The Last Negroes At Harvard Quotes

“At age fifty-five, I left NBC News, fed up with the rat race, office politics, and the intense commercialization of the news. Farming was hard, but it was good for the soul and the ego. The cows didn’t care that I had been a big-time producer and had won three Emmys. They shit on me anyway.”
― Kent Garrett, The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever

“I liked my humanities courses; I was finally pursuing something that felt like “knowledge for its own sake.”
― Kent Garrett, The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever

“Having access to a free daily newspaper was one of the delightful discoveries I had made while checking out Harvard in the early weeks. I read the Crimson every day, starting with their thick preregistration issue,”
― Kent Garrett, The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever

“Learning and knowledge were part of the white man’s game, and to be Black and intellectual was to be not, to my mind, normal. The normal kids were back in the neighborhood. The few friends I made at JHS 210 lived all over the city, so I couldn’t hang out with them and do the normal things, like playing stickball, talking about girls and records, and just hanging around the ’hood, keeping clear of the gangs. My parents would see to it that getting back to “normal” never happened.”
― Kent Garrett, The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever

“It was true that my room, especially after the grandeur of what we’d seen so far that afternoon, looked pretty old, small, and bare. We associated high status with oversized, ostentatious luxury, and the idea that the Spartan might be chosen for its own sake, or that simplicity could be more prestigious than extravagance, was simply not part of our concept of social class, which had been shaped by life in the rural South and in the poor districts of New York City.”
― Kent Garrett, The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever

“The group of professional men, students, white-collar workers, and upper servants, whose common bond was color of skin . . . together with a common history and current experience of discrimination, formed a unit . . . , so that increasingly a colored person in Boston was more neighbor to a colored person in Chicago than to a white person across the street.”
― Kent Garrett, The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever

“Much of the time at Harvard, some of us had to modify our behavior and our speech and be careful about not perpetuating any Black stereotypes, to speak only what was then called “proper English.” Today the Black comedian Deon Cole calls it “managing your Blackness” to avoid frightening the whites. We were all adept at it, but it could grow tiring; at the Black Table we could be ourselves and quit “managing our Negro-ness.”
― Kent Garrett, The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever