In localizing the story, it must be noted that although many young African Americans admired the courage and leadership of figures like King, Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), the few black Ivy students could only look to themselves (and potentially their surrounding communities) to advance change. In essence, these students had to become their own versions of freedom fighters. This chapter concludes that this small but effective minority of youth practiced Black Student Power: African American students used their racial status in conjunction with their ties to institutions of higher education to win victories for the larger black freedom movement. Brown students’ peaceful display of Black Power advanced the freedom movement and indirectly aided the effort to appoint the Ivy League’s first (and so far only) black president.
To contextualize the role of black people in determining post-World War II policies, it is important to understand the relationship of Brown to black people in earlier periods. Brown University began as the College of the English Colony Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in 1764. As one of the oldest universities in the nation, it has long stood as a pioneer of education. According to the official university website, Brown was the first of the Ivies to admit students from religious backgrounds other than Protestant. The school boasts that making the college available to those of all religious affiliations was a “testament to the spirit of openness” that existed at Brown then and now.1
Although Brown was open to the various religious affiliations of its oncoming students, the elite university has a storied past concerning people of African descent in this nation. The university is named after the Brown family, who had profited from the American and international slave trade. With the Browns acting as original signatories on the college’s charter and as benefactors, the university directly and indirectly benefited from the trafficking of humans. Enslaved people even built some edifices on campus.2
Brown, in that way, is one of the most conflicted of all the Ivy institutions with regard to its history of black freedom. Although the university got its start, in part, from the enslavement of black people, Brown had an important impact on black educational advancement in the nineteenth century. In 1877, Inman Page and George Washington Milford Brown became the first two black students to graduate from the Ivy institution in Rhode Island. Impressively, Page served as president of Lincoln College and Western Baptist College in Missouri, Agriculture and Normal University in Oklahoma (later Langston University), and Roger Williams University in Tennessee.3 At the turn of the twentieth century, black Brunonians John Hope and John William Beverly affected the educational opportunities of other black students by taking posts as president of historically black colleges and universities like Morehouse College and Alabama State Normal School.4 John Brown Watson, who graduated in 1904, founded a college and eventually acted as president of Arkansas Agricultural and Mechanical Institute. Another black alumnus, William Dinkins, was president of Selma University from 1935 to 1950. Ethel Robinson, a student at Women’s College in Brown University, graduated in 1904 and then began teaching at Howard University. While there, she acted as an advisor to a group of women who established the world’s first college sorority for black women, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.5 The university was also the alma mater of alumni like Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard, a 1919 graduate and the first black professional football coach. Pollard, while at Brown, was a standout running back who made the prestigious Walter Camp All-America First Team.6 Those Brown and Pembroke alumni returned to the black community to uplift and create more opportunities for others.
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In the 1960s, life for black students at Brown was still, unfortunately, an isolating experience. “Don’t stand together like this, man. If a bomb drops, they’ve got all of us,” went the joke that black students at Brown in the early 1960s told each other.7 Speaking to the psychological effects of desegregating and trailblazing in an Esquire magazine article, alumnus Barry Beckham (class of 1966) wrote: “It wasn’t difficult to reach the ego-building deduction that we were the only talented negroes in the country who could pass the stringent admissions policy of Brunoversity.”8 Shortly after his arrival to campus, he wondered if that were the case or if he had been “chosen only to add some color.”9 There was a fear, he revealed, that “perhaps we [black students] weren’t equal, or at least they [white people] thought it.”10 That particular line of thought was erroneous. University officials later admitted that the institution had not searched for all of the qualified black students it could, which meant that Beckham and his early 1960s black schoolmates were well qualified (and equal to their white peers) but certainly not exclusively talented.11
As the number of black students remained relatively small in the early 1960s, the number of white “legacy” students remained steady. Beckham made note of that fact: “every university in the county maintains separate admissions standards for different groups,” he charged. “Sons and daughters of alumni and alumnae are almost always given preference over other applicants in colleges.”12 Beckham, to some extent, was correct. In the 1963–1964 school year at Princeton University, which was similar to other institutions in the Ivy League, 20 percent of the entering class were sons of alumni.13 The Princeton alumni were all white. The same was virtually true of Brown.
By 1965, black students made up 316 of the 14,125 students accepted to universities/colleges in the Ivy League.14 Harvard’s dean of admissions explained that the forty black students (up from thirty the year before) they accepted for the 1965–1966 school year was double the number accepted to the nation’s oldest university a decade earlier. Harvard accepted 1,370 for the 1965–1966 school year. As Ivy schools accepted higher numbers of black students, an admissions official at the University of Pennsylvania pointed out that the elite schools were competing for a small number of students even though there was an “unprecedented” number of black students applying to Ivy institutions. Applications from students of black middle-class families stood out to the Brown dean of admissions. He was surprised in part by their existence but also by the fact that they had little need for financial assistance. Of course, for decades, the National Urban League’s State of Black America report had indicated there had always been a professional class that existed in the black community that sought to provide their children with the highest forms of education possible, but that may have escaped the Brown dean’s attention.
Black students, apparently, had not been at the forefront of admissions officials’ minds, and so those gatekeepers could unknowingly overlook the children of the black middle class. At Columbia University, black students made up 35 (up from 25 the previous year) of the 1,125 students accepted. Cornell University accepted 70 black students (up from 25 the previous year) and 3,925 students in general. There were an estimated 30 black students (up from 14 the previous year) out of a total 1,220 students admitted to Dartmouth College. At the University of Pennsylvania 2,750 total students were admitted, of which 46 were black students (up from 30 the previous year). Of the 1,210 students admitted to Princeton University, black admitted students comprised 30 (up from 20 the previous year) and Yale admitted 35 black students (up from 25 the previous year) and 1,425 students total. Brown’s dean of admissions estimated that the university was admitting 1,100 total students and 30 black students (up from 15 previous year) into the oncoming class. Each of the universities/colleges saw an increase in total applications, reflecting the effects of the baby boom. Black students, irrespective of their economic status, still made up a lonely minority (2 percent) of Ivy admits by 1965.15 Even though more students than ever before attended four-year institutions, black students only made up 5 to 6 percent nationwide. Along those lines by the end of the decade, half of the students at universities/colleges came from the top 25 percent in terms of family income; only 7 percent came from the lowest family incomes.16 Black high school students were more likely than their white peers to come from the lowest family incomes.
The numbers of black admits was bleak, but the sense of otherness black students felt was profound. In discussing his experience, Barry Beckham pointed out ways that he tried to avoid loneliness and stave