Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League
Winner, 2019 Anna Julia Cooper and C.L.R. James Award, given by the National Council for Black Studies

Finalist, 2019 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History, given by the African American Intellectual History Society

Winner, 2019 Outstanding Book Award, given by the History of Education Society

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.

1128523326
Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League
Winner, 2019 Anna Julia Cooper and C.L.R. James Award, given by the National Council for Black Studies

Finalist, 2019 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History, given by the African American Intellectual History Society

Winner, 2019 Outstanding Book Award, given by the History of Education Society

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.

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Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League

Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League

by Stefan M. Bradley
Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League

Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League

by Stefan M. Bradley

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Overview

Winner, 2019 Anna Julia Cooper and C.L.R. James Award, given by the National Council for Black Studies

Finalist, 2019 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History, given by the African American Intellectual History Society

Winner, 2019 Outstanding Book Award, given by the History of Education Society

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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781479873999
Publisher: New York University Press
Publication date: 09/25/2018
Pages: 480
Product dimensions: 6.30(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Stefan M. Bradley is Coordinator for Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives and Professor of African American Studies in the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is author of Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s and co-editor of Alpha Phi Alpha: A Legacy of Greatness, The Demands of Transcendence.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations vii

Foreword Gerald Horne ix

Preface xiii

Introduction 1

1 Surviving Solitude: The Travails of Ivy Desegregators 23

2 Unsettling Ol' Nassau: Princeton University from Jim Crow Admissions to Anti-Apartheid Protests 46

3 Bourgeois Black Activism: Brown University and Black Freedom 92

4 Black Power and the Big Green: Dartmouth College and the Challenges of Isolation 139

5 Space Invader: Columbia Enters Harlem World 167

6 There Goes the Neighborhood: Penn's Postwar Expansion Project 197

7 Blue Bulldogs and Black Panthers: Yale, New Haven, and Black Imaginings 249

8 Black Studies the Hard Way: Fair Harvard Makes Curricular Changes 296

9 Africana Ambitions: The Defense of Blackness at Cornell University 331

Conclusion: Welcome to the Class 361

Acknowledgments 375

Notes 379

Bibliography 431

Index 449

About the Author 465

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