WILMINGTON, MA — The Wilmington Memorial Library hosted Kent Garrett and Jeanne Ellsworth, authors of “The Last Negroes at Harvard,” for a virtual author talk on Thursday, February 10, 2022.
In the fall of 1959, Harvard recruited 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, began to reconnect with his classmates and explore their vastly different backgrounds, lives, and what their time at Harvard meant.
Kent Garrett and his partner Jeanne Ellsworth recount how these young men broke new ground. By the time they were seniors, they would have demonstrated against injustice, had lunch with Malcolm X, experienced heartbreak and the racism of academia, and joined with their African national classmates to fight for the right to form an exclusive Black students’ group.
Watch the author talk, courtesy of the library’s Facebook page, below:
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