Upending the Ivory Tower

Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League

Stefan M. Bradley

• Editorial: NYU Press
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479819270
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Afroamerikanische Geschichte

The inspiring story of the black students, faculty, and administrators who forever changed America’s leading educational institutions and paved the way for social justice and racial progress The eight elite institutions that comprise the Ivy League, sometimes known as the Ancient Eight—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell—are American stalwarts that have profoundly influenced history and culture by producing the nation’s and the world’s leaders. The few black students who attended Ivy League schools in the decades following WWII not only went on to greatly influence black America and the nation in general, but unquestionably awakened these most traditional and selective of American spaces. In the twentieth century, black youth were in the vanguard of the black freedom movement and educational reform. Upending the Ivory Tower illuminates how the Black Power movement, which was borne 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. Between the close of WWII and 1975, the civil rights and Black Power movements transformed the demographics and operation of the Ivy League on and off campus. As desegregators and racial pioneers, black students, staff, and faculty used their status in the black intelligentsia to enhance their predominantly white institutions while advancing black freedom. Although they were often marginalized because of their race and class, the newcomers altered educational policies and inserted blackness into the curricula and culture of the unabashedly exclusive and starkly white schools. This book attempts to complete the narrative of higher education history, while adding a much needed nuance to the history of the Black Power movement. It tells the stories of those students, professors, staff, and administrators who pushed for change at the risk of losing what privilege they had. Putting their status, and sometimes even their lives, in jeopardy, black activists negotiated, protested, and demonstrated to create opportunities for the generations that followed. The enrichments these change agents made endure in the diversity initiatives and activism surrounding issues of race that exist in the modern Ivy League. Upending the Ivory Tower not only informs the civil rights and Black Power movements of the postwar era but also provides critical context for the Black Lives Matter movement that is growing in the streets and on campuses throughout the country today. As higher education continues to be a catalyst for change, there is no one better to inform today’s activists than those who transformed our country’s past and paved the way for its future.

1

Surviving Solitude

The Travails of Ivy Desegregators

At but not of Harvard.

—W.E.B. Du Bois

Very few black students enrolled in Ivy institutions before World War II. They took up the burden of racially desegregating America’s most elite white organizations. As members of the desegregation generation, they had to perform under the intense white gaze of Ivy League students and officials. The new students did so with the hopes of the black masses. There was a small black population in higher education in general, but the number of black learners in the Ancient Eight in the early part of the century was miniscule. To protect themselves, they banded together to create bonds. When life for them on campus turned cold, they sometimes found warm welcomes in the homes of black people in neighboring communities. Many black students in the Ivy League before World War II enrolled in the elite graduate and professional schools, but there were those few who enrolled as undergraduates.

Life for all of them, undergraduate or otherwise, was lonely and remarkably challenging as they confronted what Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard have termed Jim Crow North; however, they endured. They used tactics of survival and assimilation in their attempts to live a normal college life. They resisted racism, in part, by remaining enrolled, but they did not always directly confront institutional racial bias at the collegiate level in the way that later generations would. Many believed it was their duty to take up the charge of racial uplift after they graduated. This chapter seeks to discuss the experiences of students who went on to comprise the black upper class in the decades before World War II. For as heeled and refined as the black Ivy students were, they were not nearly as exclusive and discriminating as their wealthy and privileged white peers in the elite white universities and colleges of the Ivy League.

The majority of the nation’s black students who pursued education beyond elementary school attended agricultural and industrial training institutions in the South. Henry Arthur Callis, who was in Cornell University’s class of 1909, noted correctly that at the time “the conflict raged between industrial and ‘higher’ education.” Although some learning institutions were available to African American students, the quality of resources at those black schools did not yet rank with white institutions. As such, Callis continued, “in 1906, for a colored student to be enrolled in an accredited high school was a mark of distinction”; however, “for such a student to enter a reputable university set him apart as ‘unusual.’ ”1 The black students’ distinctiveness at Ivy schools was ostensibly positive in nature. Historian Kevin Gaines, however, wrote about the potential flaws of the upwardly mobile students: “many black elites sought status, moral authority, and recognition of their humanity by distinguishing themselves, as bourgeois agents of civilization, from the presumably undeveloped black majority.”2 Being unusual did not free the young members of the black bourgeoisie from obligations to the larger community and from the pitfalls of their own success.

Black students had been attending Ivy institutions in small measure since the nineteenth century. Edward Mitchell graduated from Dartmouth College in 1828. In 1850, the year that America was compromising legislatively over the freedom of black people, free Black Nationalist Martin Delaney was the first black student admitted to Harvard (medical school), but Boston’s George Lewis Ruffin was the first to graduate Harvard with a law degree; another Bostonian, Richard Greener, was the first undergraduate student to graduate in 1870. New Haven’s own Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed graduated from Yale with a medical degree in 1857, the year of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. Four years later, Edward Bouchet earned Phi Beta Kappa honors as an undergraduate and then attained a PhD at Yale. In 1877, Inman Page at Brown University became the first to earn a degree. Five years later, the University of Pennsylvania graduated its first black student, James Brister, with a degree in dentistry; that same year Nathan Francis Mossell graduated with a medical degree. William Adger was the first black undergraduate to receive a degree from Penn in 1883. At Cornell University (which was not founded until 1865), George Washington Fields earned a law degree and Charles Chauveau Cook and Jane Eleanor Datcher obtained their bachelor of arts degrees in 1890. The year of the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision, James Dickinson Carr received a law degree at Columbia University, becoming one its first graduates. Princeton graduated its first black student in 1947.

Perhaps the most famous black Ivy alumnus was W.E.B. Du Bois. After graduating Fisk Institute, “Willie” Du Bois continued his scholastic trek to the educational jewel of the nation, Harvard. As would be the case at other Ivy League institutions, black students coming with degrees from historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) needed to prove themselves by taking undergraduate courses at Harvard. Du Bois entered the college in 1887 with another black student, Clement G. Morgan. They grew close to each other while attempting to navigate the world of snobbery and exclusiveness that was Harvard. Du Bois was rejected membership to the glee club and made few white friends; however, his intellectual acumen caught the attention of white professors who took care to train him.3 Although he regaled his education, Du Bois always felt that he was “at but not of Harvard.”4 He would not be the last black Ivy student to feel that way.

In the early part of the new century, not much in the way of admissions to higher education institutions changed. On the whole, during the period between 1900 and 1945, college was not an option for most Americans. This was especially true for black citizens. The majority of black people lived in rural areas of the South, and many still worked as sharecroppers or other capacities in agriculture. That period saw high rates of lynching and other forms of racial violence, but it also observed the solidification of a black middle and elite class.5 In some ways, members of the black elite had the opportunity to enjoy the privileges of their white peers that included taking advantage of higher education. In other ways, even the black elite could not be fully human. By that time, the institutions most available to black learners were the HBCUs: Howard, Hampton, Fisk, Morehouse, Spelman, Tuskegee, Wilberforce, Lincoln (Pennsylvania), and Florida A&M were among the top choices for the black college bound. What today are called predominantly white institutions (PWIs) comprised less of an option to black students, particularly those not from elite socioeconomic backgrounds. As historian Robert Harris Jr. observed, by 1910, only fifty-four black students (men and women) graduated with their bachelor’s degrees from elite PWIs, which included universities such as Columbia, Yale, the University of Chicago, Harvard, Stanford University, University of Michigan, Penn, and Cornell. Black graduate and professional students by and large looked to the Ivy League for their degree options. As of 1939, thirty-five black students graduated from Columbia, twenty-eight from Penn, twenty-five from Cornell, twenty-five from Harvard, and ten from Yale.6

At that historical moment, considering the educational options at the secondary level for most black people, even fifty-four black undergraduate degree earners in 1910 was miraculous. In terms of public secondary options there were a finite number of schools that prepared black students for work at elite higher education institutions. Of those secondary schools, the M Street School (later renamed Paul Laurence Dunbar High School) in Washington, D.C., is one of the most (if not the most) acclaimed. With its faculty holding an impressive number of advanced degrees, the black prep school in D.C. trained some of the most influential black figures in the history of the nation. Of its early graduates, 80 percent earned degrees at the collegiate level.7 Many went from the M Street School to the Ivy League. Famous black educators such as Carter G. Woodson (alumnus of Harvard), Anna Julia Cooper (alumna of Oberlin), and Mary Church Terrell (alumna of Oberlin) worked as teachers or administrators at the prep school.8

Although Dartmouth and Harvard had accepted black students earlier, Cornell became an attractive educational home for black college students. Unlike the other Ivies, Cornell did not get its start until the nineteenth century, at the close of the Civil War. When founded as a land grant institution, Cornell’s founder and the new president indicated that the university should provide educational opportunities to all students regardless of religion, gender, and race. That was a departure from most of the Ivy institutions that started with religious underpinnings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Where informal quotas for black students existed at places like Harvard and Yale, there were seemingly none at Cornell. Black students who could afford it attended at will. Between 1904 and 1943, nearly 150 black students matriculated at Cornell.9 For Cornell’s short history, the number of black matriculants was notable in contrast to other institutions in the Ivy League.

Aside from the fact that the institutional mission was more liberal than those of its peers, Cornell featured other qualities that made it alluring to black students. That it was in the North was a positive attribute. Before the Civil War, enslaved people running for their freedom to Canada used Ithaca, New York, as a stopping point. Despite the cold winters and remote geographic location in the Finger Lakes Region, a free black community developed. Ithaca’s location gave the town an appeal that New York City or Philadelphia did not have: very few distractions. That was an advantage for serious black students who could use the off-campus community for support and the quietude to study.

Cornell and its affiliates were not always welcoming. In 1900, a white student from West Virginia withdrew from the university in protest of two black students who were enrolled in his agriculture class. His southern sensibilities and rearing, he said, made him uncomfortable with black people being in the classroom. He knew his parents would not appreciate the fact that he sat in the same learning space and swam in the same pool with black students.10 The white student who withdrew was not typical of all Cornell students, but his behavior represented an aspect of life that black learners had to endure at elite PWIs.

Segregation, as restrictive and insidious as it was, forced black people to innovate in many ways. In 1905, men could not live on campus at Cornell. Most white homeowners would not board black renters so housing became an issue for black students. Black families like the Nelsons, Cannons, Newtons, and Singletons worked service jobs in town and on campus while supplementing their income in other ways. Edward Newton and William Cannon worked in fraternity houses on Cornell’s campus. Archie Singleton worked as a butler for a prominent white businessman in Ithaca and Singleton and his wife owned a business.11 These families opened their homes to black student boarders. The situation provided additional income for the black homeowners but also a secure place for the students to live.

Since enslavement, people in black communities revered formal education and they attempted to assist black learners who sought it. As historian Kevin Gaines put it, “African Americans have, with almost religious fervor, regarded education as the key to liberation.”12 In that way, those homes became more than support centers that allowed students to be human; they were incubators for black civil rights and intellectual leadership. The students appreciated the hospitality their hosts showed. “The social life among our group was carried on in the many comfortable homes of the Negroes [in Ithaca]. Nearly every Friday night, we were welcomed at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Wm. Cannon where we could meet their charming daughter and the other young women of the community. We were allowed to dance and good eats were always served us,” remembered Cornell alumnus George Kelley (class of 1908).13

While black students dealt with social isolation on campus in Ithaca, further north black leaders convened to address the rights of black people in general. Racial violence and political disfranchisement threatened African Americans wherever they resided. In Niagara Falls, Canada, black Harvard alumni Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter (Du Bois PhD and Trotter BA in 1895) organized a group of nearly thirty other progressive activists. By the end of the 1905 meeting, the group declared that their race deserved total freedom, which included the right to participate in the democracy and to be treated as social equals in all realms of society. Many scholars agree that the Niagara Movement was in many ways a precursor to one of the most influential civil rights organizations in the twentieth century: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Students with a desire to attend Cornell and other Ivy institutions were well aware of the glacial pace of racial progress and understood that by achieving education they helped uplift the community. They also instinctively knew that they would not be able to depend on the liberal notions of white administrators to succeed. Even though some elite universities allowed excelling black students to attend, those places were often all but welcoming. In the early twentieth century, Harvard’s president Abbott Lowell provided insight regarding the position of many liberal elite administrators: “We owe to the colored man the same opportunities for education that we do to the white man; but we don’t owe to him to force him and the white man into social relations that are not, or may not be, mutually congenial.”14 Some race leaders (particularly those who participated in the Niagara conference in 1905) agitated against that attitude. Booker T. Washington, who received an honorary master’s degree from Harvard in 1896, bolstered the opinion of the president with his famous Atlanta Cotton States Exposition speech of the same year, in which he accommodated racial discrimination by explaining that social segregation should be acceptable as long as mutual progress was respected. Thought leaders like Du Bois and Trotter vehemently opposed this viewpoint. Black students who attended the Ivies in the early twentieth century attempted to push the envelope beyond the accommodation of racist treatment.

The activities of black Cornellians best exemplified the more assertive campaign for racial equality that students made in the new century. Keeping in mind that at least five black students had not returned to Cornell from the previous semester, in the fall of 1905 some remaining students took the initiative to create their own support network. In addition to socializing, the early group members worked to improve their academic opportunities by studying together. The students borrowed a study technique from the members of white fraternities on campus. They banked the tests they took so that black students who took the courses in the future would know how and what to study.15 Current institutions of higher education expend millions of dollars to recreate the academic and student affairs retention models that these isolated black students conceived of for their own survival in 1905–1906.

Soon afterward, some of the men in the social/study group suggested that it become a literary society that surveyed and discussed the works of black intellectuals. The idea of a literary society was profound in the ...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Surviving Solitude: The Travails of Ivy Desegregators
• 2. Unsettling Ol’ Nassau: Princeton University from Jim Crow Admissions to Anti-Apartheid Protests
• 3. Bourgeois Black Activism: Brown University and Black Freedom
• 4. Black Power and the Big Green: Dartmouth College and the Challenges of Isolation
• 5. Space Invader: Columbia Enters Harlem World
• 6. There Goes the Neighborhood: Penn’s Postwar Expansion Project
• 7. Blue Bulldogs and Black Panthers: Yale, New Haven, and Black Imaginings
• 8. Black Studies the Hard Way: Fair Harvard Makes Curricular Changes
• 9. Africana Ambitions: The Defense of Blackness at Cornell University
• Conclusion: Welcome to the Class
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author