Читать книгу Upending the Ivory Tower - Stefan M. Bradley - Страница 8

PREFACE

Guest commentators on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes usually have the luxury of a calm, well-lit, studio, and scholars typically have the comfort of distance when covering significant moments. On the night of November 24, 2014, I did not. Minutes into my conversation with Hayes in Ferguson, Missouri, I abruptly concluded the interview. I had been responding to his questions about the nonindictment of Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Ferguson teenager Michael Brown Jr. I explained that more than angry or shocked, I was saddened because the narrative of that night would be that the lawless, ungrateful, black youth delighted in destroying other people’s property. I wanted to express that more than anything what I sensed was hopelessness, but the chaotic scene unfolding off camera behind me demanded that I shift my attention elsewhere. I hastily wrapped up the MSNBC interview, crawled under the fence of a locked-down compound to race to my car, which was parked twenty feet from the Public Storage building on West Florissant Avenue that was going up in flames. I pulled on the hot door handle and entered the smoke-filled vehicle, driving through red lights and weaving to the wrong side of the road to avoid the burning garbage cans in the street. I looked warily at the seemingly endless number of police officers and national guardsmen. As I drove, I remembered hearing the moans of mothers (including Brown’s) and the defiant shouts of young angry people earlier in the night after the announcement. Somehow, I was finally face-to-face with what I had written about for so many years.

“Now do you understand how we felt?!!,” asked a participant in the now famous 1968 rebellion at Columbia University in the City of New York when he reached me by phone that night as I drove away. In terms of scholarship, I thought I had done a decent job researching material for my book, Harlem vs. Columbia University; I mean I spoke with many of the right people and read the documents and papers, but I could only imagine the frenzy of the moment and try to write about it as best I could. The night of the nonindictment, when the Columbia alumnus called, I felt the anxiety and fear and anger that so many others felt a half century ago when demonstrations and rebellions were more commonplace—when if young people had a problem with a system or a president or a war, they took to the streets or took over a building or just made noise to voice their displeasure. The Columbia alumnus told me to be careful but more important not to expend all my energy because there would be plenty more nights to demonstrate and many more issues to protest. He said that I should prepare for a protracted struggle for freedom and justice in addition to the emotionally charged battles that the people were waging. That was sage advice. Many of those black and progressive students who attended Ivy League institutions took advantage of the zeitgeist of the moment and protested what they considered injustice, but they also set the stage for future generations’ freedom of access. Those students who activated in the decades after World War II should be recognized.

I never attended an Ivy institution, but, like so many others, I wanted to do so. With that said, I have not written this book to manifest personal bitterness or malice for these revered educational centers, but because I believe strongly that black change agents need to be inserted into the American narrative. Furthermore, I have taken to heart the encouragement of the scholarly role model and Harvard alumnus John Hope Franklin to confront America’s past and to “see it for what it was and is.” In terms of the Ivy League, that means delving into the experience of black people. As is the case with larger American history, going beyond the popular narrative involves accepting the ugliness of discrimination and wrong turns regarding race. This is, in many ways, a story of racial progress, but it reveals the sacrifices black people had to make to enhance elite predominantly white institutions.

As an Ivy outsider, there are a few things that I have noticed in preparing this book. First, these schools keep excellent records of activity, which is quite helpful to researchers. Along those lines, I also noticed that officials of these institutions (like nearly every other American institution) are conscious of self-presentation and public perception. Many of the affiliates at these schools realize that they are “insiders,” and as one fellow explained to me when I tried to enter an Ivy library to complete research for the book, “we don’t just let outsiders in.” That, in itself, was revelatory. Thankfully, the vast majority of librarians, archivists, and special collections staff at each of the Ivy institutions and at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture were extremely helpful along the way. I find what those facilitators of knowledge do to be magical, and I owe them an immense debt of gratitude. I am particularly thankful for the Friends of Princeton University Library Grant that I received. The staff at Princeton was quintessentially hospitable.

Writing this book has taught me a great deal. I learned soberly about the implications of change. The institutions of the Ivy League have existed for centuries by both adapting to and resisting change. These schools were higher education innovators, but they were reliant, perhaps too reliant, upon the policies, traditions, and culture of the past. Change, at least as it regards racial advancement, is difficult—even messy—but necessary. The American university provides a good place to implement that kind of change. As the first black administrator at Princeton noted, “If total democracy is to be translated from theory into practice, it will be done first in our educational institutions rather than in our political system. The college or university, in particular, must bear the burden of this task.”1

In my years as a student and as a scholar, I have also learned that those who work at universities or colleges are experts in the arena of discussion. They talk about ideas of fairness and liberalism and equality, but implementing justice in the academy is much more difficult for officials to do. That has become ever more apparent as students at dozens of universities and colleges throughout the nation have activated to question the commitment of their institution to equity and fairness. The current demands of the young agitators are similar to those of their predecessors. In fact, some student activists have even resubmitted the demands of protesters from the sixties. That is, in part, why the countless young and progressive people who nudged these institutions toward openness and access during the period between World War II and 1975 should be acknowledged. Their presence in itself symbolized a sea change in higher education and especially the Ivy League, but their protest also provided a way for progress.

When putting together the book, I also realized it would be impossible to name all of the actors in these stories of survival, struggle, and striving. I am bound to leave out the names of thousands who made change possible, and for that I am deeply regretful. Undoubtedly, some important events have not made the pages of the book as well. To those whose names do not appear, please know that I, along with the thousands of others in the generations that followed you into higher education, greatly appreciate your efforts. You were intruders, pioneers, and soldiers, when all you wanted to be was educated. As one scholar explained, you were a “part of and apart” from the institutions you attended.2 Unfortunately, that meant “being in a school where you couldn’t fully participate,” remembered the first black woman graduate of Princeton.3 Perhaps, she thought, the most courageous thing that she and other black students in the Ivy League did was to “keep forging through” to graduation. That courage extended to challenging their own privilege as part of the black intelligentsia to make a way for those they would never meet. Most did not realize that they were making opportunity or history; they were just trying to survive the moment. That is the testament of many a soldier. For that, I personally thank them all for their service.

I wrote the bulk of this book with uprisings of Ferguson, St. Louis, Baltimore, Charlotte, and Baton Rouge in the background. In historiography courses in graduate school (which I then considered boring), my professors droned on about how everything is written in a moment and how that moment informs the writing of history. Of course, that meant nothing to me as I tried to pretend as though I understood the theories of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. I did not get it then, but I comprehended clearly after trying to outrun police atop armored personnel vehicles, breathing in teargas, feeling the heat of burning buildings, and hearing the moans of grieving mothers in Ferguson. The Movement for Black Lives matured before my eyes, and I got a sense of what young people lived through fifty years ago.