The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever

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 an unprecedented eighteen "Negro" boys as an early form of affirmative action. Four years later they would graduate as African Americans. Some fifty years later, one of these trailblazing Harvard grads, Kent Garrett, would begin 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 eighteen youths broke new ground, with ramifications that extended far past the iconic Yard. By the time they were seniors, they would have demonstrated against national injustice and grappled with the racism of academia, had dinner with Malcolm X and fought alongside their African national classmates for the right to form a Black students' organization.

Part memoir, part group portrait, and part narrative history of the intersection between the civil rights movement and higher education, this is the remarkable story of brilliant, singular boys whose identities were changed at and by Harvard, and who, in turn, changed Harvard.



About the Author
KENT GARRETT graduated from Harvard in 1963. He has had a thirty-year Emmy and Peabody award-winning career in television news and documentaries.

JEANNE ELLSWORTH has a PhD in social foundations of education from the University of Buffalo, and has devoted her life to teaching, from elementary school to prisons to university.

Garrett and Ellsworth live in Roxbury, New York.