the past two decades the literature surrounding black student protest has bourgeoned as scholars have recognized that the story of student agents of change is worth telling.25 Upending the Ivory Tower is the examination of those few students, professors, staff, and administrators who pushed for change at the peril of losing what privilege they had.

      Change was not reserved solely for the elite institutions. The students underwent transformations themselves during their scholastic journey. The moment and the movements that black learners observed in their time spent in the boldly white environment of the Ivy League made an impression on them. Discussing and participating in protest actions and negotiations with officials helped to develop the students’ black identities. Some students, particularly those who came in the early 1960s and graduated in 1967 and 1968, witnessed within themselves the rise of black consciousness. Scholar William Cross referred to the phenomenon as Nigrescence, which is the process of actualizing blackness that occurs within Americans of African descent. For many students, that included self-identifying as black and not Negro, changing their style of dress and hair to reflect the Afrocentric trends, and choosing to associate with mostly black people whenever possible. If some students questioned their blackness before arriving, they established a racial identity that linked them to what historian Vincent Harding referred to as the river of black liberation and created an ancestral bind between black people who rebelled against slavery and those who fought to advance opportunities at the collegiate level in the postwar era.26 That process informed the remainder of their experiences in the Ivy League and also in life.

      In wrestling with their own black development, they looked to the now sacred but then recently released Black Power texts. In addition to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), they read the searing criticisms of institutional racism and economic deprivation in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967), Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Where Do We Go from Here? (1967). By January 1968, Nathan Wright, Jr.’s Black Power and Urban Unrest was available and socially conscious and intellectually curious students read books like The Black Power Revolt: A Collection of Essays, edited by Floyd Barbour. In an attempt to extend their international political understanding, some students were reading Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) and Mao Tse-tung’s Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (Little Red Book, 1964), a favorite of the Black Panthers. Through their reading, students attempted to grasp the meaning of revolution and sought to apply revolutionary principles to their own struggles.27 In viewing themselves as victims of colonialism, some black students even identified themselves as part of the third world.

      In considering the sometimes traumatic experiences the students endured, a logical question is why would they stay? Why would they not leave and attend historically black colleges or universities if education was the sole goal? A few students, like Alford Dempsey (who would have been in Columbia’s class of 1969), decided to transfer to historically black colleges and universities.28 The majority of black students, however, agreed that they had the right to be black and human in any space in the nation and they advanced that concept through their demonstrations. The social movements of the time helped them to see what was possible and they applied the rhetoric and methods used in human rights struggles on campus.

      It is clear that the black students who attended Ivy League universities between the close of World War II and 1975 greatly influenced black America and the nation in general. The list of black figures who graduated during the period is impressive by any measure. They became high level politicians, captains of industries, health care officials, and thought leaders. A representative example of those black leaders and figures who took degrees from Ivy institutions was the Haverford Group, which met in the late 1960s and early 1970s to advocate racial integration in a moment when young people of the race proposed Black Nationalism and racial separation. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, William Hastie, John Hope Franklin, J. Saunders Redding, M. Carl Holman, Anne Cooke Reid, Phyllis Wallace, and Robert Weaver, who represented nine of fourteen group members, all attended Ivy universities or colleges before the World War II era. They represented a segment of the civil rights generation and the older guard of the movement that contrasted with the newer guard, which cried Black Power and campaigned for Black Studies.29 Black Ivy alumni’s advocacy in the nonprofit sector (including education) is equally as notable as that in the academy, industry, and politics. In addition to achieving in their careers and in society, black graduates continued to push their alma maters to create access for black students who followed them by joining alumni associations.

      It bears noting that there has always been within the ranks of Ivy-educated black people a great diversity regarding values, political allegiances, and beliefs about the best course of action for the larger community. For instance, conservative politician and political commentator Alan Keyes opposed the efforts of black student activists at Cornell in 1969 when he was an undergraduate.30 He left Cornell for Harvard, where he continued his opposition to the antiwar and black campus movements. Coming from a military household, he supported the conflict in Vietnam. Thomas Sowell attended Harvard for his undergraduate degree, Columbia University for graduate school, and was a professor at Cornell. Like Keyes, he opposed the actions of black demonstrators at Cornell and resigned his post to leave in personal protest.31 Keyes and Sowell represented the conservative contingent of black students in the postwar era, but there were large numbers of students who were more liberal and an even smaller contingent who were militant enough to demonstrate. They all experienced their time at Ivy League institutions differently. For the most part, Upending the Ivory Tower follows the actions of those willing to join in collective agitation on particular issues СКАЧАТЬ