In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about a small group of educated Blacks that he called the Talented Tenth, stating famously, “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the best of this race that they may guide the mass away from the contamination and death of the worst, in their own and other races.”¹

Although Du Bois later discarded this idea, because of fears of it leading to a corrupt, moneyed Black elite, it was an idea that many future generations took seriously. Stefan M. Bradley’s Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League tells their story.

Bradley’s subjects are what Maya Angelou may have meant when she said in her poetry, “Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave.” All the aspirations, all the dreams, all the pennies saved, all the toil of the past, all the broken backs, all the worn-out hands — cleaning someone else’s house or taking care of someone else’s children — so that their children could one day stand in halls of Ivy are realized here.

Bradley is able to capture the youth and fragile optimism of these future leaders. We come to understand the often brutal indignity of the Black experience in the Ivy League. When one reads that they poured urine on Black students on their way to classes at Princeton University, we are reminded of this.

Upending the Ivory Tower makes clear that the presence of African Americans at America’s oldest citadels of higher learning was a profound sacrifice — one that was born not only by ancestral generations of family that made it possible, but of the students themselves. They innocently, but bravely, began to find their way onto the most distinctive of proving grounds laden with so much symbolism, significance, and finally, as we will see, opportunity.

The manifestation of the ideology of white supremacy forms the backdrop for this study. The presupposition that Black people were biologically inferior, also known as pseudoscience, was being hatched in the very Ivory Towers in question. Racist theories of African Americans known as scientific racism argued for a biological notion of race. And so the Black presence in these spaces — where the planned demise of African Americans was so often decided, plotted, and planned — becomes noteworthy, especially Black presence in positions of power in those hallowed corridors of knowledge.