Blacks at Harvard: A Documentary History of African-American Experience At Harvard and Radcliffe Book

The history of blacks at Harvard mirrors, for better or for worse, the history of blacks in the United States. Harvard, too, has been indelibly scarred by slavery, exclusion, segregation, and other forms of racist oppression. At the same time, the nation's oldest university has also, at various times, stimulated, supported, or allowed itself to be influenced by the various reform movements that have dramatically changed the nature of race relations across the nation. The story of blacks at Harvard is thus inspiring but painful, instructive but ambiguous--a paradoxical episode in the but painful, instructive but ambiguous--a paradoxical episode in the most vexing controversy of American life: the "race question."

Included in this documentary history are scholarly overviews, poems, short stories speeches, well-known memoirs by the famous, previously unpublished memoirs by the lesser known, newspaper accounts, letters, official papers of the university, and transcripts of debates. Among Harvard's black alumni and alumnae are such illustrious figures as W.E.B. DuBois, Monroe Trotter, and Alain Locke; Countee Cullen and Sterling Brown both received graduate degrees. The editors have collected here writings as diverse as those of Booker T. Washington, William Hastie, Malcolm X, James Alan McPherson, Andrea Lee, Rayford Logan, John Hope Franklin, and Nathan I. Huggins, among many others.