Audiobook10 hours
The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever
Written by Kent Garrett and Jeanne Ellsworth
Narrated by Peter Jay Fernandez
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
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.
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Reviews for The Last Negroes at Harvard
Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
10 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kent 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.