Confronting Ivy League Racism 101: A Review of Stefan Bradley's `Upending The Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League'

After providing readers of his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America, with "a sketch," in chapters 10 to 13, "of the part which Negroes took in the reconstruction of various Southern states, together with some indication of their action along the border" states following the 1861-1865 U.S. Civil War, 20th-century historian W.E.B. Du Bois observed that "it is only the Blindspot" in U.S. academic "historians that can overlook and misread so clear and encouraging a chapter of human struggle and human uplift." And in his book's final chapter, titled "The Propaganda Of History," Du Bois recalled the role that some professors employed at Ivy League elite universities apparently played in presenting a false and racially biased account of how the Southern states were actually governed during Reconstruction in that region:

"The Columbia school of historians and social investigators have issued between 1895 and the present time sixteen studies of Reconstruction in the Southern States, all based on the same thesis and all done according to the same method: first, endless sympathy with the white South; second, ridicule, contempt or silence for the Negro...We shall never have a science of history until we have in our college men who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race, and who will not deliberately encourage students to gather thesis material in order to support a prejudice or buttress a lie..."

In his second intellectually ground-breaking book, Upending The Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League, Loyola Marymount University Professor and Chair of American American Studies Stefan Bradley (who previously authored the 2009 book, Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s) also shows readers that until the black students who attended Ivy League institutions became "willing to join in collective agitation on particular issues affecting black people" and protest against injustice on campus in the 1960s, "institutional white racism" still "lived within the policies and culture of those elite institutions." And, as Professor Bradley observes in his book, "the isolation, embarrassment, mistreatment, benign neglect, and outright segregation that black students experienced at some of these schools was as bad as that experienced in many southern institutions," during the first half of the 20th-century (and even subsequently).

Ivy League universities like Harvard, for example, "propagated and accommodated segregation in housing and social activities;" and a black Harvard student, Roscoe Conkling Brule Jr., "was denied housing at Harvard in 1922"despite "the fact that his grandfather" was "the first black person to serve a full term as a U.S. Senator."

Before providing his readers with a sketch of "how young black people became a conduit of Black Power in white spaces" on each of the Ivy League university campuses (in a much more detailed way than most other previously-written academic book and mass media historical accounts of 1960s student protests on U.S. campuses) in Upending The Ivory Tower 's later chapters, Professor Bradley first explores the lives of Black students in the Ivy League from the early 20th century through World War II in his initial chapter, in an interesting, ground-breaking way.

Although, after 1828, a few individual black students had attended and graduated from Ivy institutions during the 19th-century, as late as 1939, only "35 black students" had "graduated from Columbia, 28 from Penn, 25 from Cornell, 25 from Harvard and 10 from Yale;" and during the first half of the 20th-century "informal quotas for black students" still "existed at...Harvard and Yale." In addition, prior to World War II "the entire curriculum at Harvard and throughout the Ivy League glorified white civilization and supremacy and perpetuated racial dominance and racist ideology;" while "at mid-century, there were still few black students at Brown."

In chapter 2 of Upending The Ivory Tower, Professor Bradley presents a history of institutional and interpersonal racism at Princeton University that most readers (and even some 21st-century Princeton students, perhaps) might not have been aware of prior to reading his book; since, as Professor Bradley notes, "surprisingly little has been written about Princeton and its historic relationship with black people," although, despite Princeton being located in the northern state of New Jersey, "African American students could not attend Princeton...until the middle of the 20th century." And as well as no black applicants being accepted by Princeton in 1953, 1954 and 1959, "of the 1,202 applicants who were accepted" by Princeton "for the 1963-1964 academic year," still "only 10 were black."

But later in this same chapter, Professor Bradley describes how, after establishing an Association of Black Collegians on Princeton's campus in 1967, black students at Princeton "took it upon themselves to ensure that Princeton became an option for other black students;" and also demonstrated in opposition to the Princeton administration's initial failure to divest the university's $127 million investment in "companies associated with apartheid-sanctioning governments of South Africa and Mozambique," during the late 1960s--although "as it is, Princeton University is still an elite and exclusive primarily white institution" in the 21st-century.

Moving on from his examination of late 1960s Black student activism and protests on Princeton's campus, Professor Bradley then shows, in subsequent chapters, how what Black student activists "did on campus in the name of black freedom" at Brown, Dartmouth, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Columbia in the late 1960s "was just as significant as what advocates for black liberation did off campus." One historical result of this late 1960s wave of Black student campus protest and activism on these campuses, for example, as Professor Bradley noted in his introduction to Upending The Ivory Tower, was that "by 1975, each of the Ivies had revised its admission policies to better accommodate black candidates" and "all but one of the eight Ivies had Black Studies programs, departments, or Centers by then as well" (despite their continued lack of tenured black faculty members in 2019).

Given the continued failure of most Ivy League university administrations at places like Columbia to hire more tenured black professors, to admit more black students from black working-class families who graduated from New York City's non-elite public high schools and to stop expanding their Ivy League campuses in ways that push black working-class tenants out of the surrounding neighborhoods they gentrify in the 21st-century, some Movement readers might tend to feel Upending The Ivory Tower overestimates the degree to which institutional and interpersonal racism has been upended on Ivy League campuses.

But Professor Bradley's meticulously researched, well-written, passionate and inspiring Upending The Ivory Tower, which is written from a Black Liberation Movement intellectual political perspective (and also contains an interesting autobiographical foreword by the great 20th-century and early 21st-century historian Gerald Horne) synthesizes insightful historical analysis with a unique and fascinating historical narrative. So it's quite understandable why this great book has been praised by most reviewers. And for U.S. high school students who are considering whether or not to apply for admission to an Ivy League university, current Ivy League students and 21st-century Movement organizers and activists, especially, Upending The Ivory Tower should probably be required reading.