[inaudible conversations] hello, everyone. My name is anne. Welcome to the 13th annual savannah book festival. The festival is presented by georgia power, bob faircloth, david and nancy seven terror and the phillip e. And nancy b. Bigman foundation. We are especially grateful to jack and mary romano who are our sponsors for this beautiful venue. Wed also like to welcome our literati members and individual donors today. It is through your support that we are able to make todays festival events free to the public. 90 of our revenue comes from our donors and literati members, and we thank you. Before we get started, i have some housekeeping notes. Kent garrett and Jeanne Ellsworth will be signing festivalpurchased copies of their book at Telfair Square following their presentation. If youre planning to stay for the next author, edward j. Larson, after this presentation please move forward to fill seats as the venue empties. This will help the ushers get people seated for the next session. Please turn off your cell phones so that they dont disrupt the presentation. We also ask that you not use flash photography. Later, as you exit the remember you, you will see our volunteers in the back with their yellow buckets. They will be happy to accept your generous donation to savannah book festival. You can also donate through the festivals app and its web site. Please help continue sharing the love of books with the public. Well have the opportunity for questions and answers at the end of the presentation. Please come to the microphone at the center aisle to ask your question. And please limit yourself to one question so that we have time for the answer and other guests have a chance to ask a question as well. Kent garrett and Jeanne Ellsworth are with us today courtesy of tom and margaret morse. Mr. Garrett graduated from harvard in 1963. He has had a 30year emmy and peabody awardwinning career in Television News and documentaries. Jeanne ellsworth has a ph. D. In social foundations of education from the university of buffalo and has devoted her life to teaching from Elementary School to prisons, to universities. The authors live in rocksbury, new york. Please give a warm savannah welcome to kent garrett and jeannie else worth. [applause] finish Jeanne Ellsworth. [applause] well, thank you for enlightening us, and ill let you know the book is called the last negroes at harvard. 61 years ago harvard admitted 18 negroes, and thats what we were called then, and we were the largest number at that time ever admitted to harvard. We were from all different parts of the country north, south, east and west and we came from different economic and socioeconomic backgrounds. And we, heretofore theyd been letting, admitting blacks to harvard but only two or three at a time. And most guys would just go and do their four years and then get out of town. Finish leave cambridge. But for us it was different in the sense that we had numbers, the 18, and we could form an individual racial identity as well as a group identity. And we were able to become actually a force for change at harvard, and harvard or we changed harvard and harvard changed us. And thats essentially what the book is about. Its about our four years there and what happened before and after harvard. We, one significant thing we did is we formed the first black Student Group organization at harvard. And, again, we were 18, and the whole class was 1100. So we were, like, 1. 595 of the class. So it was, you know, it wasnt that significant. Anyway, so ill tell you about my life a little bit real fast. My parents were from, were born in South Carolina in the 20, and they went to school and got High School Degrees in akin, South Carolina. And my dad, or they part of the great migration coming to the noter, they came up here to the north, they came up here in about 1940, 41, and i was born in 42. We lived in brooklyn, new york, in the federal housing projects. My dad has always had three or four jobs, and he ultimately became a subway motorman up in new york. I have a sister whos four years younger, and we both did pretty well in school, and i went to boys high, a school in brooklyn, new york. And from there i went on to harvard. After harvard, not really realizing what i wanted to do, i went to medical school for a year which i really hated [laughter] so that, and that was sort of part of my mothers, my son the doctor syndrome. [laughter] so, you know, we didnt do that. And from there i went into, whatd i do . I went to actually, you know, im sort of looking for a calling. And i went to advertising. I worked at a Company Called ted bates new york and making, ultimately, ended up making tv commercials which was fun and interesting, and i learned about film and tv and writing commercials and all that. But ultimately, it was not that great for the mind. So i found Something Else to do. And that was black journal which was journalism, and that was my calling. Black journal was the first black nationwide network black show in the country, and it was by, for and about blacks. And i worked there for about three or four years, and it was, you know, a Ground Breaking show. And after that i went to my life became sort of a series of tenyear things. I worked at cbs with dan rather for ten years and then nbc news with tom brokaw for ten years. And then spent 1997 i got really tired of news, and in many ways the news was changing in that it became more focused on ratings and marketing and that sort of stuff. So i left that and decided, had my sort of back to the land moment, and i went upstate new york is and milked dairy cows for ten years. [laughter] we had these ashire scottish cows which were really great. So i did that for ten years, milking twice a day. As you get older, the cows realize youre getting older too, and they sort of take advantage of you. [laughter] so i got out of that. And what happened, one day harvard sends out to all its domestic alumni this thing called harvard magazine every two months or so. And most people get it, and they look at the articles and then go right to the obituary to see whos surviving in your class. [laughter] so i did that one day and saw that a guy who id been in i guess hed been about two years ahead of us had died, and i started thinking about what happened to the 18 guys, you know, in my class and who, what they had done, who had been happy, who had been sad, etc. And i knew, id been in touch with two or three of them, but i didnt know what happened to the others. And so we with decided to do a documentary, it would be a good idea to do a documentary as to what happened with these guys. Right. Thats where i came in. I didnt know kent when he sold the cows, i didnt get to do any milking, but i too, i was newly retired from the State University of new york. And wondering what i was going to do. So we were both also single. We lived about 40 minutes away from each other, but chances are we never would have met except for, what . Online dating. [laughter] so we both put our little profiles up there, and i am not lying, harvard the word harvard in kents profile, yeah, okay. He said would i like to have dinner, and i said yes. And at that first date in 2007, we talked about this project. He told me he wanted to know what happened to his class may notes classmates, and i know we had a lovely dinner, and i had about an hour drive home, and i was thinking i didnt know if wed have a second date, but i knew he had a great story. And my background is history of education, so i knew i was thinking little mental calculations. I knew these guys were born in the early 40s, they came from all over the country, therefore, they had lived under the shadow of jim crow. Probably they went to, some of them at least, went to segregated schools. They just started high school when brown v. Board of education was decided. And i figured they had some pretty interesting stories to tell. So we did have a second date and more dates after that, and before i knew it, he was teaching me how to use a boom mic [laughter] and we got in his car and went around the country. We live, as kent said, in upstate new york. So we started with kents best friend and roommate at harvard who lived about two hours away, and we just kept widening the circle and if looking for the guys and looking for the guys. Little by little, we did. It took a long time, maybe eight or ten of them being harvard graduates, they had a lot of letters after their names, and they had high profile jobs. So we googled them, and they came right up. Others were more difficult. And then, sadly, we did learn that four of the men had died before we even started the project. But then we went and looked for their widows and their children and friends, and, you know, started to amass enough probably data for a 2,000page book. And the years went by. But we did, yes, gather some great life stories. And, of course, everybody always asks us, i bet you had some surprises along the way. Oh, yeah. Kents going to tell you about a couple. Yeah. I mean, the challenge actually in doing the video expect challenge in writing the book and the challenge in writing the book is that there have been so many characters, you know, having to deal with 18 entities. But ill tell you about four of them that were really surprises to me. Well, in terms of figuring out who was, who we would be interviewing, they had taken these little black and white photos of us 50 years ago, you know, in the class book, the freshman class book. And i used that to figure out who i would be interviewing, because i didnt know, you know, some of the guys. And we assumed there were 17, and we actually had a title for the video, we would call it the Harvard Black 17. And we, the harvard class of 63, they put out every, i guess every quarter a newsletter to all of the people in the class, and they we put a note in there saying that we were working on this video project, and wed like to, if you have any funny stores or anecdotes about the black guys in our class, let us know. So we got a note back from a guy saying, hey, wait, there might be 18 or maybe 19 or 20 guys in your class that were negro, as we were called back then. So i naturally panicked about that having based the project on 17. [laughter] so the question was how do i find out if somebody is black or not. So being an intrepid reporter, i decided to just make the call. So i would call one name i got was a guy jailed jerry. Named jerry. I said, by the way, are you black . He said, yeah, i am, yeah. So that was one down. [laughter] so i had two more to go, but i talked to jerry, when i talked to him, you you know, when we we doing the movie he said that he looks very lightskinned. I mean, its very difficult to tell that hes really black. It turns out that his mom was from trinidad, and his dad was jewish, and they were out of washington. We kind of had all forgotten about him after that first day. But anyway, he told me that he, he went around back then saying im, hi, im jerry secundi, and im a negro. And he would say that as soon as he met you because he didnt want to have to deal with the derogatory negro jokes or the derogatory jewish jokes. He wanted to kill two birds with one stone, i guess. [laughter] you could say. And the interesting thing about him is that he live ares in california now, and he lives in california now x he has two sons. And he has and its sort of a study in the complexities of race in the sense that he has two sons, and one son looks white and identifies as black and the other son he has looks black but identifies as white. And theyre all very happy. I mean, its a happy family. [laughter] thats how it worked out. One album called the real davison trio and when we looked at the album the rubber on the album abhad ridden the subways and buses of new york every day for about three. I was very surprised to see him and it was nice. After we interviewed him he was at Bennington College and that was a surprise. The third surprise is that one of our classmates was gay and he had to suppress that his whole time at harvard. He was from atlanta. His job was to keep an eye on us. Being an academic i couldnt wait to get to the harvard times. We started looking for everything we could find in the archives to the point, we paged through the harvard crimson for everyday and a daily newspaper. When alaska graduated. I found in the archives two students to the students they were ethological president s. One of the studies was done by a senior at the time they were freshman he unmasked an unbelievable amount of data for an undergraduate paper especially he submitted them to 29 page questionnaire and interviews and he titled his paper rising sons of darkness. Cringing was our main activity during reading these things. But probably more interesting was a paper done by abthe first guy was white, the sky was two, a white classmate of theirs. His freshman roommate was a guy named ron allow and he was a white guy from new jersey. It actually was jack his roommates idea that he do this paper. He interviewed all 18 of the guys at some length and asked the questionnaire it was fascinating to me for a couple reasons. First of all, there was enough detail in ronnies paper for us to find out some things that the guy said about race at the time not after 50 years of change and fogging up of memory but what they said about themselves in their race at the time. Equally important to me was i got to see what a typical student in 1959 would have read in sociology classes about the negro. And the negro problem. That was pretty hairraising actually. I think for both of us. It was quite disturbing. For one thing, to think that tent was a social relations major. Knowing what ideas were in the backs of the minds or what assumptions their professors have of them was creepy. Im going to give you a couple quotes to raise your hair about it. For instance, in one of the books that ron blau quotes it was called the mark of oppression by canton or in all the sea obviously well respected sociologist, they said that their mothers were often loveless tyrants, their fathers frequently either s occlusive tax return violent and punitive or submissive to the mother, the marriages were multiple and discordant. That families unsettled and their communities devoid of genuine religiosity. He sums up in the end of the book by saying the negro has no possible basis for a healthy selfesteem and every incentive for selfhatred. Luckily ron, because possibly because he actually knew the guys and live with them, he said several times in the paper, these guys dont seem to fit the stereotype. Unfortunately rons professor who was rissman, david rissman author of the lonely crowd. It was upsetting to read. Kent is going to tell you more about the paper now. First off, ronnie was when college kids have to do a paper for it was suggested he would interview us during the week and go out with us on the weekends to parties and take notes and observe the problem with that, is he he chose to do that he would have perhaps gotten a couple of paragraphs given the dearth and lack of lack of socialite that i had. Good thing he didnt do that. The thing he did do, its very different when you read something now 2020 or 2019 versus 1959 he had one question which we really didnt think when you read about it now i get ticked off about it but back then the question was, if you had a chance to be born again would you want to be born negro or white. When i was reading this a few years ago i was happy to see everybody said yes we want to be reborn as negroes. One guy freddie said he said if i were born white it would be less trouble being negro was nice. One guy said he said he would like to try it for a year and see how it goes [laughter] the other thing we set up there we had i guess its ubiquitous or inevitable black table. Since there were 18 of us in the way harvard is set up we all live in the yard and have the freshman dining hall everybody eats together and we would have a table where we pretty much sit and eat together. For me it was kind of a refuge in the sense that i could sit with other blocks and we could talk about girls or talk about culture we could talk about ab it was a place you could you didnt have to speak the kings english. You could let your hair down as such. There is a contemporary comedian named dion cole who has this riff where he talks about how blacks who kind of maneuver in the white world have to manage their blackness because they dont want to get people afraid or scared and that sort of thing. In many ways the black table was a place where you could go during the day and not have to manage your negro this and not have to worry about what you said. As far as dating, there was not much dating at all up there. The attitude of harvard was based sort of like to keep the sexes apart they didnt try to sometimes find one black girl from the community there was one black woman. Ratcliffe at the time. She couldnt have 18 dates. What would you do in terms of the dating thing is the nearby colleges would put out put out catalogs of the women in the college and every catalog there be names of people so we want to find out if this girl, black or negro, we would have friends at college lets say if a woman was from st. Louis we would go to one of our friends from st. Louis and say, look at this name look at this address and is there any chance this woman might be black . She would say, he would say not living in that neighborhood. [laughter] that was are part of our system as to how to get going. As we got into our junior and senior years throughout the Nation Civil Rights Movement was exploding and kids here in the south were getting beat up and punished and thrown in jail. We felt we had to try to do something up there. We were in an idealistic bubble. A very liberal place if theres any kind of racism, and it was really benign in many ways in the sense that what we did get was like a lot of questions about what is it like to be a negro . And what is it like aband what do you people want . Kind of question. Does get tiring after a while. After a while some of the guys stop asking us that. What we did do is we invited malcolm x to come up. That was really my blowing for all of us in the sense we were starting to think at one point maybe integration was not going to work and maybe we should be more separatists and get into the black power thing. That changed a lot of minds and then we decided we wanted to set up a black Student Organization and we didnt have any particular radical ideas we just wanted a place we could all club where we could meet together and invite speakers up and talk and maybe a magazine and it would be called the association of african and afroamerican students and membership would be limited to people of african or africanamerican heritage. We assume it would be fine that the university would agree but when we proposed it to them they said no because they felt it was reverse discrimination. Harvard has these things called final clubs social eating clubs all the president s have been in it they look dont let it women are jewish folks or people who have money but if its new money and whatever that means. It was new money you couldnt get in. What about those . They said they dont put that in there chart. They just base it on who they picked to join. They wanted us to say, you guys take that out of your charter and you can do whatever you want to do. We refused to do that and it was a long drawn out fight which is in the book. We ended up sort of winning in the end. A couple more minutes. Okay. That Organization Still exists. Its gone through a couple of name changes. About five years after kent graduated they were the group that kind of storm the Administration Building and demanded more black faculty, more black students, recruitment and the africanamerican studies. And it still exists today. And abi guess we dont have more time but one thing is that, it was a very innocent time in many ways and for example, i will tell you a story one of the guys fred easton one of our classmates was in the dining hall one time and a white guy came up from minnesota and said, can i sit with you . The rule at that time was when anyone asked to sit at your table you said yes and this guy sat down and he said ive never talked to a negro before, can i talk to you . He proceeded to ask freddie really reasonable questions and it was a pleasant interchange and they became good friends. We invited fred to a lot of those hockey games and it was that kind of innocence also going on at the time. Finally, part of the book is to find out where we fit into the historical arc of the Civil Rights Movement and what our place was. That finally come you look at it. We did our part in trying to move the movement forward. Freddie has a good quote our pressure was that if we all messed up harvard wouldnt let any more blocks and maybe they would say this is an experiment that doesnt work in the black community has nothing to contribute to the harvard community. We feel that, a football analogy we carry the ball we didnt fumble and i like to think that we got closer to the goalpost but unfortunately the goalposts keep changing and getting further away. Thats part of the problem. If you have questions been asked to remind you to come to the microphone in the middle aisle. Kent, you touched on this but you know the question if you could have dinner with anyone who would it be . Mine is malcolm x. Could you elaborate on your dinner with him, what it was like . Was a great dinner. He was charismatic, he was actually charming and he was very different in many ways from the rhetoric you had heard that he would give and i think at that time he was very religious too. At the dinner what happened there was a time when there was controversy about Martin Luther king and Martin Luther kings womanizing as had been exposed by the fbi and that sort of thing and a big argument came up at the dinner about that between malcolm x and the faculty sponsor. The guy who was sponsoring the dinner. Got so heated that they were going to call down to Martin Luther king and in atlanta and resolve it but malcolm showed a real bunch of a lot of grace and smoothed it down. I left there on fire after that dinner. She asks whether we know how the 18 were chosen in particular how kent was chosen. I will tell you a little bit about the 18 because we wanted to answer the question for ourselves was this some kind of early form of affirmative action. Affirmative action phrase would come around for a couple years but it was. Harvard had a couple of key men you read about in the book and the admissions decided it was the right thing to do. We dont know exactly what happened with kent because he doesnt remember but i suspect that somebody in admissions at hartford had a connection with boys high. It was two blocks from his class that were admitted. I know i was recruited by dartmouth but im not sure about harvard. They were really ahead of the time and really trying to do the right thing. They really believed diversity. For example, in my three years i was in a suite with David Rockefeller and another guy Spencer Borden from the borden mill company their theory was that i would make rockefeller a better banker and im not quite sure what they felt he would be better at. [laughter] they were really the good people in this journey. [inaudible question] if you go to harvard you dont need any help. [laughter] thats the thing, it dugdoes give you an edge up. When i went into advertising, even now if you look at some of the people in tv, news, they are all a lot are from Ivy League Schools and it does give you a leg up. Even if its subconscious sometimes. Did you find they all had a nice start in the career . Oh yes. They all had nice start. One went to law school somewhere pretty successful on wall street. One gave up wall street and became an anglican priest in st. Thomas. More than half of them continued to in some vein work for civil rights. Most were very successful in whatever field they chose but not all there were some sad stories too. Thank you so much. Im wondering after you spent four years in this idealistic bubble, what was it like to go out in the real world . It had to of been very different than your experience at harvard . Yes. Going out in the real world it was very different but it did prepare you. The thing about harvard is that it really emphasizes Critical Thinking and you challenge everything. This was the best preparation for me in terms of going out into the world. You still walked out into a world where there was awful discrimination. You feel that you were able to compete with the big guys and the big guys of these like the rockefellers and the leaders of the industry. It gives you confidence you might not have had if you had gone abnot gone to harvard. Thank you you told stories of being studied by students. There were two studies of right the senior papers research papers. You are doing yet another study of this group. Did you get any resistance to did people not want to be studied . Was everyone very willing to precipitate in your project . In terms of the book project. They were really happy. We started the what happened with the video project we got a grant from the Foundation Match Humanities Foundation to do a Short Documentary we used to raise money to do a longer feature documentary so we werent sure whether everybody had their marbles and everybody who was failing and abbut they were all articulate they have a lot to say and they had been living black in america for seven decades. They had a lot to say. One of kens classmates who preferred not to be videotaped i think he eventually responded to a number of questions we had about his life but preferred not to be in the documentary. This is an easy question. As freshmen were you all in the same house . And did they not move beautiful houses then until your sophomore year . Harvard nowadays theres freshmen living in then you move into a house a the way it was set up then the freshman about eight or nine freshman dormitories kind of surrounded around new york and each of us lived and some of us lived abthere were five in my freshman dormitory. Five negroes. It was spread around. We would all meet in the freshman dining hall. After your freshman year you moved to the houses and there were about 10 of those. Like little colleges. Harvard still does interesting things my daughter had a muslim roommate from pakistan and an Orthodox Jewish roommate from from boston and there was a cuban girl who was jewish and then my daughter blonde hair blue eyes. And the four of them it was interesting but thats what i wanted, when they blocked they went in different directions, they didnt achieve any balance by living that way but i wondered if you all, you had five in a dorm. The watch table you talk about that happens in every high school in america. We were curious about how harvard, they had these 18 negroes, what were they going to do about pairing them up with guys for their freshman roommate experience. What we eventually found out is that ronnie blau the author of the paper remember that he filled out a paper that said would you be willing to room with a number of the of another race. He checked the box he ended up with kents best friend. Kent and his roommate were friends in high school. There was another pair of black men who were friends before they got to or had met each other beforehand. My little mind is saying, maybe maybe they got that few people who check the box. Did harvard continue these after yours . They did. The numbers went down a little bit but really they exploded 1968a969, when there was hundreds admitted. If you are starting i think i would be more into civil rights. In mark 77 my dad is like 97 and were still out there struggling and fighting. I thought that by this time in my life things might have been closer to postracial society and everybody happy and all that but that really has not happened. Many of us weve taken our reporting tools down from the shed and into it again like i do upstate new york i do a daily news show from 8 00 p. M. To 9 00 p. M. But its on the internet too. Im joined by two of my classmates coming on as well. We are still out there trying to do the civil rights and my hope is that someone is driving through the area. Wanted the documentary morph into a book . When we couldnt raise the money for the document. We wanted to go into history but we were both retired and as far. Thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible background conversas]
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