Race and the Ivy

As 400 armed federal troops of the 101st Airborne were escorting nine black students into the all-white Little Rock Central High School on Sept. 25, 1957, media worldwide—including The Harvard Crimson—were documenting the beginning of southern school integration. But even as the world was watching intently as Jim Crow was being dismantled, issues of race remained far-removed from the lives of average Harvard students.

“This wasn’t something we were concerned about, it just wasn’t in the forefront of our thinking,” said then-Crimson Managing Editor George H. Watson ’58, who journeyed to Arkansas and eventually wrote a five-part series for The Crimson documenting the historic desegregation of the school.

Watson wrote of the “outbreaks of violence and destruction” that accompanied the entrance of the black students into the school.

Reporting on the first day of integration, Watson noted in his article, “The only person who resisted actively this morning, trying to seize a paratrooper’s rifle, found himself quickly knocked to the ground, covered with blood, and at the mercy of four soldiers with drawn bayonets.”

Although things were heating up on the national stage, issues of race were significantly absent from the discourse among the College’s undergraduate population. Notably, there was only one black student in the Class of 1958, according to the book “Blacks of Harvard: A Documentary History of African-American Experiences At Harvard and Radcliffe.”

The forced desegregation of Little Rock, at the outset of the Class of 1958’s senior year, stemmed from the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision four years earlier, which declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

But the historical significance of the events in Arkansas did not seem to have fully sunk into the lives of Harvard students.

“A few years after Brown v. Board of Education this is the beginning of people thinking about it, but hardly,” Watson said.

At the same time, Watson said he believed the importance of this significant event was underscored by the fact that The Crimson decided to cover it in such depth, as staff members did not usually travel to cover national events.

“We did something to call attention to the racial situation in our country,” said Watson, who went on to work at The Washington Post and serve as a vice president of ABC News.

And there did exist a group—albeit a small one—of politically conscious students who were thinking about race and were concerned about integration.

For instance, the Harvard Liberal Union (HLU)—an organization that had once called on President Truman to take steps against lynchings in the south—was marginally active on racial issues in 1958, according to then-HLU President Herbert E. Milstein ’58, though the organization was small.

Milstein attributed the low membership to the overall quietness of the ’50s regarding racial matters.

“It was an inattentive, silly time—actually embarrassing now that I look back on it,” he said.

But the issue of segregation did rouse some controversy that year at Harvard, thanks in part to Milstein’s group.

The HLU initially teamed up with the Harvard Society for Minority Rights to bring David R. Wang, a Chinese American segregationist, to speak on campus.
Wang, who had graduated from Dartmouth just three years earlier, spoke at Yale, Columbia, and Princeton before coming to Harvard. Wang’s mission was to stir up pro-segregation sentiment among students at Ivy League colleges and to try to organize campus branches of the White Citizens’ Councils, according to a Crimson report at the time.

Wang said his purpose was to educate “the half-cooked college intelligentsia.”

Originally, Wang was invited to speak as part of a debate with a pro-integration representative from the NAACP or the American Civil Liberties Union.

But the event failed to attract someone to counter Wang, leaving him without an opponent, turning the intended debate into a speech, and leading the Society for Minority Rights to revoke its sponsorship.

“Our invitation was based on the idea that a liberal society should allow free discussion,” Milstein told The Crimson in 1957.

Although the speech was interrupted by a bomb threat and there was a concern that protests would occur during the speech, the 600 audience members calmly received Wang, perhaps reflecting the greater nonchalance that pervaded the undergraduate population.

Milstein described the racial climate during his senior year as “very quiet, with relatively few acts.”

—Staff writer Brittany M. Llewellyn can be reached at bllewell@fas.harvard.edu.