Stefan M. Bradley, “Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League” (NYU Press, 2018)

New Books in African American Studies · Oct 26, 2018 · 44m

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…