The Last Negroes at Harvard

The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever

By: Kent Garrett, Jeanne Ellsworth

Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez

Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's Summary

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 18 "Negro" boys as an early form of affirmative action. Four years later they would graduate as African Americans. Some 50 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.

©2020 Kent Garrett and Jeanne Ellsworth (P)2020 Recorded Books

Interesting and Important

The "18 Negro men" of the Harvard class of 1963 have their diverse stories told in a lovely and poignant way. This is the time frame shortly after my father was in service in Washington DC and playing with a mixed race jazz combo in his spare time. As a white man from a small northeasten Ohio town, the Air Force was his first introduction to really getting to know men of color. I was 4 years old in 1959 and it was about that time that he and my mother started making sure I knew what it was like to be Black/Negro in America. Stories of the guys in the band having to get in the back seat of the car before they crossed into Virginia, or the time they played for a college dance where the band and their wives/ girlfriends were treated to dinner in the dining hall before the dance and my mother discovered they wouldn't seat the Black men who were having dinner in the kitchen. (My mother took her plate and went up eat with them.)

With that as background, I found these stories fascinating as the men navigated the very progressively appearing Harvard experience while still knowing there were doors closed to them even as Harvard Men. These men were bright, intelligent, and seen as "the exceptional Negro", and yet in so many ways they were very so very ordinary, just wanting to graduate, find a satisfying career, maybe settle down and raise a family. None of them aspired to great wealth, but most of them were enriched by the Harvard experience.

Enjoyable, interesting, important

Great read, well narrated, very interesting and well written. Takes a slice of time and place and fills it out from 1959 to the present.