Winner, 2019 Anna Julia Cooper and C.L.R. James Award, given by the
National Council for Black Studies Finalist, 2019 Pauli Murray Book
Prize in Black Intellectual History, given by the African American
Intellectual History Society Winner, 2019 Outstanding Book Award,
given by the History of Education Society The inspiring story of
the black students, faculty, and administrators who forever changed
America’s leading educational institutions and paved the way for
social justice and racial progress The eight elite institutions
that comprise the Ivy League, sometimes known as the Ancient
Eight—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth,
and Cornell—are American stalwarts that have profoundly
influenced history and culture by producing the nation’s and the
world’s leaders. The few black students who attended Ivy League
schools in the decades following WWII not only went on to greatly
influence black America and the nation in general, but
unquestionably awakened these most traditional and selective of
American spaces. In the twentieth century, black youth were in the
vanguard of the black freedom movement and educational reform.
Upending the Ivory Tower illuminates how the Black Power movement,
which was borne out of an effort to edify the most disfranchised of
the black masses, also took root in the hallowed halls of
America’s most esteemed institutions of higher education. Between
the close of WWII and 1975, the civil rights and Black Power
movements transformed the demographics and operation of the Ivy
League on and off campus. As desegregators and racial pioneers,
black students, staff, and faculty used their status in the black
intelligentsia to enhance their predominantly white institutions
while advancing black freedom. Although they were often
marginalized because of their race and class, the newcomers altered
educational policies and inserted blackness into the curricula and
culture of the unabashedly exclusive and starkly white schools.
This book attempts to complete the narrative of higher education
history, while adding a much needed nuance to the history of the
Black Power movement. It tells the stories of those students,
professors, staff, and administrators who pushed for change at the
risk of losing what privilege they had. Putting their status, and
sometimes even their lives, in jeopardy, black activists
negotiated, protested, and demonstrated to create opportunities for
the generations that followed. The enrichments these change agents
made endure in the diversity initiatives and activism surrounding
issues of race that exist in the modern Ivy League. Upending the
Ivory Tower not only informs the civil rights and Black Power
movements of the postwar era but also provides critical context for
the Black Lives Matter movement that is growing in the streets and
on campuses throughout the country today. As higher education
continues to be a catalyst for change, there is no one better to
inform today’s activists than those who transformed our
country’s past and paved the way for its future.
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