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• NOTFIRSTAFRICANTOHARVARD 1 year ago

  NOT THE FIRST AFRICAN- BLACK TO HARVARD( HARVARD LAW SCHOOL? ( Columbia , and Occidental, British Butler School )
  The whole family came along to drop Kent Garrett off at college in fall 1959. He's pictured above in Harvard ...
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  NOT THE FIRST AFRICAN- BLACK TO HARVARD( HARVARD LAW SCHOOL? ( Columbia , and Occidental, British Butler School )
  The whole family came along to drop Kent Garrett off at college in fall 1959. He's pictured above in Harvard Yard with his sister, aunt and mother.
  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  Kent Garrett Sr., 97, still remembers how proud and happy he was when his son was admitted to Harvard in 1959. "I invited everybody over for dinner," he recalls with a laugh.
  
  Garrett was a subway motorman who worked a second job waxing floors. His son, also named Kent Garrett, was among an unprecedented group of 18 black students accepted into the class of 1963.
  
  Garrett chronicles what that time was like for him and his fellow black classmates in the new book The Last Negroes at Harvard, co-authored with his partner, Jeanne Ellsworth.
  
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  Kent Garrett graduated from Harvard in 1963, one of 18 black students in a class of over 1,000.
  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  "We would be attending a school that was founded and funded on the backs of our enslaved forebears ..." Garrett writes. "We were headed to a campus where, until about eighty years before, each student was given a personal Negro servant, a campus that in the 1920s barred Negroes from the dormitories and had a branch of the Ku Klux Klan."
  
  When the time came for Garrett to pack his bags and head to Cambridge in the fall of 1959, he didn't go alone. His parents, his kid sister, a couple of aunts and an uncle filled two cars and went with him. "It was a little bit embarrassing in a way, everybody wanting to come up there," Garrett recalls.
  
  Like the black students who preceded him, Garrett endured indignities and racism once he got there. W.E.B. Du Bois, the college's most famous black alumnus, wasn't allowed to live on campus in the late 19th century. In 1952, a cross was burned outside a dormitory housing 11 black students. During his freshman year, Garrett was tasked with cleaning the dorms — he says it was the "worst job" he could have been given.
  
  "I'd been with my dad, floor waxing in rich white people's houses all those years growing up, and here I was again at Harvard, you know, doing

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