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

Bradley (African American studies, Loyola Marymount Univ., Los Angeles; Harlem vs. Columbia University) adds to the fresh wave of studies swelling outside the South. Extending his work on New York's Columbia University, the author unfolds a chapter on black student protest at eight elite U.S. universities: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania State, Princeton, and Yale. Pursuing four themes—admissions, assimilation, activism, and the birth of black studies—he details how Ivy League blacks as students and alumni with rising consciousness in the post-World War II era increasingly resisted racism to advance education. He emphasizes the significant changes the late 1960s and early 1970s mostly undergraduate students wrought with building takeovers and sit-ins. In the process, he lays bare the lives of the students themselves, as they jeopardized their own privileged positions to reshape conceptions of black life and culture.