Upending the Ivory Tower

Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League

Stefan M Bradley author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:New York University Press

Published:19th Jan '21

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Upending the Ivory Tower cover

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...

Upending the Ivory Tower is an engaging, revealing, fluid read.It takes its place alongside some of the finest recent scholarship on the Black Power and civil rights movements, including KendisThe Black Campus Movement, Martha BiondisThe Black Revolution on Campus, Peniel JosephsWaiting & Til the Midnight Hour:A Narrative History of Black Power in America, and Jeanne Theoharis boldly revisionistA More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History. * New York Journal of Books *
Upending the Ivory Tower is a definitive account of the experiences of black students at the Ivy League universities from 1945 to 1975. It is a brilliant book, complete with stunning photographs...essential reading * Academe *
Richly nuanced in its discussion of points of conflict and affiliation with radical white students and divisions over tactics, rhetoric, and ultimate goals among African Americans, both within academia and in the surrounding communities. * Journal of American History *
Fascinating and ambitious, Upending the Ivory Tower breathes of meticulous research and analysis from beginning to end. With this definitive chronicling of black students organizing, demanding, and sometimes protesting to blacken the exclusively white Ivy League, Stefan Bradley shows us once again why he is the historian of the Ivy black activist. There may be nothing more powerful than the student activist, and Upending the Ivory Tower again shows us why. -- Ibram X. Kendi,award-winning author of The Black Campus Movement and Stamped from the Beginning
Stefan Bradley is one of the foremost scholars of the black student movement. In Upending the Ivory Tower, he as turned his attention black student activism in the Ivy League. This is a brilliant book about how the Black Power Movement reached the elites halls of higher education. In a moment when 21st century black student activists in the Ivy League and across the country are demanding more faculty of color, wanting more accountability for anti-black pedagogy and policy, and declaring that black lives matter, Upending the Ivory Tower is an important and necessary history of black student activism in higher education. -- Derrick W. White,Dartmouth College
Upending the Ivory Tower is a critical but scrupulous exposition of some of the major changes that overtook the American academyand American culture in generaltoward the end of the storied 1960s. Although Stefan Bradley views these changes mainly through the lens of the privileged Ivy League, he never loses sight of either the steep price of such historic privilege or the more democratic and equally dynamic mainstream of American university life. His book is an invaluable record of institutional change in a few schools that manages nevertheless to capture the spirit of a transformational moment when some of our most venerable ideas about education, race, and power changed forever. -- Arnold Rampersad,Sara Hart Kimball Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, Stanford
A significant contribution to Black Power Studies, the history of the black student movement, and reform movements in US educational institutions during the 1960s and 1970s. This is indeed a microstudy that has large implications and it is refreshing that he avoids the pitfalls of analyzing his cases studies in vacuo. His book is also a prerequisite, required reading in fact, for any explorations into contemporary expressions of black student activism. * The Journal of African American History *

ISBN: 9781479806027

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 726g

480 pages