Like so many early black Ivy students, Houston, feeling that he had to represent the race well, excelled in his studies, which earned him a place on the prestigious Harvard Law Review editorial team. Not surprisingly, he was the first of his race to serve in that capacity.43 As an attorney, he revived Howard University’s law school and went on to engineer the desegregation of public education as head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Fellow fraternity brother and protégé Thurgood Marshall, who succeeded Houston, credited the Harvard-trained lawyer with providing the blueprint for the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Incidentally, Houston’s law school friend Alexander used his training to bring social, educational, and economic justice to Philadelphia as part of the NAACP.
Houston and Alexander were in league with Ralph Bunche, who started his graduate studies at Harvard in 1928. Having attended the University of California, Los Angeles, he had some conception of life at a PWI, but Bunche was still solitary in the political science department and one of few at the prestigious university. He studied colonial Africa and upon graduation enjoyed academic fellowships at the London School of Economics and Capetown University in South Africa. Bunche became arguably the most well-known black man in the world. During World War II, he worked for the Office of Strategic Services, which was the precursor to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and eventually for the State Department. At the close of the war, he was among those (including eventual Ivy presidents Grayson Kirk and John Dickey), who helped to plan the United Nations and construct its charter. Bunche, as an UN mediator, achieved what has not been possible since, a signed armistice between Israel and Palestine. His efforts earned him a Nobel peace prize and world acclaim. Between 1960 and 1965, Bunche became a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers.44
As Houston, Alexander, and Bunche took the fight for racial equity to the courts and world stage, back at Cornell, black women took the lead in organizing efforts during the Great Depression. In addition to the arrival of black fraternities and later a black sorority (Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.), students organized the Booker T. Washington Club at Cornell. The group delved into conversations and debates regarding segregation and invited speakers to campus to inform their discussions. In 1935, the same year as the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Margaret Morgan took over as president of the club.45 The group did not survive for long, but the seriousness of the students in their approach to the oppression that black people faced on and off campus is noteworthy. So, too, is the leadership of black women in these matters.
Students at other Ivy institutions shared the travails of the black men and women at Harvard and Cornell. J. Saunders Redding poignantly provided a glimpse into the solitary life of an Ivy desegregator. Redding, who eventually became a prominent literary scholar, arrived at Brown University as an undergraduate student in 1924. He was the second in his family to graduate from the Ivy League university. His brother, Louis, achieved his BA at Brown before receiving his JD from Harvard. Of his time as an undergraduate at the university, Redding remembered there being only four other black students—if that; two of them graduated after his first year. Although he and the remaining student shared what he called a “consciousness,” Redding said: “we took elaborate precautions against the appearance of clannishness.”46 Claiming to emulate the behavior of the black students who graduated before him, on campus and in the presence of white students he attempted not to give off the impression that he was only interested in matters of blackness. This led him to avoid eating with and fraternizing with the other black student in public but only “in the secret of our rooms at night with the shades down,” he revealed. Redding admitted an awareness of himself and his actions: “We were lost.”47 To find solace, Redding and his fellow black Brunonian left campus to engage other black students who were attending New England colleges.
Even with those cultural outlets off campus, Redding’s schoolmate could not adjust to always guarding his speech and measuring his movements on campus. The other black student, Redding remembered, exclaimed: “There’s something wrong with this” in reference to the way they felt constantly on alert.48 The unsettled student wondered aloud: “There must be some place better than this. God damn it, there must be!” Declaring his desire to leave, the student shared his feelings: “I feel like everybody’s staring at me, all these white guys, waiting for me to make a bad break.” The student suffered from what modern scholars have termed “racial battle fatigue”—experiencing intense stress as a result of the small racialized slights (called microaggressions today) and behaviors of the dominant (white) race.49 Unable to withstand the pressure further, Redding’s school friend exited Brown and shortly afterward committed suicide. That left Redding to feel as though he was “fighting alone against the whole white world.”50 In 1928, he graduated, earning Phi Beta Kappa honors, and shortly afterward entered the MA program in English. He finished his master’s degree in 1932. Later he took courses toward a PhD at Columbia University without completion.
During the Depression, the experience of black graduate and professional students at Harvard in some ways mirrored that of Redding. A graduate of Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., William H. Hastie, like his cousin Charles Hamilton Houston, came to Harvard from Amherst College. He earned a Bachelor of Law degree at Harvard followed by a Doctorate of Juridical Science in 1933. He, like Houston, became editor of the Harvard Law Review. After working with Houston, Hastie took an appointment as governor of the Virgin Islands and eventually became the first black federal court judge under the Harry S. Truman administration.51 Shortly after Hastie graduated, premier historian and activist John Hope Franklin enrolled in the graduate school of Harvard to study in the Department of History. In his memoir, Mirror to America, Franklin described taking a loan from his white Fisk University advisor Ted Currier to afford tuition. The son of an attorney in the Tulsa area, Franklin had the advantage that many black students in the Ivy League enjoyed: educated, supportive, and active parents. They worked to ensure he believed he was intelligent and capable of achieving. The value of that singular notion can never be underestimated when students are thrust into racist and racially oppressive environments. Those qualities and beliefs are what Franklin, and so many other Ivy League students, claimed sustained him when he found himself in a space filled with rich whiteness.
Franklin’s memory of his time in Cambridge represented that of other black students trying to make the best for themselves via education. He remembered: “A day, and often an hour, didn’t go by without my feeling the color of my skin—in the reactions of white Cambridge, the behavior of my fellow students, the attitudes real and imagined struck by my professors.”52 Growing up witnessing the destruction of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa during the riot of 1918, he was fully aware of his blackness; however, the constant reminders of others grew irksome. “Race precluded my enjoying the self-assurance to which most of my colleagues, along with the affluence and influence, were born,” he said. That which had worked in his favor for most of his life, “being ambitious and black,” also attracted the often unwanted gaze of white observers, recalled Franklin.
Unlike his peers of affluence and influence, the only thing he remembered having was his “determination and a corresponding work ethic to fall back on.” He needed both when his professor told a “darky” joke while Franklin sat embarrassed in class.53 The joke was based on ignorance regarding black people, but the entire curriculum at Harvard and throughout the Ivy League glorified white civilization and supremacy. In part, that is what made those institutions elite. Harvard and its peers perpetuated racial dominance and racist ideology while simultaneously establishing themselves as American stalwarts. Unfortunately for Franklin, life in Cambridge was at times not much better. He told the story of an outing with a black lady friend. The couple waited in a restaurant in the northern city for more than hour without so much as being recognized by the wait staff.54 The North and elite universities were not sheltered from racism.
Life for Franklin was not all bad, and he had positive interactions with white peers and professors. He always had to be cognizant, though, of the potential for situations to sour because of his race and the racism of others. For many black students in Franklin’s generation, unrelenting determination and work ethic motivated them to succeed academically and professionally. Franklin became the premier scholar of black history while assisting his fraternity brother Thurgood Marshall with research for the Brown v. Board case. Nearly forty years