The Last Negroes at Harvard, Jeanne Ellsworth
The Last Negroes at Harvard, Jeanne Ellsworth
5 Rating(s)
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The Last Negroes at Harvard
The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever

Author: Jeanne Ellsworth, Kent Garrett

Narrator: Peter Jay Fernandez

Unabridged: 10 hr 44 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 02/11/2020

Synopsis

The untold story of the Harvard class of '63, whose Black students fought to create their own identities on the cusp between integration and affirmative action. In the fall of 1959, Harvard recruited 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, began 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 young men broke new ground. By the time they were seniors, they would have demonstrated against injustice, had lunch with Malcolm X, experienced heartbreak and the racism of academia, and joined with their African national classmates to fight for the right to form an exclusive Black students' group. Part journey into personal history, part group portrait, and part narrative history of the civil rights movement, this is the remarkable story of brilliant, singular boys whose identities were changed at and by Harvard, and who, in turn, changed Harvard.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Rama

Champions of Change In 1959, Harvard University recruited eighteen African American men to its undergraduate program as a symbolic gesture of affirmative action, a term that did not exist at that time. Author Kent Garrett, one of these kids recalls and recollects his experiences at the famous school......more

Goodreads review by Pamela

The Last Negroes at Harvard was an important book with a fascinating subject matter and a lot to say. It was part memoirs, part journalism, part dry-ish non-fiction, which is the only reason I didn't rate it higher. The parts of The Last Negroes at Harvard that were memoir had the best literary styl......more

Goodreads review by Kimberley

This is a well-researched book: meticulously detailed and carefully investigated. No Stone was left unturned and every individual story was treated with the utmost respect. That said, there was a LOT to wade through and far too much of the wading felt like a monumental task. So many narratives. So ma......more

Goodreads review by Sanjuro

This is a fascinating book; both insightful and frustrating, as good books often are. The story is framed as a journalistic memoir of Garrett and the other 17 black students who began at Harvard together in 1959. The book ends up being an engrossing account of many social and cultural realities of r......more

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