"Harvard has played a curiously central role in the American
cultural imagination, a role that is fraught with ambiguity. In no
part of our society is this more the case than in black America.
This important book brings together for the first time two hundred
years of reflection on the curious relation of black culture to
Harvard, and Harvard's complex relation to black people. A
fascinating collection, extraordinarily well-researched, an
essential text for all who are interested in the history of
African-Americans in higher education."
--Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
The history of blacks at Harvard mirrors, for better or for
worse, the history of blacks in the United States. Harvard, too,
has been indelibly scarred by slavery, exclusion, segregation, and
other forms of racist oppression. At the same time, the nation's
oldest university has also, at various times, stimulated,
supported, or allowed itself to be influenced by the various reform
movements that have dramatically changed the nature of race
relations across the nation. The story of blacks at Harvard is thus
inspiring but painful, instructive but ambiguous--a paradoxical
episode in the most vexing controversy of American life: the "race
question."
The first and only book on its subject, "Blacks at Harvard" is
distinguished by the rich variety of its sources. Included in this
documentary history are scholarly overviews, poems, short stories,
speeches, well-known memoirs by the famous, previously unpublished
memoirs by the lesser known, newspaper accounts, letters, official
papers of the university, and transcripts of debates. Among
Harvard's black alumni and alumnae are such illustrious figures as
W.E.B. Du Bois, MonroeTrotter, and Alain Locke; Countee Cullen and
Sterling Brown both received graduate degrees. The editors have
collected here writings as diverse as those of Booker T.
Washington, William Hastie, Malcolm X, and Muriel Snowden to convey
the complex ways in which Harvard has affected the thinking of
African Americans and the ways, in turn, in which African Americans
have influenced the traditions of Harvard and Radcliffe.
Notable among the contributors are significant figures in
African American letters: Phyllis Wheatley, William Melvin Kelley,
Marita Bonner, James Alan McPherson and Andrea Lee. Equally
prominent in the book are some of the nation's leading historians:
Carter Woodson, Rayford Logan, John Hope Franklin, and Nathan I.
Huggins. A vital sourcebook, Blacks at Harvard is certain to
nourish scholarly inquiry into the social and intellectual history
of African Americans at elite national institutions and serves as a
telling metaphor of this nation's past.
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