The Last Negroes At Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever

By Kent Garrett and Jeanne Ellsworth

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 an unprecedented 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, would begin 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 eighteen youths broke new ground, with ramifications that extended far past the iconic Yard. By the time they were seniors, they would have demonstrated against national injustice and grappled with the racism of academia, had dinner with Malcolm X and fought alongside their African national classmates for the right to form a Black students’ organization.

Part memoir, part group portrait, and part narrative history of the intersection between the civil rights movement and higher education, this is the remarkable story of brilliant, singular boys whose identities were changed at and by Harvard, and who, in turn, changed Harvard.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Feb 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781328880000

Reviews for The Last Negroes At Harvard

[forsanolim · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kent Garrett entered Harvard in 1959 as one of the eighteen African-American members of the Class of 1963. He tells the stories of different members of this group, describing how they navigated Harvard and interfaced with the broader world as the Civil Rights Movement came into their and Americans' consciousness. I found it a really interesting look at Garrett, the men in his class, and the depiction of Harvard as an institution in the 60s.This book may well have appealed to me more than it might generally appear to everyone. The portions of the book mainly focusing on Harvard history were really personally interesting to me--it was really interesting to me to hear about things like the history and legacy of different Harvard administrators, as well as what Harvard culture was like in the 50s/60s. I expect that most people reading this wouldn't be as personally invested in this as I am, but I really enjoyed it.