In the minds of some, there was much at stake if black and white students lived together in such close quarters at Ivy schools. According to a white Mississippian who graduated Harvard in 1898, race mingling led to dire consequences. Commenting on the controversy over black freshmen rooming with white peers that was occurring during the same period as that at Cornell, he said, “social equality—marriageability, if you will—is implied in sharing ‘bed and board’ with another.”34 He based his statement on the premise that black and white people were not equal to begin with, and that merely sleeping near white men would entice black men to take on white wives. Aside from being racist, the statement was irrationally illogical. At the root of his and others’ concerns about living in close proximity to black people was the strange fixation that white America had on the prospects of miscegenation. In following the Harvard alumnus’s line of reasoning, racial equality under any circumstances meant a loss of power in terms of reproduction. Perhaps eating separately under the same roof in a dining hall or restaurant was permissible and even inevitable, conceded the Harvard educated southerner, but to “‘sleep with a nigger’—is a horse of another color” and unacceptable.
As scholars like Komozi Woodard, Jeanne Theoharis, Matt Delmont, and Mathew Countryman have convincingly demonstrated in their works, racial bigotry was not reserved for men of the South and southern locations. When Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of famous white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Harvard alumnus (class of 1893), and founding member of the NAACP weighed in on the issue, compelling Harvard to be as fair as its reputation on the issue of black housing, white northerners raised their voices in opposition as well. A Connecticut alumnus from the class of 1901, in a revelatory statement, called for Harvard’s administrators to be forthright about the issue. He criticized “overseers” for not having the intelligence to innovate creative ways to keep black and Jewish men out of the university. The alumnus asked, “does the possible flare-up of such men as Villard” scare administrators such that they will not return Harvard to being a “white man’s college?”35 Finally, he queried, “why not come out into the open and take the … criticism for a year or so and save our University for our sons, grandsons and for our posterity?” Of course, “our sons and grandsons,” meant future white men.
The concern about living arrangements continued with the women of Cornell as well. In 1911, two black women, juniors Pauline Angeline Ray and Rosa Vassar, attempted to register for housing on campus, pointing out that accommodating racism had become too expensive. It cost them extra to get to campus by streetcar; their rent was more than what white women paid at the dormitory; and they were at a disadvantage when attempting to attain materials in the library because the on-campus students pilfered them first. When the dean of Sage College met with the students and heard their appeal, a controversy ensued, as the dean suggested that it was not her but the white female students who would have a problem with living with black women.36 Of course administrators, not students, made policy, but the dean was correct in her prediction that white women would protest black residents. Two hundred students of Sage College signed a petition stating that they could not tolerate living with black women and gave it to the trustees of Cornell.37 The New York chapter of the NAACP took up the issue. Subsequently, black women begrudgingly but not consistently were permitted to live on campus. Administrators at Cornell and the other Ivies often valued the comfort of white segregationists more than the human dignity of black learners.
Unfortunately, the controversy regarding housing continued in 1914 and beyond. When white women in the dormitory confronted first-year student Adelaide Cook, the daughter of a black alumnus, wanting her to leave, the mother and daughter made their displeasure public. Again, the NAACP joined the conversation to keep equality of opportunity and access a priority. As the controversy became public, the university president had to, once again, reaffirm the institution’s commitment to its mission. The trustees and administration had to confront the reality of racism on campus in the face of their liberal mission of educating everyone.38 By 1939, black women were again having difficulty accessing Sage College with little support from the administration. It should be noted that these students who struggled to find housing still had to attend their courses and compete in the classroom. Ultimately, students who happened to be black shouldered undue burdens while trying to excel in their studies. They learned that racism made education at an elite PWI an expensive endeavor.
That same racism, however, cost the university as well. Evie Carpenter, who graduated in 1918, dissuaded her daughter, Emily Spencer, from going to Cornell. Spencer was a second-generation college woman who received a bachelor’s degree from Virginia State College and was considering Cornell for graduate school. Carpenter believed her daughter was “too young to be isolated in Ithaca,” where she would have to endure some of the same problems surrounding housing that Carpenter had faced.39 The isolation of Cornell combined with the negative experiences with discrimination caused some black families to rethink sending their children to the university. In future decades, housing issues would again plague black women in the Ivy League and particularly Cornell.
The decision to place one’s self in such trying circumstances spoke to the value that black students placed on an Ivy League education and the invasiveness of racism in the culture of these leading institutions. As historian Genna Rae McNeil insightfully noted in her seminal biography of eminent civil rights attorney Charles Hamilton Houston, “One did not come to Harvard and forget one’s racial heritage.”40 That went for both black and white affiliates of the university. McNeil referred to the experience of Houston as a law student, who had completed his undergraduate work at Amherst College.
During what scholars refer to as the Red Summer of 1919, when white mobs attacked black citizens in forty cities and counties, Houston enrolled at the Harvard Law School. During the turmoil of the race riots, black people, some of whom were veterans of World War I, assertively defended themselves and their property. Houston and his fellow veterans understood their rights as citizens, and he especially believed it his duty to make the law work for the most oppressed Americans. That is why he chose one of the most, if not the most, renowned law schools in the nation. Houston’s father was an attorney and Houston himself was already a member of black elite society, having been an officer in the war and a college graduate. He was also a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. Like the founders of the fraternity in Cornell, he recognized racial divisions at Harvard. Just as the Cornell students could not join white fraternities, Houston and other black students could not join the law clubs and societies at Harvard. That sort of rejection led to the creation of the Nile Club on campus, which brought together black students much the same way as the study group at Cornell in 1905 did. The racial rejection also inspired the establishment of the National Bar Association for black attorneys, over which Houston’s law school friend and fraternity brother Raymond Pace Alexander (the first black graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business) eventually presided.41
Again, members of the black elite banded together to establish parallel organizations to advance their own opportunities but also to deflect white racism. Great Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey personified that effort with the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s Negro World weekly and the Black Star steamship line. Houston and his classmates admired Garvey’s vision to establish a black economy that spanned the world while rebuilding pride in black culture. At a moment when black life was so fragile, young leaders like Houston invited Garvey to campus to meet with the