Blackened Ivy: African American Student Activism at Three Ivy League Universities, 1945–75

This paper attempts to highlight youthful members of the black intelligentsia who attempted to alter the policies and curricula of the nation’s most elite institutions of learning:  the Ivy League.  By employing what the paper refers to as “Black Student Power,” young learners on prestigious, predominantly white campuses used their race and status as students to advance the Black Freedom Movement.  The paper will focus specifically on the activism of black students at Ivy League universities because those institutions have, in many respects, represented the pinnacle of American education. 

Scholarship covering the Black Power Movement has not typically underscored the activism of black students on campus.  In keeping in line with my scholarly work (Harlem vs. Columbia University:  Black Student Power in the Late 1960s), this paper will place black students squarely in the Black Power and Student movements.  In the 1960s, black student activists on the various Ivy League campuses addressed the Black Freedom Movement in different ways.  To illuminate the various approaches, this paper will cover the efforts of students at Columbia University in New York, Princeton University in New Jersey, and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.  At Columbia, black students made a coalition with the local Harlem community, politicians, and the campus chapter of SDS to prevent their institution from expanding further into the historic black neighborhood.  Then, at Princeton, black students became some of the first campus activists in the nation to demonstrate against their university’s economic ties to apartheid southern Africa.  Black learners at Dartmouth chose not to demonstrate but rather negotiate with the liberal administrators and trustees for programs that enhanced black life on campus.  At each of the universities, students were at the forefront of the movement for Black Studies.