In the context of issues and models of assimilation, pluralism, and separatism, and the impact of the King assassination, Glasker (African American studies, Rutgers U., Camden, NJ) examines the Black Student League's protests at the predominantly white Penn campus as the school sought to expand into a neighboring black neighborhood and the ensuing expansion of black enrollment. Includes a chronology of the African American student movement. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967-1990

Black Students in the Ivory Tower

A case study of the rise of black student activism at an urban university

This is the story of a lot of pain, some blunders, and some successes. In the mid-sixties, the University established committees to recruit black students and to add more blacks to the faculty. These efforts produced only modest results.

Richard P. McCormick has chronicled the black student protest movement at Rutgers University, from the 1960s to today. He examines the forces that produced the protest movement, the tactics that were employed, and the qualified gains that were achieved. He tells us about demonstrations, building occupations, committee hearings, and countless meetings, but he also paints portraits of the many student leaders who mobilized protest. This is the story of a lot of pain, some blunders, and some successes. In the mid-sixties, the University established committees to recruit black students and to add more blacks to the faculty. These efforts produced only modest results. By 1968, there were still not enough black students on campus, but there were enough to create a political presence for the first time. They were committed to acting against the racism they perceived within the University. To respond to their protests, in March 1969 the Board of Governors passed a dramatically new and controversial policy to encourage disadvantaged students who lived in Camden, Newark, and New Brunswick to apply to Rutgers, where they would take college-preparatory classes as unmatriculated students, and then enter Rutgers as matriculated students. This program, never very successful, lasted only two years. Unrest did not end with the sixties. During the seventies, black students sporadically voiced protests against what they perceived to be an unsupportive environment. During the eighties, black enrollment actually declined, as did the black graduation rate. In conclusion, McCormick points to the effort that has been made but even more to the effort that still needs to be made and the social cost of ignoring the problem.

The Black Student Protest Movement at Rutgers

... Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967–1990. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Harris, Michelle, Sherrill L. Sellers, Orly Clerge, and Frederick W. Gooding&nbsp;...

When Sharde M. Davis turned to social media during the summer of racial reckoning in 2020, she meant only to share how racism against Black people affects her personally. But her hashtag, BlackintheIvory, went viral, fostering a flood of Black scholars sharing similar stories. Soon the posts were being quoted during summer institutes and workshops on social justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. And in fall 2020, faculty assigned the tweets as material for course curriculum. This curated collection of original personal narratives from Black scholars across the country seeks to continue the conversation that started with BlackintheIvory. Put together, the stories reveal how racism eats its way through higher education, how academia systemically ejects Black scholars in overt and covert ways, and how academic institutions—and their individual members—might make lasting change. While anti-Black racism in academia is a behemoth with many entry points to the conversation, this book marshals a diverse group of Black voices to bring to light what for too long has been hidden in the shadow of the ivory tower.

Truth-Telling about Racism in Higher Education

Being Black in the Ivory

... Black Students in the Ivory Tower : African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania , 1967-1990 . Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press . Harris , Michelle , Sherrill L. Sellers , Orly Clerge , and Frederick W&nbsp;...

... Black Students in the Ivory Tower, 88–89; Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, 72–73; Kabaservice, The Guardians, 327–29; Stave, Red Brick, 147. 59. Glasker, Black Students in the Ivory Tower, 54; Williamson, Black Power on Campus, 72–73. 60&nbsp;...

"Ellen Schrecker shows how universities shaped the 1960s, and how the 1960s shaped them. Teach-ins and walkouts-in institutions large and small, across both the country and the political spectrum-were only the first actions that came to redefine universities as hotbeds of unrest for some and handmaidens of oppression for others. The tensions among speech, education, and institutional funding came into focus as never before-and the reverberations remain palpable today"--

American Universities in the 1960s

The Lost Promise

... Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967–1990 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 20; Williamson, Black Power on Campus, 58. 38. Benson Snyder, “Change Despite&nbsp;...

A Review of Four Models

American Race Relations Theory

... Black Students in the Ivory Tower; Joy Ann Williamson, Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965–1975 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Carl Fields, Black in Two Worlds (Princeton: Red Hummingbird Press&nbsp;...

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.

Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League

Upending the Ivory Tower

... Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967–1990 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). 34 Glasker, Black Students in the Ivory Tower, 23–29; similar&nbsp;...

... Black Students in the Ivory Tower, 29–32; Ibram Rogers, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 131. 70 Black Power Conference Reports&nbsp;...

... Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activists at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967–1990 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 68. 55 John Wideman, Brothers and Keepers (New York: Holt, Rinehart&nbsp;...

... Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967–1990. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. Gore, Dayo F., Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, eds. Want to Start&nbsp;...

... Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967–1990 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Stefan Bradley, “The Southern- Most Ivy: Princeton University from Jim&nbsp;...

... Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967–1990 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Joy Ann Williamson, Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois&nbsp;...

Minutes after midnight on May 15, 1970, white members of the Jackson city police and the Mississippi Highway Patrol opened fire on young people in front of a women's dormitory at Jackson State College, a historically black college in Jackson, Mississippi, discharging "buckshot, rifle slugs, a submachine gun, carbines with military ammunition, and two 30.06 rifles loaded with armor-piercing bullets." Twenty-eight seconds later two young people lay dead, another 12 injured. Taking place just ten days after the killings at Kent State, the attack at Jackson State never garnered the same level of national attention and was chronically misunderstood as similar in cause. This book reclaims this story and situates it in the broader history of the struggle for African American freedom in the civil rights and black power eras. The book explores the essential role of white supremacy in causing the shootings and shaping the aftermath. By 1970, even historically conservative campuses such as Jackson State, where an all-white Board of Trustees of Institutions of Higher Learning had long exercised its power to control student behavior, were beginning to feel the impact of the movements for African American freedom. Though most of the students at Jackson State remained focused not on activism but their educations, racial consciousness was taking hold. It was this campus police attacked. Acting on racial animus and with impunity, the shootings reflected both traditional patterns of repression and the new logic and rhetoric of "law and order," with its thinly veiled racial coding. In the aftermath, the victims and their survivors struggled unsuccessfully to find justice. Despite multiple investigative commissions, two grand juries and a civil suit brought by students and the families of the dead, the law and order narrative proved too powerful. No officers were charged, no restitution was paid, and no apologies were offered. The shootings were soon largely forgotten except among the local African American community, the injured victimized once more by historical amnesia born of the unwillingness to acknowledge the essential role of race in causing the violence.