Upending the Ivory Tower argues that what the students did on campus in the name of black freedom was just as significant as what advocates for black liberation did off campus. The struggle for black people existed wherever they found themselves—even in historic, castlelike buildings. Indeed, Black Power, as with all other social movements, had varying elements and people that attempted to attain liberation by employing different tactics. By considering the diversity within the Black Power Movement, which included campus movements, Upending the Ivory Tower will help to complicate (and complete) the narrative. While some black students at schools like Cornell, Columbia, Penn, Yale, and Princeton took over campus buildings and even flirted with violence to achieve their goals, students at schools like Dartmouth and Brown were much less dramatic in their demonstrations but equally successful at winning their demands on behalf of black people. Depending on their schools’ responses to their demands, black students at each of the eight Ivies employed various aspects of the language, rhetoric, and tactics of the movement.
The question is why. Why would these mostly undergraduate black students and professionals risk their own chances at individual freedom? Some of the students came from the black elite, while the majority in the 1960s came from the urban black working class, and fewer from lower economic circumstances. The mix of working class and middle- to upper-middle-class black people created interesting interactions, but a student’s class background was not always easy to determine by the student’s actions. As one multigenerational college graduate of Harvard recalled: “Some of the people who were Black Power to the max had parents who were physicians.”18 Regardless of the higher socioeconomic statuses of some students, if they were black they were likely not that far removed from the lower class in terms of familial, friendship, and social ties. The militancy of the moment crossed class dimensions, which for black people were often fluid. Subsequently, young people, regardless of their backgrounds, worked together to change their institutions to better accommodate their blackness. In spite of all else, they shared their race and what came along with it.
One answer as to why they would risk their opportunities involved the call to collective action that so many young people made during the period. Members of the generation, even today, reflect on the times that “we” stopped the war or when “we” faced down the Ku Klux Klan or when “we” brought Black Studies onto campus. Individual progress was important, but at a time when their entire racial group faced threats, acting in coalition with other black people was both logical and practical. Thomas W. Jones, of Cornell’s class of 1970, explained that “it was in a spirit of self-sacrifice that we were determined to fight for beliefs and principles greater than ourselves.”19 If necessary, he said, they were ready “to meet our destiny in a struggle that was much bigger than any one of us, and even bigger than all of us,” said Jones.
Another reason was the pressure they felt from others. Students described feeling guilty, in some ways, for being at the prestigious institutions knowing that so many black people faced oppression. As more students came from areas and cities where the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement had taken hold, they felt almost beholden to their blackness. This was a point of contention among students, who may have sympathized with the postwar black freedom movement but who did not want to actually demonstrate and protest. Those students felt pressure from some of the urban black working and lower-income students who came during the late 1960s, who believed more militant action was necessary. Moderation and liberalism became targets in much the same way as conservatism and bigotry. That led some black students to relent to what today is called “peer pressure” in the struggle. To compensate for the self-imposed pressure they felt for “making it” to the Ivy League and from the more militant factions on campuses, some black students became activists. These conflicts of ideologies manifested in terms of gender convention, class identities, neighborhood backgrounds, and political agendas.
The few black students who made it to the Ivy League were in a precarious position because of privilege. Ernest Wilson III, Harvard class of 1970, was able to articulate the awkwardness of his situation: “I was born at the top of the bottom and on the inside of the outside of society.”20 His depiction of his life circumstances shed light on the experiences of other black students similarly situated. Ivy Leaguer Eric Holder of Columbia University’s class of 1973 bolstered Wilson’s point about the educational experiences of black students who attended elite institutions: “I had this dual existence.”21 Although he was in a mostly white environment at school, Holder felt the need to prove he “was still one of those guys” from the neighborhood. He attempted to convince his peers from his Queens neighborhood that he “was still cool.” At Columbia that meant he had to stay engaged with the black community through his activism and through service in his black fraternity. As the 1960s ended, larger numbers of black undergraduate students enrolled in Ivy League schools from working class and lower socioeconomic backgrounds. In spite of their paucity of resources, they, too, were part of their communities’ and the nation’s elite once they arrived on campus.
The members of that minority of black people in colleges confronted double marginalization. They were different than the masses—black or otherwise—because of their opportunities to attend college and especially Ivy schools. Concurrently, they were manifestly distinct from the mostly white, well-to-do students at the top universities and colleges. According to Henry Rosovsky, a white economic historian who headed the committee to design Harvard’s Afro-American Studies program, the students, “more or less consciously,” felt “something 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