There
is not a more coveted degree by the status-starved Black elite than
that which is conferred by Harvard University. The Cambridge center
of traditional American intellectualism can lay claim to having
stamped a goodly number of government and industry leaders with
its crimson imprimatur. A negro wearing a Harvard brand has always
earned special attention of the masses, mostly because of the white
custom of unilaterally elevating its negro matriculants to race
leadership.
BlackCommentator.com
has expertly repudiated Harvard's Randall Kennedy, who is currently
touring the lecture circuit telling whites for $25 a head that there
is no longer any word that is objectionable in describing the Black
race. His book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
has served to raise a deeper issue still. An internet search of
Randall Kennedy reveals that every single mention of this white
man's trusty ne'er-do-well is appended to an equally prominent mention
of his affiliation with Harvard - an inferential certification of
Kennedy as a racial authority. A study of early Black nomenclature
reveals that emerging from the American slave system, Blacks often
took the name of the white man who had enslaved them as their new
surname. Thus, the former "Toby, President Washington's nigger"
became Toby Washington, and so forth. Kennedy has linked himself
to Harvard - and they to him - in precisely the same way, making
themselves just as responsible for Nigger: The Strange Career of
a Troublesome Word as the nigger himself.
So,
what is Harvard University to Black folks? And why have so many
Blacks with suspect motives, and having no organic relationship
to any Black institution, been placed in front of Blacks to speak
on Blacks' behalf? Maybe it is time to examine the legacy of this
institution to understand the nature of those Blacks who so proudly
wear its brand. Such Blacks continue to be given extraordinary access
to public airwaves to opine on and interpret the Black condition
for white America. More than a generation ago Adam Clayton Powell
confidently asserted that Harvard has "ruined more negroes
than bad whiskey." A brief racial history of America's intellectual
Vatican puts its special role, and Powell's biting assessment, in
proper context.
Harvard
College was founded in 1636 (just six years after the settlement
of Boston) with the intent of academically assisting the clergy
in their attempts to brainwash the Massachusetts Indians into accepting
white European customs and religious beliefs. In this they were
wholly unsuccessful, having only graduated one Indian, who died
just a year later. Once conversion failed, the ol' Pilgrim/Puritan
standby of massacres and mayhem was employed, and the Red man was
no longer welcome at Harvard. Thus, in 1698 Harvard tore down its
"Indian College" and used the bricks to construct the
new Stoughton College--named for the family of the man who has been
"credited" with the annihilation of the Pequot Indians
in 1637.
Quiet
as it's kept, the slave trade was the primary economic force in
the development of Boston's elite, and most of that class were trained
at Harvard. Puritan minister and president of Harvard (1685-1701)
Increase Mather held African slaves. Benjamin Wadsworth, president
from 1725-1737, was a member of one of the leading slaveholding
families in New England. "Servants are very Wicked," he
once wrote, "when they are LAZY and IDLE in their Masters Service.
The Slothful Servant is justly called Wicked..." In 1756, the
First Parish Church at Cambridge was made off-limits to Blacks when
Harvard officials 
objected
to their sitting in the gallery. In 1773 Harvard hosted a debate
in which Blacks were defined as "a conglomerate of child, idiot
and madman." Many of the early ship-owning slave traders of
New England sent their children to Harvard, as did many of the Southern
plantation owners. The grand wizard of the Massachusetts Ku Klux
Klan graduated from Harvard in 1853. One of the most viciously anti-Black
newspapers in Boston history was run by a Harvard graduate.
A
host of paragons of race hate acquired their intellectual bearings
at this Cambridge center of white supremacy, including many icons
of American history. John Adams, Samuel Adams, Josiah Quincy, Theodore
Roosevelt, to name a few, have proudly ascended to the upper echelon
of America's racial villainy. John Adams "shuddered at the
doctrine" of racial equality and spoke in Hitlerian terms of
"quieting the Indians forever." Samuel Adams and Josiah
Quincy both enslaved Black Africans. Roosevelt voiced the common
Harvard creed that Blacks were backward savages who needed strong
white rule to bring them into civilization. The Africans, this Harvard-trained
American president believed, were "ape-like, naked savages,
who dwell in the woods and prey on creatures not much wilder or
lower than themselves." Divinity school graduate Ralph Waldo
Emerson asserted matter-of-factly that "it is better to hold
the negro one inch below water than one inch above it."
Harvard,
a pillar of the Brahmin establishment, "did its best to stifle
anti-slavery [legislation]." When expelled German scholar Charles
Follen sought refuge in America, he found it on the Harvard faculty.
But when he became an abolitionist in 1833, he was immediately fired.
When Harvard graduate Charles Sumner criticized slavery in a speech
to the student body in 1848, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow recorded
the reaction: "the shouts and hisses and the vulgar interruptions
grated on my ears." Two of the college's honorable presidents,
Jared Sparks and Cornelius Felton, were strong supporters of the
notorious Fugitive Slave Bill, which aligned the northern "free
states" with the Southern slave-owners in apprehending runaway
Black slaves. When a Southern slaveholder came up to a Boston court
to use the fugitive slave law to reclaim "his slave" Anthony
Burns, Harvard students acted as the slaveholder's bodyguards.
Distinguished
Harvard graduate Lemuel Shaw was considered to be the most influential
state judge in American history. Shaw considered Blacks who escaped
from chattel slavery to be "fugitives from labor" and
ordered their immediate return. When two Black women were arrested
in 1836 as escaped slaves, Shaw allowed the slave catchers to correct
their warrant so that they could re-arrest the Black women right
in his courtroom. The Blacks who came to court refused to stand
by and allow for this outrage and attempted to rescue the women.
Shaw himself tried to stop them before he was knocked to the floor
during the successful escape.
As
chief justice the Harvard-trained Shaw delivered the unanimous opinion
of the Massachusetts Supreme Court which upheld the legality of
school segregation,
providing the basis for the doctrine of "separate but equal"
- America's official racial policy until 1954. Between 1872 and
1949 at least eleven state courts cited Shaw's opinion to justify
their own state's segregationist policies. (In 1956, when Virginia
Senator Robert Byrd read his infamous "Defiance: The Southern
Manifesto" he was joined by 19 Southern Senators and 70 Representatives,
including J. William Fulbright and Strom Thurmond. Byrd cited Shaw's
opinion to buttress his last stand against the Supreme Court's desegregation
order.)
The
many well-to-do Harvard students from Southern plantation families
did not have to long for the amenities of their beloved slavocracy;
upon their arrival at the University each cracker was given a Black
servant they euphemistically called a "scout." All the
while Blacks served Harvard's white faculty and enrollees as janitors,
custodians, and waiters. The first record of these "scouts"
at Harvard is noted by Samuel F. Batchelder, in Bits of Harvard
History, as he contemptuously recounts the tribulation of these
unpaid, overworked Harvard slaves:
What
ebony face with rolling white eyeballs grins sheepishly at us
from this mildewed page? Who was this blackamoor who surreptitiously
helped himself to beer and (possibly under its influence) made
so free of little Sam Hough's bed? Have we not here the first
darkey "scout" of Harvard, progenitor of the whole tribe
of college coons and great-grandfather of all Memorial Hall waiters?
What fluky breeze of fortune wafted this dusky child of nature
from a languorous coral strand to the grim confines of Calvinistic
Cambridge? Were colored brethren already hanging round the Square
looking for odd jobs ere that classic forum had become clearly
distinguishable from the encircling wilderness?
But
always, Blacks seeking to better themselves attempted to break through
Harvard's rigid racial barriers. When three Black men attended lectures
at the Medical School in 1850, groups of white students protested
their presence and prevailed upon the faculty to expel them. Harvard
president Charles Eliot (term 1869-1909) stated his belief in separate
educational facilities for Blacks and whites and suggested that
Harvard may implement such a policy. He maintained - quite accurately
- that the white man in the North is no less averse to the mingling
of races than his Southern counterpart.
Race
hater Louis Agassiz, the dean of the Nazi-approved philosophy of
scientific racism, and for whom a Harvard campus building is currently
named, warned fellow whites, "Let us beware of granting too
much to the negro race...lest it become necessary hereafter to deprive
them of some of the privileges which they may use to their own and
our detriment." Agassiz found his views of the Black man warmly
received and echoed by Harvard deans Henry Eustis, who considered
Blacks "little above beasts," and Nathaniel Shaler, who
believed Blacks "unfit for an independent place in a civilized
state." In 1922-23, President A. Lawrence Lowell barred Blacks
from living in the freshman dormitories saying, "We have not
thought it possible to compel men of different races to reside together."
Around
that time, Harvard's venerable newspaper, the Crimson, excitedly
announced the presence of the school's very own Ku Klux Klan chapter.
Without a trace of indignation, it trumpeted the KKK's campus membership
drive. The paper even promised to respect the secret identities
of the KKK leaders, and announced the possibility of the establishment
of the branch of the KKK called Kamelia, the female KKK, at Radcliffe.
By 1960 Harvard was writing letters to white students asking if
they had problems with being assigned a Black roommate. (Black students
received no such "courtesy.") In the '80s, Bell Curve
author, the now dead Richard Herrnstein, successfully restored Harvard's
white-hooded intellectual tradition, which seemed to have been usurped
briefly by some loud but ineffectual liberal '70s campus activism.
So,
here comes Randall Kennedy, bookending this tradition to the proud
nods of his white campus puppeteers. Ultimately, those Blacks who
seek to append themselves to this corrupt legacy will suffer a shameful
disgrace. For increasing numbers of Blacks today are in complete
agreement with the great "uneducated" freedom fighter
Fannie Lou Hamer, who could not have been clearer when recounting
the battles she fought for political representation and justice:
Everybody
that would compromise in five minutes was the people with a real
good education. I don't understand that - I really don't to save
my life. Them folks will sell you - they will sell your mama,
their mama, anybody else for a dollar.
Shelton
Amstrod is a researcher and editor at CBIA Publishing in Detroit.
