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Surviving Solitude

The Travails of Ivy Desegregators

At but not of Harvard.

—W.E.B. Du Bois

Very few black students enrolled in Ivy institutions before World War II. They took up the burden of racially desegregating America’s most elite white organizations. As members of the desegregation generation, they had to perform under the intense white gaze of Ivy League students and officials. The new students did so with the hopes of the black masses. There was a small black population in higher education in general, but the number of black learners in the Ancient Eight in the early part of the century was miniscule. To protect themselves, they banded together to create bonds. When life for them on campus turned cold, they sometimes found warm welcomes in the homes of black people in neighboring communities. Many black students in the Ivy League before World War II enrolled in the elite graduate and professional schools, but there were those few who enrolled as undergraduates.

Life for all of them, undergraduate or otherwise, was lonely and remarkably challenging as they confronted what Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard have termed Jim Crow North; however, they endured. They used tactics of survival and assimilation in their attempts to live a normal college life. They resisted racism, in part, by remaining enrolled, but they did not always directly confront institutional racial bias at the collegiate level in the way that later generations would. Many believed it was their duty to take up the charge of racial uplift after they graduated. This chapter seeks to discuss the experiences of students who went on to comprise the black upper class in the decades before World War II. For as heeled and refined as the black Ivy students were, they were not nearly as exclusive and discriminating as their wealthy and privileged white peers in the elite white universities and colleges of the Ivy League.

The majority of the nation’s black students who pursued education beyond elementary school attended agricultural and industrial training institutions in the South. Henry Arthur Callis, who was in Cornell University’s class of 1909, noted correctly that at the time “the conflict raged between industrial and ‘higher’ education.” Although some learning institutions were available to African American students, the quality of resources at those black schools did not yet rank with white institutions. As such, Callis continued, “in 1906, for a colored student to be enrolled in an accredited high school was a mark of distinction”; however, “for such a student to enter a reputable university set him apart as ‘unusual.’ ”1 The black students’ distinctiveness at Ivy schools was ostensibly positive in nature. Historian Kevin Gaines, however, wrote about the potential flaws of the upwardly mobile students: “many black elites sought status, moral authority, and recognition of their humanity by distinguishing themselves, as bourgeois agents of civilization, from the presumably undeveloped black majority.”2 Being unusual did not free the young members of the black bourgeoisie from obligations to the larger community and from the pitfalls of their own success.

Black students had been attending Ivy institutions in small measure since the nineteenth century. Edward Mitchell graduated from Dartmouth College in 1828. In 1850, the year that America was compromising legislatively over the freedom of black people, free Black Nationalist Martin Delaney was the first black student admitted to Harvard (medical school), but Boston’s George Lewis Ruffin was the first to graduate Harvard with a law degree; another Bostonian, Richard Greener, was the first undergraduate student to graduate in 1870. New Haven’s own Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed graduated from Yale with a medical degree in 1857, the year of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. Four years later, Edward Bouchet earned Phi Beta Kappa honors as an undergraduate and then attained a PhD at Yale. In 1877, Inman Page at Brown University became the first to earn a degree. Five years later, the University of Pennsylvania graduated its first black student, James Brister, with a degree in dentistry; that same year Nathan Francis Mossell graduated with a medical degree. William Adger was the first black undergraduate to receive a degree from Penn in 1883. At Cornell University (which was not founded until 1865), George Washington Fields earned a law degree and Charles Chauveau Cook and Jane Eleanor Datcher obtained their bachelor of arts degrees in 1890. The year of the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision, James Dickinson Carr received a law degree at Columbia University, becoming one its first graduates. Princeton graduated its first black student in 1947.

Perhaps the most famous black Ivy alumnus was W.E.B. Du Bois. After graduating Fisk Institute, “Willie” Du Bois continued his scholastic trek to the educational jewel of the nation, Harvard. As would be the case at other Ivy League institutions, black students coming with degrees from historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) needed to prove themselves by taking undergraduate courses at Harvard. Du Bois entered the college in 1887 with another black student, Clement G. Morgan. They grew close to each other while attempting to navigate the world of snobbery and exclusiveness that was Harvard. Du Bois was rejected membership to the glee club and made few white friends; however, his intellectual acumen caught the attention of white professors who took care to train him.3 Although he regaled his education, Du Bois always felt that he was “at but not of Harvard.”4 He would not be the last black Ivy student to feel that way.

In the early part of the new century, not much in the way of admissions to higher education institutions changed. On the whole, during the period between 1900 and 1945, college was not an option for most Americans. This was especially true for black citizens. The majority of black people lived in rural areas of the South, and many still worked as sharecroppers or other capacities in agriculture. That period saw high rates of lynching and other forms of racial violence, but it also observed the solidification of a black middle and elite class.5 In some ways, members of the black elite had the opportunity to enjoy the privileges of their white peers that included taking advantage of higher education. In other ways, even the black elite could not be fully human. By that time, the institutions most available to black learners were the HBCUs: Howard, Hampton, Fisk, Morehouse, Spelman, Tuskegee, Wilberforce, Lincoln (Pennsylvania), and Florida A&M were among the top choices for the black college bound. What today are called predominantly white institutions (PWIs) comprised less of an option to black students, particularly those not from elite socioeconomic backgrounds. As historian Robert Harris Jr. observed, by 1910, only fifty-four black students (men and women) graduated with their bachelor’s degrees from elite PWIs, which included universities such as Columbia, Yale, the University of Chicago, Harvard, Stanford University, University of Michigan, Penn, and Cornell. Black graduate and professional students by and large looked to the Ivy League for their degree options. As of 1939, thirty-five black students graduated from Columbia, twenty-eight from Penn, twenty-five from Cornell, twenty-five from Harvard, and ten from Yale.6

At that historical moment, considering the educational options at the secondary level for most black people, even fifty-four black undergraduate degree earners in 1910 was miraculous. In terms of public secondary options there were a finite number of schools that prepared black students for work at elite higher education institutions. Of those secondary schools, the M Street School (later renamed Paul Laurence Dunbar High School) in Washington, D.C., is one of the most (if not the most) acclaimed. With its faculty holding an impressive number of advanced degrees, the black prep school in D.C. trained some of the most influential black figures in the history of the nation. Of its early graduates, 80 percent earned degrees at the collegiate level.7 Many went from the M Street School to the Ivy League. Famous black educators such as Carter G. Woodson (alumnus of Harvard), Anna Julia Cooper (alumna of Oberlin), and Mary Church Terrell (alumna of Oberlin) worked as teachers or administrators at the prep school.8

Although Dartmouth and Harvard had accepted black students earlier, Cornell became an attractive educational home for black college students. Unlike the other Ivies, Cornell did not get its start until the nineteenth century, at the close of the Civil War. When founded as a land grant institution, Cornell’s founder and the new president indicated that the university should provide educational opportunities to all students regardless of religion, gender, and race. That was a departure from most of the Ivy institutions that started with religious underpinnings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Where informal quotas for black students existed at places like Harvard and Yale, there were seemingly none at Cornell. Black students who could afford it attended at will. Between 1904 and 1943, nearly 150 black students matriculated at Cornell.9 For Cornell’s short history, the number of black matriculants was notable in contrast to other institutions in the Ivy League.

Aside from the fact that the institutional mission was more liberal than those of its peers, Cornell featured other qualities that made it alluring to black students. That it was in the North was a positive attribute. Before the Civil War, enslaved people running for their freedom to Canada used Ithaca, New York, as a stopping point. Despite the cold winters and remote geographic location in the Finger Lakes Region, a free black community developed. Ithaca’s location gave the town an appeal that New York City or Philadelphia did not have: very few distractions. That was an advantage for serious black students who could use the off-campus community for support and the quietude to study.

Cornell and its affiliates were not always welcoming. In 1900, a white student from West Virginia withdrew from the university in protest of two black students who were enrolled in his agriculture class. His southern sensibilities and rearing, he said, made him uncomfortable with black people being in the classroom. He knew his parents would not appreciate the fact that he sat in the same learning space and swam in the same pool with black students.10 The white student who withdrew was not typical of all Cornell students, but his behavior represented an aspect of life that black learners had to endure at elite PWIs.

Segregation, as restrictive and insidious as it was, forced black people to innovate in many ways. In 1905, men could not live on campus at Cornell. Most white homeowners would not board black renters so housing became an issue for black students. Black families like the Nelsons, Cannons, Newtons, and Singletons worked service jobs in town and on campus while supplementing their income in other ways. Edward Newton and William Cannon worked in fraternity houses on Cornell’s campus. Archie Singleton worked as a butler for a prominent white businessman in Ithaca and Singleton and his wife owned a business.11 These families opened their homes to black student boarders. The situation provided additional income for the black homeowners but also a secure place for the students to live.

Since enslavement, people in black communities revered formal education and they attempted to assist black learners who sought it. As historian Kevin Gaines put it, “African Americans have, with almost religious fervor, regarded education as the key to liberation.”12 In that way, those homes became more than support centers that allowed students to be human; they were incubators for black civil rights and intellectual leadership. The students appreciated the hospitality their hosts showed. “The social life among our group was carried on in the many comfortable homes of the Negroes [in Ithaca]. Nearly every Friday night, we were welcomed at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Wm. Cannon where we could meet their charming daughter and the other young women of the community. We were allowed to dance and good eats were always served us,” remembered Cornell alumnus George Kelley (class of 1908).13

While black students dealt with social isolation on campus in Ithaca, further north black leaders convened to address the rights of black people in general. Racial violence and political disfranchisement threatened African Americans wherever they resided. In Niagara Falls, Canada, black Harvard alumni Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter (Du Bois PhD and Trotter BA in 1895) organized a group of nearly thirty other progressive activists. By the end of the 1905 meeting, the group declared that their race deserved total freedom, which included the right to participate in the democracy and to be treated as social equals in all realms of society. Many scholars agree that the Niagara Movement was in many ways a precursor to one of the most influential civil rights organizations in the twentieth century: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Students with a desire to attend Cornell and other Ivy institutions were well aware of the glacial pace of racial progress and understood that by achieving education they helped uplift the community. They also instinctively knew that they would not be able to depend on the liberal notions of white administrators to succeed. Even though some elite universities allowed excelling black students to attend, those places were often all but welcoming. In the early twentieth century, Harvard’s president Abbott Lowell provided insight regarding the position of many liberal elite administrators: “We owe to the colored man the same opportunities for education that we do to the white man; but we don’t owe to him to force him and the white man into social relations that are not, or may not be, mutually congenial.”14 Some race leaders (particularly those who participated in the Niagara conference in 1905) agitated against that attitude. Booker T. Washington, who received an honorary master’s degree from Harvard in 1896, bolstered the opinion of the president with his famous Atlanta Cotton States Exposition speech of the same year, in which he accommodated racial discrimination by explaining that social segregation should be acceptable as long as mutual progress was respected. Thought leaders like Du Bois and Trotter vehemently opposed this viewpoint. Black students who attended the Ivies in the early twentieth century attempted to push the envelope beyond the accommodation of racist treatment.

The activities of black Cornellians best exemplified the more assertive campaign for racial equality that students made in the new century. Keeping in mind that at least five black students had not returned to Cornell from the previous semester, in the fall of 1905 some remaining students took the initiative to create their own support network. In addition to socializing, the early group members worked to improve their academic opportunities by studying together. The students borrowed a study technique from the members of white fraternities on campus. They banked the tests they took so that black students who took the courses in the future would know how and what to study.15 Current institutions of higher education expend millions of dollars to recreate the academic and student affairs retention models that these isolated black students conceived of for their own survival in 1905–1906.

Soon afterward, some of the men in the social/study group suggested that it become a literary society that surveyed and discussed the works of black intellectuals. The idea of a literary society was profound in the sense that so many Americans were either illiterate or had little or no time for leisure reading.16 That these black collegians enjoyed such a luxury is telling. Although the members of the group were amenable to adding literary discourse to their meetings, they could not agree on what to name the society. Some members of the group who had been working in white fraternity houses to support themselves wanted to use Greek letters. One group member, a graduate student, disapproved of the idea, claiming that there were no Greek signifiers that could be used for African Americans. After some debate and research, the leading members of the society came up with the name Alpha Phi Alpha.17

Within months of naming the literary society, at the home of the Singletons on December 4, 1906, seven members established Alpha Phi Alpha as the first collegiate fraternity for black men.18 With the help of members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, students held their first fraternity ritual in an Odd Fellows masonic lodge. The fraternity followed the trail that the founders of Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, Inc., also known as the Boulé, had blazed in Philadelphia.19 The founders of the Boulé represented the black elite in the professions, with members having attained education at Phillips Exeter, Penn, Harvard, Columbia, and other elite institutions. After their college and academic training, they entered professions in medicine and dentistry while using their status to create more freedoms for people like them. At the collegiate level, the founding members of Alpha Phi Alpha organized around principles of scholarship, uplift, and service to the black community.

To be sure, the founders of Alpha were the sons of relatively established families, but the students were still only one generation removed from slavery. Various members of their families had served in the Civil War, attended college, taught at the collegiate level, were ministers, and owned businesses.20 The founding members included Henry A. Callis, Charles H. Chapman, Eugene K. Jones, George B. Kelley, Nathaniel A. Murray, Robert H. Ogle, and Vertner W. Tandy. Two were from the South, and the remaining five were from either northern states or the nation’s capital. Of the seven founders, the parents or another close family member attended college at institutions like Hampton, Howard, and Harvard. Two of the founders had attended the M Street School, and two others had attended HBCUs before arriving at Cornell.21 In making the fraternity’s motto “first of all; servants of all; we shall transcend all,” the students were quite aware of their elite status in officially creating a brotherhood for black college men.

The fraternity also expressed the need to establish networks of fictive kinship on university campuses. Fictive kinship was a survival tool that black people employed for generations. Although universities claimed to adhere to the concept of in loco parentis, black students had to engineer their own family models while on campus—often without the help of their schools’ institutional parenting. When the Cornell administration recognized the fraternity, the members made it a resource for black intellectualism and community progress within and outside of the university. The fraternity quickly expanded to other institutions, creating another chapter on the campus of Howard University and then another at the University of Toronto, making Alpha the first national and international black collegiate fraternity. By the 1920s, the fraternity established chapters at six of the eight American Ivies. In spite of declarations of uplift and service to the community, the founding members wanted to remain somewhat exclusive. Famous historian, Sigma Pi Phi member, and Alpha Phi Alpha member Charles H. Wesley explained that “it was only natural” the founders would turn the fraternity “toward other colleges and universities of the first rank.”22 Additionally, it was important to the fraternity not to admit what one founder called “undesirables.”23 The founders and members of Alpha did not escape notions of elitism even in their good works for the race. Their sentiments echoed those of many from their socioeconomic class during the period. After the founding of Alpha Phi Alpha, students founded other black Greek letter organizations at Howard, the University of Indiana, and Butler University.

When the founders of Alpha Phi Alpha graduated, they took their place among the race’s leaders and in the professions. Callis, training under the prominent surgeon Daniel Hale Williams, became a physician and charter member of the National Medical Association, which allowed black medical doctors to share information and best practices.24 He had a brief marriage with fellow Cornellian, club woman, and activist Alice Dunbar Nelson, who was formerly married to Paul Laurence Dunbar.25 Chapman became an award winning agriculture professor at Florida A&M, inspiring students and colleagues alike.26 Jones became an executive of a new organization called the National Urban League and a leading figure in the struggle for black rights in New York.27 His son, Eugene Kinkle Jones Jr. graduated Cornell Law School in 1933. George Kelley became the first registered civil engineer in New York and worked on the Barge Canal system.28 He also achieved the rank of second lieutenant in the U.S. Army during World War I. Murray taught at Dunbar High School (formerly the M Street School) and Armstrong High School in Washington, D.C.29 Ogle moved to the nation’s capital, where he worked as an assistant for Republican U.S. Senator Frances E. Warren who headed the Senate Appropriations Committee.30 Tandy became the first recognized registered architect in the State of New York. Also a prominent member of black New York society, he designed the historic St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal church in Harlem and the palatial homes of black millionaire and mogul Madame C. J. Walker.31 Black Cornell graduates achieved in spite of Jim Crow.

Back on campus, fraternity members became student leaders. The fraternity put together a “Committee on Student Affairs” to address black student needs. The fraternity’s and committee’s duty was to “promote the scholarship of all the colored students of the university and to promote a sympathetic relationship between the townspeople and the students.” As part of the desegregation generation, black students at Ivy schools believed they had something to prove to their institutions and other observers. In performing at a high level, they understood they were paving the way for other black students to attend and for potential social acceptance at PWIs. Aware that they were on a metaphoric stage, Alpha members offered programs and services “in order that the colored student body may get some recognition in the eyes of the university.” It was vital to modify their behavior and to be as respectable as possible, “for outsiders are quick to criticize and [are] severe in their judgments.” That was why they looked to each other to uphold a standard of decorum that was irreproachable.32 Scholars have argued that artists of the Harlem Renaissance took a similar tack in trying to present to the world the best of black people in the hope that white America may accept black people as being as refined as any other American. For members of the desegregation generation in the Ivy League, the burden of respectability and representation was all but light.

Cornell women especially shouldered the burden of respectability while overcoming other circumstances that called into question their status as ladies. For the black female students of the university, the issue of housing came to the fore. Between 1911 and 1914 black students at Sage College (Cornell’s school for women) faced issues because of the requirement that female students stay on campus. The earliest black students at Sage, including Harlem Renaissance luminary Jessie Fauset, stayed on campus without major event. But by 1905 the college had stopped housing black women.33 The fact that it was compulsory for women (white) to stay on campus when it was not for men spoke to the period’s flawed notions of female fragility and the need to monitor women for their own sake. Ladies (white) deserved a certain amount of accommodation, according to the ideas of the period. The regulation revealed the desire of men (white) to protect women (white) from the dangers of the outside world. Those noble men’s desires to shield women from undue burdens did not, apparently, extend to black women. That a school that professed openness to all students would have a conflict over whether to allow black women to be housed in the same fashion as their white peers illustrates the contradictory nature of the informal and formal policies that black people had to navigate in institutional white America during that period and later. It also illustrates the devaluation of black womanhood that was common at the time; black ladies did not receive the same respect as white women in the eyes of administrators.

In the minds of some, there was much at stake if black and white students lived together in such close quarters at Ivy schools. According to a white Mississippian who graduated Harvard in 1898, race mingling led to dire consequences. Commenting on the controversy over black freshmen rooming with white peers that was occurring during the same period as that at Cornell, he said, “social equality—marriageability, if you will—is implied in sharing ‘bed and board’ with another.”34 He based his statement on the premise that black and white people were not equal to begin with, and that merely sleeping near white men would entice black men to take on white wives. Aside from being racist, the statement was irrationally illogical. At the root of his and others’ concerns about living in close proximity to black people was the strange fixation that white America had on the prospects of miscegenation. In following the Harvard alumnus’s line of reasoning, racial equality under any circumstances meant a loss of power in terms of reproduction. Perhaps eating separately under the same roof in a dining hall or restaurant was permissible and even inevitable, conceded the Harvard educated southerner, but to “‘sleep with a nigger’—is a horse of another color” and unacceptable.

As scholars like Komozi Woodard, Jeanne Theoharis, Matt Delmont, and Mathew Countryman have convincingly demonstrated in their works, racial bigotry was not reserved for men of the South and southern locations. When Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of famous white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Harvard alumnus (class of 1893), and founding member of the NAACP weighed in on the issue, compelling Harvard to be as fair as its reputation on the issue of black housing, white northerners raised their voices in opposition as well. A Connecticut alumnus from the class of 1901, in a revelatory statement, called for Harvard’s administrators to be forthright about the issue. He criticized “overseers” for not having the intelligence to innovate creative ways to keep black and Jewish men out of the university. The alumnus asked, “does the possible flare-up of such men as Villard” scare administrators such that they will not return Harvard to being a “white man’s college?”35 Finally, he queried, “why not come out into the open and take the … criticism for a year or so and save our University for our sons, grandsons and for our posterity?” Of course, “our sons and grandsons,” meant future white men.

The concern about living arrangements continued with the women of Cornell as well. In 1911, two black women, juniors Pauline Angeline Ray and Rosa Vassar, attempted to register for housing on campus, pointing out that accommodating racism had become too expensive. It cost them extra to get to campus by streetcar; their rent was more than what white women paid at the dormitory; and they were at a disadvantage when attempting to attain materials in the library because the on-campus students pilfered them first. When the dean of Sage College met with the students and heard their appeal, a controversy ensued, as the dean suggested that it was not her but the white female students who would have a problem with living with black women.36 Of course administrators, not students, made policy, but the dean was correct in her prediction that white women would protest black residents. Two hundred students of Sage College signed a petition stating that they could not tolerate living with black women and gave it to the trustees of Cornell.37 The New York chapter of the NAACP took up the issue. Subsequently, black women begrudgingly but not consistently were permitted to live on campus. Administrators at Cornell and the other Ivies often valued the comfort of white segregationists more than the human dignity of black learners.

Unfortunately, the controversy regarding housing continued in 1914 and beyond. When white women in the dormitory confronted first-year student Adelaide Cook, the daughter of a black alumnus, wanting her to leave, the mother and daughter made their displeasure public. Again, the NAACP joined the conversation to keep equality of opportunity and access a priority. As the controversy became public, the university president had to, once again, reaffirm the institution’s commitment to its mission. The trustees and administration had to confront the reality of racism on campus in the face of their liberal mission of educating everyone.38 By 1939, black women were again having difficulty accessing Sage College with little support from the administration. It should be noted that these students who struggled to find housing still had to attend their courses and compete in the classroom. Ultimately, students who happened to be black shouldered undue burdens while trying to excel in their studies. They learned that racism made education at an elite PWI an expensive endeavor.

That same racism, however, cost the university as well. Evie Carpenter, who graduated in 1918, dissuaded her daughter, Emily Spencer, from going to Cornell. Spencer was a second-generation college woman who received a bachelor’s degree from Virginia State College and was considering Cornell for graduate school. Carpenter believed her daughter was “too young to be isolated in Ithaca,” where she would have to endure some of the same problems surrounding housing that Carpenter had faced.39 The isolation of Cornell combined with the negative experiences with discrimination caused some black families to rethink sending their children to the university. In future decades, housing issues would again plague black women in the Ivy League and particularly Cornell.

The decision to place one’s self in such trying circumstances spoke to the value that black students placed on an Ivy League education and the invasiveness of racism in the culture of these leading institutions. As historian Genna Rae McNeil insightfully noted in her seminal biography of eminent civil rights attorney Charles Hamilton Houston, “One did not come to Harvard and forget one’s racial heritage.”40 That went for both black and white affiliates of the university. McNeil referred to the experience of Houston as a law student, who had completed his undergraduate work at Amherst College.

During what scholars refer to as the Red Summer of 1919, when white mobs attacked black citizens in forty cities and counties, Houston enrolled at the Harvard Law School. During the turmoil of the race riots, black people, some of whom were veterans of World War I, assertively defended themselves and their property. Houston and his fellow veterans understood their rights as citizens, and he especially believed it his duty to make the law work for the most oppressed Americans. That is why he chose one of the most, if not the most, renowned law schools in the nation. Houston’s father was an attorney and Houston himself was already a member of black elite society, having been an officer in the war and a college graduate. He was also a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. Like the founders of the fraternity in Cornell, he recognized racial divisions at Harvard. Just as the Cornell students could not join white fraternities, Houston and other black students could not join the law clubs and societies at Harvard. That sort of rejection led to the creation of the Nile Club on campus, which brought together black students much the same way as the study group at Cornell in 1905 did. The racial rejection also inspired the establishment of the National Bar Association for black attorneys, over which Houston’s law school friend and fraternity brother Raymond Pace Alexander (the first black graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business) eventually presided.41

Again, members of the black elite banded together to establish parallel organizations to advance their own opportunities but also to deflect white racism. Great Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey personified that effort with the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s Negro World weekly and the Black Star steamship line. Houston and his classmates admired Garvey’s vision to establish a black economy that spanned the world while rebuilding pride in black culture. At a moment when black life was so fragile, young leaders like Houston invited Garvey to campus to meet with the small group of black students and Cambridge residents. If they were to remain mentally and emotionally fit, they had to craft a social and cultural life for themselves.42

Like so many early black Ivy students, Houston, feeling that he had to represent the race well, excelled in his studies, which earned him a place on the prestigious Harvard Law Review editorial team. Not surprisingly, he was the first of his race to serve in that capacity.43 As an attorney, he revived Howard University’s law school and went on to engineer the desegregation of public education as head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Fellow fraternity brother and protégé Thurgood Marshall, who succeeded Houston, credited the Harvard-trained lawyer with providing the blueprint for the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Incidentally, Houston’s law school friend Alexander used his training to bring social, educational, and economic justice to Philadelphia as part of the NAACP.

Houston and Alexander were in league with Ralph Bunche, who started his graduate studies at Harvard in 1928. Having attended the University of California, Los Angeles, he had some conception of life at a PWI, but Bunche was still solitary in the political science department and one of few at the prestigious university. He studied colonial Africa and upon graduation enjoyed academic fellowships at the London School of Economics and Capetown University in South Africa. Bunche became arguably the most well-known black man in the world. During World War II, he worked for the Office of Strategic Services, which was the precursor to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and eventually for the State Department. At the close of the war, he was among those (including eventual Ivy presidents Grayson Kirk and John Dickey), who helped to plan the United Nations and construct its charter. Bunche, as an UN mediator, achieved what has not been possible since, a signed armistice between Israel and Palestine. His efforts earned him a Nobel peace prize and world acclaim. Between 1960 and 1965, Bunche became a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers.44

As Houston, Alexander, and Bunche took the fight for racial equity to the courts and world stage, back at Cornell, black women took the lead in organizing efforts during the Great Depression. In addition to the arrival of black fraternities and later a black sorority (Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.), students organized the Booker T. Washington Club at Cornell. The group delved into conversations and debates regarding segregation and invited speakers to campus to inform their discussions. In 1935, the same year as the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Margaret Morgan took over as president of the club.45 The group did not survive for long, but the seriousness of the students in their approach to the oppression that black people faced on and off campus is noteworthy. So, too, is the leadership of black women in these matters.

Students at other Ivy institutions shared the travails of the black men and women at Harvard and Cornell. J. Saunders Redding poignantly provided a glimpse into the solitary life of an Ivy desegregator. Redding, who eventually became a prominent literary scholar, arrived at Brown University as an undergraduate student in 1924. He was the second in his family to graduate from the Ivy League university. His brother, Louis, achieved his BA at Brown before receiving his JD from Harvard. Of his time as an undergraduate at the university, Redding remembered there being only four other black students—if that; two of them graduated after his first year. Although he and the remaining student shared what he called a “consciousness,” Redding said: “we took elaborate precautions against the appearance of clannishness.”46 Claiming to emulate the behavior of the black students who graduated before him, on campus and in the presence of white students he attempted not to give off the impression that he was only interested in matters of blackness. This led him to avoid eating with and fraternizing with the other black student in public but only “in the secret of our rooms at night with the shades down,” he revealed. Redding admitted an awareness of himself and his actions: “We were lost.”47 To find solace, Redding and his fellow black Brunonian left campus to engage other black students who were attending New England colleges.

Even with those cultural outlets off campus, Redding’s schoolmate could not adjust to always guarding his speech and measuring his movements on campus. The other black student, Redding remembered, exclaimed: “There’s something wrong with this” in reference to the way they felt constantly on alert.48 The unsettled student wondered aloud: “There must be some place better than this. God damn it, there must be!” Declaring his desire to leave, the student shared his feelings: “I feel like everybody’s staring at me, all these white guys, waiting for me to make a bad break.” The student suffered from what modern scholars have termed “racial battle fatigue”—experiencing intense stress as a result of the small racialized slights (called microaggressions today) and behaviors of the dominant (white) race.49 Unable to withstand the pressure further, Redding’s school friend exited Brown and shortly afterward committed suicide. That left Redding to feel as though he was “fighting alone against the whole white world.”50 In 1928, he graduated, earning Phi Beta Kappa honors, and shortly afterward entered the MA program in English. He finished his master’s degree in 1932. Later he took courses toward a PhD at Columbia University without completion.

During the Depression, the experience of black graduate and professional students at Harvard in some ways mirrored that of Redding. A graduate of Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., William H. Hastie, like his cousin Charles Hamilton Houston, came to Harvard from Amherst College. He earned a Bachelor of Law degree at Harvard followed by a Doctorate of Juridical Science in 1933. He, like Houston, became editor of the Harvard Law Review. After working with Houston, Hastie took an appointment as governor of the Virgin Islands and eventually became the first black federal court judge under the Harry S. Truman administration.51 Shortly after Hastie graduated, premier historian and activist John Hope Franklin enrolled in the graduate school of Harvard to study in the Department of History. In his memoir, Mirror to America, Franklin described taking a loan from his white Fisk University advisor Ted Currier to afford tuition. The son of an attorney in the Tulsa area, Franklin had the advantage that many black students in the Ivy League enjoyed: educated, supportive, and active parents. They worked to ensure he believed he was intelligent and capable of achieving. The value of that singular notion can never be underestimated when students are thrust into racist and racially oppressive environments. Those qualities and beliefs are what Franklin, and so many other Ivy League students, claimed sustained him when he found himself in a space filled with rich whiteness.

Franklin’s memory of his time in Cambridge represented that of other black students trying to make the best for themselves via education. He remembered: “A day, and often an hour, didn’t go by without my feeling the color of my skin—in the reactions of white Cambridge, the behavior of my fellow students, the attitudes real and imagined struck by my professors.”52 Growing up witnessing the destruction of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa during the riot of 1918, he was fully aware of his blackness; however, the constant reminders of others grew irksome. “Race precluded my enjoying the self-assurance to which most of my colleagues, along with the affluence and influence, were born,” he said. That which had worked in his favor for most of his life, “being ambitious and black,” also attracted the often unwanted gaze of white observers, recalled Franklin.

Unlike his peers of affluence and influence, the only thing he remembered having was his “determination and a corresponding work ethic to fall back on.” He needed both when his professor told a “darky” joke while Franklin sat embarrassed in class.53 The joke was based on ignorance regarding black people, but the entire curriculum at Harvard and throughout the Ivy League glorified white civilization and supremacy. In part, that is what made those institutions elite. Harvard and its peers perpetuated racial dominance and racist ideology while simultaneously establishing themselves as American stalwarts. Unfortunately for Franklin, life in Cambridge was at times not much better. He told the story of an outing with a black lady friend. The couple waited in a restaurant in the northern city for more than hour without so much as being recognized by the wait staff.54 The North and elite universities were not sheltered from racism.

Life for Franklin was not all bad, and he had positive interactions with white peers and professors. He always had to be cognizant, though, of the potential for situations to sour because of his race and the racism of others. For many black students in Franklin’s generation, unrelenting determination and work ethic motivated them to succeed academically and professionally. Franklin became the premier scholar of black history while assisting his fraternity brother Thurgood Marshall with research for the Brown v. Board case. Nearly forty years later, Franklin took an appointment to head a presidential commission on American race relations.

In the pre-World War II period, black students often found a modicum of acceptance at Ivy League universities and colleges as athletes. In higher education in general and the Ivy League especially, athletics translated to privilege in terms of one’s mobility on campus. There is a long history of black athletes entertaining predominantly white audiences in the United States. William Rhoden, author of Forty Million Dollar Slave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete (2007), described black sportsmen in the period of enslavement having to perform to meet the expectations of their masters. If good enough, those chosen few athletes received elevated treatment. During the period of Jim Crow, white Americans loved black sportsmen—as long as they performed their duties on the field or court. Once back in society, however, black athletes faced the same kind of racism that nonathletic citizens confronted. Scholars have called this the “key functionary theory.”55 When applied to race and sports, as long as black people performed their roles in entertaining and amusing white people, they could be applauded and even admired. In the early twentieth century, this was true for athletes racing horses and bicycles as well as boxing and playing football. Perhaps a clear example of the key functionary theory was Jesse Owens. White Americans cheered the gold medal winning Olympian, but he could not stay on campus at his northern predominantly white university.

The Ancient Eight got the name “Ivy League” because of football. During the early part of the twentieth century, some of the Ivy institutions were more renowned for their sports wins than their academic rigor. For some time, the Ivy League led the way in football competition.56 The names of black players could be found on rosters at most of the Ivies, but Princeton, which did not enroll black students, often refused to even play against teams fielding black athletes. Historian Charles Martin, in Benching Jim Crow: The Rise and Fall of the Color Line in Southern College Sports, relayed a story of a Dartmouth black player who took the field against Princeton only to have his collar bone broken within the first minutes of the game, effectively ending his season. After the incident, a Princeton player said, “We’ll teach you to bring colored men down here. You must take us for a gang of servants.”57 The animosity that the Dartmouth player experienced was not unusual for black athletes, especially when playing teams throughout the South. Princeton was not in the South geographically, but it was well known as a haven for southerners who had a predilection for oppressing black people.58

In most of the Ivy League, however, black players had a chance to display their talents on the field and court. In the early 1890s, William H. Lewis became the first black football player in the league. Lewis has the distinction of being the first in a number of other categories as well. He was the first black player selected for Walter Camp’s All-Time All-America team. Enrolled in the law school, he played center for Harvard University. There, he also became the first black player to be named captain of the Harvard team. His leadership on the field portended his career as the first black coach in the Ivy League, when he spent eleven years on the coaching staff of the Harvard team. As if his football exploits were not enough to fill a lifetime for Lewis, President William Howard Taft appointed him U.S. assistant attorney general in 1910.59 After his term as a federal appointee, he spent his life fighting against lynching and other forms of racism.

Joining Lewis in the Ivy League were footballers like the Pollard brothers. Leslie and Frederick “Fritz” Pollard represented Dartmouth and Brown respectively. Fritz Pollard was also a Walter Camp All-American, graduating Brown with a degree in chemistry in 1919. While on the field he met with hardnosed players and racist taunts from the crowd. At one game against Yale, the white students in the crowd sang the tune “Bye Bye, Blackbird.”60 Despite the jibes, Pollard had a successful college career and went on to play and coach professionally. Incidentally, Fritz Pollard also pledged Alpha Phi Alpha while at Brown. While the athletes played football and joined fraternities, black people throughout the United States tried daily to escape racial violence. In spite of their acclaim, black athletes had to keep in mind the threat of lynching and the blatant disrespect of racism in the same way that other black men and women did.

Cornell University was competitive in football during the depression years. In the 1930s at Cornell, the students, staff, and administration adored Jerome “Brude” Holland, who was the first black varsity football player there. Born in upstate New York, he played offense and defense, with his presence affecting much of the game. Off the field he was a member of black Greek organization Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., and the Booker T. Washington Club, which students started on campus to debate the utility of Washington’s philosophy. Holland also mentored black youth at a newly established community center in Ithaca founded by the Francis Harper Society. Although he was black, because he was a beloved football player he enjoyed a Cornell experience that was not available to students who were not standout athletes. For instance, Holland was selected to a very exclusive honor society, Aleph Samach. White people at Cornell were generous in granting Holland the distinction of the honor society, but at the very same time black women, who did not play football, faced rejection for the housing that was supposed to be compulsory for women. Ater graduating, Holland earned a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and eventually became the president of two HBCUs and an ambassador to Sweden during President Richard M. Nixon’s administration.61 He also accepted an appointment as trustee of Cornell University.

Black students also excelled in other sports in the Ivy League. At Columbia, George Gregory received national commendations for his play on the basketball court from 1929 to 1931. He was the first black player at Columbia and he remained in New York City after graduating, taking posts in civil service leadership roles.62 On the lacrosse field, Lucien Alexis of Harvard gained acclaim in 1941. That year, he and his white teammates played against the University of Maryland in College Park, making that the first integrated athletic competition of the twentieth century in the state. Harvard coaches were egalitarian enough to field a black player, but they were not above accommodating other teams’ racist culture. That was the case when, in 1941, Harvard was set to play the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. The academy maintained a rule that its teams would not host black players. Rather than cause controversy, the Harvard coaches benched Alexis and played the game. Black athletes at Ivy institutions may have been revered on their campuses, but when they traveled, the sportsmen met with traumatic circumstances.

The concession of Harvard in 1941 was especially hurtful because, in 1916, the university had righteously canceled a track meet with the naval academy because it would not allow a black long jumper to participate. The wavering on principles that Harvard displayed was the source of a great deal of embarrassment, disillusionment, and frustration for Alexis and black onlookers. The rights of black people to participate fully in society or to be fully human largely depended on the unpredictable integrity of even the most well-intending white people. Fortunately, fair-minded students pressured Harvard to establish a policy of competition regarding race, and the university responded with a statement indicating that it would not reenact the Alexis scenario.63

The spirit of a “unified” nation and the observation of black men sacrificing themselves in defense of the country influenced some Ivy officials to put black athletes in play. The estranged relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States that led to the Cold War helped to called into question ideas of race and American democracy within institutions. Additionally, the re-desegregation of the National Football League in 1946 and of Major League Baseball in 1947 may have provided some outside societal pressure for the elite colleges to allow black students to play as well. At Yale, a black basketball player, Jay Swift, graced the court, helping the team to win. Soon after, Levi Jackson became the first black football player at Yale; the team selected Jackson to be the captain, making history again.64 In addition to being chosen to lead the team on the field, he was selected to join the secretive Skull and Bones society. The military and the Ivy League’s athletic teams found utility in black men, as long as they could help the institutions win.

World War II and the Cold War made it possible for an evolution in race relations to take place at Ivy League institutions. The V-12 Navy College Training Program that called on universities to provide education to sailors so that the navy could increase its pool of officers did not restrict itself to white servicemen.65 That made it possible for black men to attend an institution like Princeton, which had traditionally rejected black applicants. There, Arthur Wilson, one of the first black students to attend the university, played basketball for three years and even became captain of the team. At the Yale School of Nursing, a question arose regarding the admission of black women because they would necessarily have to make skin contact with white patients. When a prominent white Yale alumnus wrote to point out the irony of “opposing Nazi ideas of race” while still rejecting American students because of their race, Yale’s president responded that from that point forward the nursing school would admit or reject candidates based solely on their student qualifications.66 Here, again, the school’s leadership had to be steered toward morality and justice.

At midcentury, there were still few black students at Brown, but the university did, at least, have a course that covered the black experience. J. Saunders Redding, who by then had established himself as a scholar, returned to his alma mater as a visiting professor and taught a literature course on the Negro in American literature in the fall of 1949, making him one of the first (if not the first) black professors in the Ivy League. Inasmuch, his course was one of the first of its kind offered at Brown and its peer institutions. Interestingly, a fellow Brown alumnus, Morehouse president John Hope, gave Redding his first opportunity in the professoriate at the historically black college in Atlanta. After a brief unsettling stay at the institution, Redding resigned his position to seek other opportunities. That led him back north to Brown. As a student and as a professor, Redding was one of very few black people on campus.67 In spite of his and his brother’s presence at Brown, Harvard, and Columbia, the early generation of black Ivy Leaguers faced extreme isolation. Redding was able to help other black students ease their transition to elite college life when he took an endowed chairmanship at Cornell University in 1970. He was the first black professor to do so at Cornell.

A great scholar-athlete, who could not attend the Ivy League university of his choice as an undergraduate, found redemption in the fact that his son could attend the school he selected. Paul Robeson was an All-American star football player at Rutgers University where he earned varsity letters in four sports. He pledged Alpha Phi Alpha and graduated valedictorian of his class at Rutgers; however, he originally wanted to attend Princeton University, which is in Robeson’s hometown. When his brother, William Drew Robeson Jr., was denied acceptance, Paul Robeson made the decision to stay in New Jersey but to attend Rutgers. Robeson graduated at the head of his class and then took a law degree at Columbia University while acting on Broadway. Rather than even consider Princeton (which had very few black students enrolled just after World War II), Robeson sent his son, Paul Robeson Jr. to Cornell, where he graduated in 1949.

From the nineteenth to the twentieth century, black students in the Ivy League pushed through difficult circumstances to achieve. When given the opportunity, they excelled in all categories. Not surprisingly there was a high number of black students who received Phi Beta Kappa honors and many of the student athletes achieved national and university recognition for their work on the fields and courts. Many of these students were “firsts.” With the exception of few, black firsts, in nearly every category, have always known they had to carry themselves in a manner that exuded confidence but not arrogance in the face of white competition. Working within the system, black Ivy students during the desegregation period strove to shine scholastically and athletically through diligence and excellence. That would not change in the period after World War II, but black learners, following the lead of black agitators off campus, began to critique the system and move away from the idea of assimilation as a survival mechanism. The small number of black students attending the Ivies before World War II, however, did whatever they could to maintain their dignity while striving for excellence.