Summary
The untold story of the Harvard class of '63, whose Black students fought to create their own identities on the cusp between integration and affirmative action.
In the fall of 1959, Harvard recruited an unprecedented eighteen "Negro" boys as an early form of affirmative action. Four years later they would graduate as African Americans. Some fifty years later, one of these trailblazing Harvard grads, Kent Garrett, would begin to reconnect with his classmates and explore their vastly different backgrounds, lives, and what their time at Harvard meant.
Garrett and his partner Jeanne Ellsworth recount how these eighteen youths broke new ground, with ramifications that extended far past the iconic Yard. By the time they were seniors, they would have demonstrated against national injustice and grappled with the racism of academia, had dinner with Malcolm X and fought alongside their African national classmates for the right to form a Black students' organization.
Part memoir, part group portrait, and part narrative history of the intersection between the civil rights movement and higher education, this is the remarkable story of brilliant, singular boys whose identities were changed at and by Harvard, and who, in turn, changed Harvard.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Former NBC News producer Garrett reflects on his 1959 arrival at Harvard University as one of "the largest group of Negroes admitted to a freshman class to date" and interviews 14 of his 17 fellow African-American classmates about their experiences in this vivid and perceptive debut. A Brooklyn native, Garrett spent his childhood summers in South Carolina, where his relatives conveyed "a visceral sense of fear" around local whites. At Harvard, Garrett's classmates included Wesley Williams, a member of the "elite Negro world" of Washington, D.C., and George Jones from segregated Muskogee, Okla. "Almost from the first day," Garrett writes, "we Negroes started noticing each other, making mental note of who and where the brothers were." He describes eating at the "Black Table" in the freshman dining hall and attending house parties in nearby Roxbury, as well as Malcolm X's 1961 campus visit to debate the merits of integration. Reconnecting with his classmates 50 years later, Garrett notes many educational and professional achievements, including the founding of the African and Afro American Association of Students at Harvard, but laments that their lives have been "bracketed" by Jim Crow and Trumpism. He and coauthor Ellsworth eloquently describe the pressures these students were under, drawing an insightful portrait of the limits of racial progress in America. Expertly blending memoir and cultural history, this outstanding retrospective deserves to be widely read. (Feb.)
Kirkus Review
An alumnus of the Harvard class of 1963 recounts an experiment in affirmative action and its lasting effects.Before 1959, the African American presence at Harvard was minimal to the point of being practically nonexistent. That year, the university recruited 18 young black menwomen did not yet enter into the pictureone of them Garrett, who went on to excel in TV news and documentary-making. "I was by no means the first Black at Harvard," he writes. "That was Richard Theodore Greener, who graduated in 1870. From then until the mid-twentieth century, there were sometimes one or two in a class, and often none." The other 17 men were just as capable. In a kind of modern rejoinder to Michael Medved and David Wallechinsky's What Really Happened to the Class of '65? Garrett traces their lives and careers. All acknowledge that a Harvard education had its uses, but most also allow that during their student years, they kept quiet and did their work, careful not to give any reason to be forced out. Some of the former students are expatriates, having found other countries more congenial than the still racially troubled United States. One gentleman who has long lived in Austria after a career at IBM remembers going to student mixers and having classmates rush out to find a black girl for him to dance with: "There we were, the two of us, and all these whites just standing there glowing, saying Isn't it great?' It was very embarrassing for her and for me." Rueful reminiscence sometimes shades into anger, but for the most part, these extraordinary men chart life journeys that were full of challengesas with a closeted gay classmate who went on to careers in the aerospace, banking, and advertising sectorsbut also full of accomplishments. Garrett writes with an easy, charming style ("In the spring of 1962, I was still trying to climb the steep and slippery slope of organic chemistry"), but the sense of injustice is palpable.A fine contribution to the literature of civil rights and the African American experience. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Garrett was one of 18 young black men who in 1959 enrolled at Harvard. Many of these students were recruited from America's inner cities or Southern towns because of their race and academic achievements. The title refers to the shifts in racial politics that took place around the time this group graduated in 1963. Former TV and film producer Garrett's beautifully written narrative, coauthored by educator Ellsworth, offeres a gripping snapshot of how these students "stood out and blended in" as the largest incoming Harvard class of African Americans to date and for a number of years to come. (That said, these 18 students represented just 1.595 percent of the freshman class.) Race and class sometimes kept students apart, starting with the young men's choice to sit together during meals. Garrett is a keen observer of his fellow students, and he explores how this experience sharpened his critical thinking skills and raised his consciousness of Negroes as Afro-Americans (later African Americans), Afro-Caribbeans, and Africans. The author draws from his firsthand knowledge and interviews conducted over a ten-year period with 14 of his surviving classmates and their loved ones, supplemented by anecdotes about classmates who died and others who attended or taught at Harvard at that time. VERDICT Essential reading for those interested in civil rights, racial identity, and higher education. [See Prepub Alert, 8/5/19.]--Elizabeth Connor, Daniel Lib., The Citadel, Military Coll. of South Carolina, Charleston
Excerpts
Arrival Day, September 18, 1959. The new boys trudge along with their suitcases; attentive fathers carry trunks, mothers in flats and autumn coats tote desk lamps and portable typewriters, and kids trot along carting bags and boxes or just kicking through the first of the fall leaves. Harvard Yard is a verdant quadrangle of well-tended but simple elegance, boxed in by fine old American buildings, sequestered behind sturdy ivied brick walls and wrought-iron fences of fine design. Even on a busy day like this, the Yard is serene, as if over three hundred years of arrivals have inured it to any disturbance. Proud parents walk confidently into the epicenter of the American aristocracy, in the footsteps of some of the most illustrious feet in American history. Half of this year's boys have gone to private schools, and they watch out for familiar faces, letter sweaters, or school ties. For the many fathers who are Harvard alums, this is a ritual and a homecoming: they greet old classmates with backslaps and inside jokes. Other fathers tip their hats, secure in the knowledge that as of this day, through their sons, they have joined one of the most elite clubs in the world. Mothers exchange the polite smiles of privileged sisterhood. Just after one o'clock that afternoon, another family comes across the Yard. Heads turn, eyes widen, a mother whispers behind her hand, a father shushes a child. Now treading on the Puritan soil and patrician pathways of Harvard Yard are eight dark-skinned, Sunday-best Negroes, one of them a tall thin boy carrying a suitcase. That boy is me, and this is the Garrett party; this is my family, my very Negro family, stepping onto the very white, very Old New England, very exclusive grass and gravel of Harvard Yard. We know we are being looked at. We stick closer together, say less, and walk more stiffly than the other families, maintaining what we hope looks at least like composure, if not aplomb. Aside from my fourteen-year-old sister and me--who were born in Brooklyn--the others in our party, my parents and aunts and uncle, were all born and grew up on sharecropper farms in Edgefield, South Carolina. They lived more than half of their lives in the rural Jim Crow Deep South. They were just two decades distant from driving mules and picking cotton, from the indignities of segregated schools, parks, buses, and water fountains, from violence and hatred, degradation and fear. They had clear memories of having stuffed Cousin Emery into the trunk of a car to escape the Ku Klux Klan. Considering their beginnings, their struggles, and the history of Harvard and of the United States, my family's arrival in Harvard Yard that cool early fall day in 1959 was one of incalculable dimension. The wide lawns of Harvard Yard say to the privileged few who have been chosen, You belong here, you are important, you are granted a generous share of space and time in this world , while my family and just about everyone I had spent time with in my seventeen years on earth had been told, You don't belong here, you're not very important, and what little you are granted we will begrudge you . The trees of Harvard Yard rise confidently into a leafy canopy that keeps both the sun and the outside world from beating down too harshly on its chosen, while my family and our forebears slaved under the sun and the whip for more than three hundred years as generations of trees grew and died in the Yard and new ones were planted. Thousands of white Harvard boys and men had sat under the trees smoking, chatting in clusters with their hands in their pockets, considering the questions of the ages and dreaming the big dreams, or they had horsed around, singing drunkenly, considering the questions of the moment and dreaming the little dreams, while my family and our brothers and sisters in blackness had walked mean streets and dark country roads, trying to dream any kind of dream at all. But I wasn't thinking about those incongruities on that day in September 1959. I was seventeen, awkwardly and tentatively confident. I hadn't thought much about Harvard at all, in fact, except that it was a good school and famous. The only connection I had to the place was a distant cousin of my mother, Ida Thomas, who worked in one of the kitchens. Had I wondered how many Blacks would be here? I don't think so. For that matter, had any of the white boys who were arriving that day thought about having Black classmates, or even roommates? Not likely. But here we were all together, and some of those white boys and their families no doubt were shocked to see me. Excerpted from The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever by Kent Garrett, Jeanne Ellsworth All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.