The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever by Kent Garrett with Jeanne Ellsworth
The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever by Kent Garrett with Jeanne Ellsworth
In the fall of 1959, Harvard recruited an unprecedented eighteen "Negro" boys as an early form of affirmative action. Four years later they would graduate as African Americans. Some fifty years later, one of these trailblazing Harvard grads, Kent Garrett, would begin to reconnect with his classmates and explore their vastly different backgrounds, lives, and what their time at Harvard meant.
Garrett and his partner, Jeanne Ellsworth recount how these youths broke new ground, with ramifications that extended far beyond the iconic Yard. By the time they were seniors, they had demonstrated against national injustice, grappled with the racism of academia, had dinner with Malcolm X, and fought alongside their African national classmates for the right to form a Black students' organization.
Part memoir, part group portrait, and part narrative history of the intersection between the civil rights movement and higher education, this is the remarkable story of brilliant, singular young men whose identities were changed at and by Harvard, and who, in turn, changed Harvard.
Houghton/Mifflin/Harcourt, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2020.
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