The eight elite institutions that comprise the Ivy League, sometimes known as the
Ancient Eight—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell—are
American stalwarts that have profoundly influenced history and culture by producing
the nation’s and the world’s leaders. The few black students who attended Ivy League
schools in the decades following WWII not only went on to greatly influence black
America and the nation in general, but unquestionably awakened these most traditional
and selective of American spaces. In the twentieth century, black youth were in the
vanguard of the black freedom movement and educational reform.
Upending the Ivory Tower illuminates how the Black Power movement, which was borne
out of an effort to edify the most disfranchised of the black masses, also took root
in the hallowed halls of America’s most esteemed institutions of higher education.