Theauthors live in roxbury new york. Please give a warm savanna welcome to and jean ellsworth. [applause] thank you for inviting us and the focus for the last negroes at harvard and 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 harvard. We were from all different parts of the country. North, south, east and west and we came from economic and socioeconomic backgrounds. And we heretofore they had been letting, admitting blacks to harvard but only two or three at a time most guys would just go and do their four years and get out of town. We leave cameras but was different in the sense that we had numbers. 18 and we could form an individual racial identity as well as a group identity. We were able to become actually a force for change at harvard and harvard, we changed harvard and harvard changed us and that essentially what the book is about, its about our four years here and what happened before and after harvard. 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 percent of the class. It was wasnt that significant. Anyway, so ill tell you about my life a real fast. My parents were from born in South Carolina in the 20s and they went to school in aiken, got High School Degrees from South Carolina and my dad, they were part of the great migration coming up to the north. I came up here in about 1941 and i was born in 42. And we lived in brooklyn. New york in the housing federal housing projects. My dad has always had three or four jobs and the ultimately became a subway motor man in new york. I have a sister who is four years younger and we both did pretty well in school and i went ooBoys High School in Brooklyn New York and from there went on to harvard , after harvard, not really realizing what i wanted to do, i went to medical school for a year which i hated and so that was sort of part of my mothers, my son the doctor syndrome. We didnt do that and from there i went into, what did i do . Actually im sort of looking for a calling and i went into advertising and work at a Company Called ted bates new york in making ultimately ended up making tv commercials. Which was fun and interesting and i learned about filament tv and writing commercials and all that but it ultimately is not that great for the mind so i found Something Else to do and that was black journalwhich was journalism and that was my calling. Black journal was the first black nationwide network black show in the country and it was like, for and about blacks and i were there for about three or four years and it was a groundbreaking show and after that, i went to my life became a series of tenyear things. I worked at cvs with dan rather for 10 years and nbc news with brokaw for 10 years and then it was about 1997 i got really tired of news and in many ways the news was changing and it became more focused on ratings and stuff so i left that and f decided i had my son back to the land moment and i went upstate new york and no dairy cows for 10 years. We had these ash are scottish cows were really great so i did that for 10 years, milking twice a day but what happens there is as gyou get older the cows realize you are getting older to and they take it vantage ofyou. So i got out of that and what happened, one day harvard sends out all its domestic alumni, this harvard magazine every two months or so and most people get it and they look at a few of the articles and then go right to the obituary to see whos surviving in your class so i did that one day and saw a guy nwho i guess had been years ahead of us had died and i started thinking about what had happened to the 18 guys in my class and what they had done, who had been happy, who had been sad, etc. And i have been in touch with two or three of them and i didnt know what happens to the others so we decided to do a documentary. It would be a good idea to a documentary as to what happened with these guys. Thats where i came in. I didnt know cant when he sold cows, didnt get to do any milking but 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 went about 40 minutes away from chances are we never would have met except for online dating. So we both put our little profiles of their and i am not lying, harvard, the word harvard in kents profile, okay. He said what i like to have dinner and i said yes and that first date in 2007 we talked aboutthis project. And he told me he wanted to d know what happened to his classmates and i know we had a lovely dinner i had about and drive home and i was thinking, i didnt know if we have a second date but i knew he had a great story. And my background is history of education so i knew, i was doing a little mental calculation. I knew theseguys were born in the early 40s. They came from all over the country, therefore they had lived under the shadow of jim crow. Probably to some of them went to segregated schools. They just started high school when brown versus board of education was decided. And i figured they had some pretty interesting stories to tell so we did have a second w date and more dates after that and before i knew he was teaching me how to use a boom mic and we got in his car and went around the country read we live in it as can set atin upstate new york so we started with kents best friend androommate at harvard who lived about two hours away. Jand we just widening the circle. And looking for the guy and little by little we get. It took a long time read maybe eight or 10 of them being harvard graduates had a lot of letters after their names and they had high profile jobs so we went with them and they came right up. Others were more difficult but at sadly we did learn that four of the men had died project but then we went and looked for their, with those in their children and friends and started when amassed enough probably gave for 8000 people. And the years went by. We gather some great life stories and of course, everybody always asked us y that you have some surprises on the way read over yet, kent is going to tell you about a couple. Challenge in doing the video, the challenge in writing the book has been there had been so many characters. Having to deal with 18 entities. But ill tell you about 4 of them that were really surprises me. In terms of figuring out who was, who we would be interviewing , they had taken these little blackandwhite photos of us 50 years ago in the class book, the freshman class book and i use that to figure out who i would be interviewing because i didnt know some of the guys. And we assumed that there were 17 and we actually had sort of a title for the video we would call it the Harvard Black 17 and the harvard class of 62, they put out i guess every quarter a newsletter ato all of the people in the class and they, we put a note in there saying we were working on this video project and wed like to if you had any funny stories or anecdotes about the black guys in our class, let us know so we got a note back from a guy saying wait, there might be 18 or maybe 19 or 20 guys in the class that were negro as we were called back then so i actually panicked about that based this project on all 17 so the question was how do i find out as somebody who is black or not so being an intrepid reporter i decided to just make the calls i would call one name i got was ben and jerry so i called jerry and we had a little small talk and at the end i said by the way, are you black . He said yes, i am so that was one down and so i had two more to go but i thought to jerry and when i talk to him when we were doing and he said he looks very lightskinned. These very difficult to tell that hes black and it turns out his mom was from trinidad and his dad was jewish and we had offered about him after that first day he told me that he went around back then saying ghi, im jerry secundi and im a negro and he said that because he didnt want to have to deal with the derogatory negro jokes for the jewish jokes so he wanted to kill two birds with one stone i guess. The interesting thing about him is he was in california now and he has 2 sons 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 black but identifies as white. And they were allvery happy. Its a happy family but thats how it worked out and another surprise, loel davidson was a guy in our class who was in on rps and he became a protcgc of ornette coleman, the jazz musician and a gate and album , loel did one album called loel davidson trio and when we look at the album, the drummer on the album was a guy named Milford Grade School i had gone to Boys High School with and had written written the subways of new york, and buses of new k york every day for three years so it was very surprised to see him and it was nice to have so we did interview him, he was out in Bennington College and that was a surprise. And the third surprise was that one of our ofclassmates was gay and he had had to suppress that this whole time at harvard and he was from atlanta and he tells in the book, youll see he tells them harrowing stories about being in the closet at that time in harvard and how he wanted to sort of teeth that away from us, that sort of thing and the fourth i guess the prize which is not in the book but is that one of our classmates was while we were there work for the cia and his job was to keep an eye on us and we vowed not to, if not in the book but we vowed not to tell his name so those were some of thesurprises. And along the way there are discoveries. Being an academic myself i couldnt wait to get to the harvard archives so we started looking for everything we could find in the archives to the point of we paid through the harvard crimson n every day and this was a daily newspaper for the year before they arrived right through when the last guy graduated. Also, i found in the archives to student papers that had been done about the 18th. So i know that the guys at the time, they said what are we doing here . Is this an experiment . Are the anomalies, are we curiosity mark to these, at least these two students, they were anthropological specimens. So one of the studies was done by a senior at the time. They were freshmen. The mass an unbelievable amount of esdata for an undergraduate paper especially. He submitted them to a 29 page engineer and interviews and retitled his paper rising sons of darkness. Yes, cringing was our main activity during reading these things. And probably more interesting was a paper done by a white classmate, the first guy was white, this guy wasnt. A white classmate of they are so tense best friend at harvard, his freshman roommate was a guy named ron blau and he was a white guy from new jersey and it actually was jack roommates idea that ron you this paper and he interviewed all 18 of the guys at some length and asked of course the questionnaire. So it was fascinating for a couple of reasons read first or of all, it was , there was enough detail and enough quotes in ronnies paper for us to find out some things that the guys said about race at the time you not after 50 years of change and fogging up of memory as it will. But what they said about themselves and 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. And that was pretty hairraising actually. I think for both of us. It was quite disturbing and for one thing to think that can for example was asocial relations major. So knowing what ideas were in the backs of the minds and what assumptions their professors and of them was creepy and im going to just if you couple of quotes to raise your hair about it. So for instance, in one of the books that ron blau quotes, that was called the mark of oppression by kent, obviously well respected sociologist, they said that their mothers were often lovelesstyrants , their le father recently either sequences, taciturn, white punitive or submissive to the mother. The marriages were multiple and distorted, their families unsettled and their communities avoid 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 knew the guy and lived with them said several times in the paper these guys dont seem to fit the stereotype. O unfortunately rons professor who was, i forget his first name. David reasoning, author of the lonely crowd tried to argue back with you also had the comments that reason had made on the paper and he tried to argue ron out of his position. It was upsetting to read but kent is going to tell you a little bit more about the paper on that one. First off, ronnie was a nice guy. We all liked him and as you know when college kids have to do a paper you just have to do a paper so we were helping him out to do his paper and it was kind of amused by it because his first suggestion was that he do a paper on the social life of the freshman negroes at harvard in our class and it was suggested that he would interview us during the week and then go out with us on the weekends to parties and. Ake notes and observe but the problem with that was that if he had chose to do that , he would have perhaps gotten a couple of paragraphs given the dearth and lack of social life that we had and ill tell you about that later so a good thing he didnt do that but the thing he did do and again, its very different when you read something now 2020 or 2019 versus 1959. He had one question which we really didnt think, when i read about it now i get ticked off about it but back then it wasnt and the question was if you had a chance to be born again would u you want to be born negro or white and he asked everybody that and when im reading this a few years ago i was very happy to see that everybody had said yes, we wanted to be born as negroes. One guy freddie said he would , he said if i were born white it would be less trouble being negro was nice and one guy holding an armstrong a Football Player said he thought about it and said hed like to try it for ayear and see what happens. And the other thing that we set up there, we had i guess its ubiquitous or inevitable black table. Since there were 18 of us and the way harvard is set up as we all lived in the yard and it had a freshmen dining hall, everybody eats together and we would have a table where we would pretty much sits and eat together and for me it was kind of a refuge in the sense that i could sit with other blacks and we could talk about girls, i guess and we could talk about culture. We could talk about, it was a place where you could, you didnt have to speak things english. In you could let your hair down as such. And as a matter of fact theres a guy, theres a contemporary comedian named dion cole who has this rift where he talked 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 so in many ways the black table was a place where you could go during the day and not have to manage your negroness and worry about what you said. As far as dating goes there was not much dating at all their and the attitude of our heard was that they sort of liked to keep the sexes apart and they had these mixers which everybody would go to but everybody hated. There would be girls and the guys and that sort of thing. They didnt mean that kind of mixing. They tried to find one black girl from the community. There was one black woman at bl ratcliff at the time. She couldnt have 18 dates. What we would do in terms of the dating thing would be the nearby colleges would put out catalogs of the women in the college and in every catalog there would be names of people with no pictures so we would want to find out if this girl was black or is she a negro and should we would have friends at college, lets say if a woman was from st. Louis, we go to one of our friends from st. Louis and say look at this name and look at this address and is there any chance that this woman might be black and he would say not living in that neighborhood so that was part of our system as to how to get going but what happened is as we got into our junior senior years, throughout the nation , the whole Civil Rights Movement was exploding and kids here in the south were getting beat up and punished and thrown in jail so we felt we had to try to do something up there and we were kind of in an idealistic bubble. It was a very liberal place. If theres any kind of racism , it was really benign in many ways in the sense that what we did get is a lot of questions about what is it like to be a negro . And what is it like, and sort of what do you people want kind of questions and those got tiring after a while and after a while some of the guys stopped asking us that as well so what we did do is we invited malcom x to come up and he talked to us at elliott house and that was really mind blowing for all of us. We were starting to think at that point that Navy Integration was not going to work and maybe we should be more separatist and get into the black power thing. That changed a lot of minds and then we decided that we wanted to set up a black Student Organization and again, we didnt have any particular radical ideas. We just wanted a place where we could meet together and invite speakers up and talk and maybe publish a magazine or something and it would be called the association of african and afroamerican students and membership would be limited to people who were of african or africanamerican heritage. Am we assumed it would be fine and the university would agree but when we proposed it to them they said no because they felt it was reverse discrimination and we claimed, we were really upset about that because harvard has these things called final clubs which are sort of social eating clubs where aristocratic families go mike john f. Kennedy, roosevelt, all the president s and they dont let in women. They dont let in jewish folks. Dont let in people who have money. If its new money, whatever that means but if it was new money you couldnt get in. So we claimed that what about those and they said well, they dont put that in their charter. They just sit on who they picked join and they wanted us to say okay, you guys take that out of your charter and you can do whatever you want to do and we refused to do that and it was a whole long drawn out fight which is in the book and we ended up winning in the end. 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 stormed the Administration Building and demanded more black faculty, more black students recruitment and the africanamerican studies and as i say it still exists today. I guess we dont have much more time. One thing is that it was a very innocent time in many ways and for example ill tell youa story. One of the guys freddie easton, one of our classmates was in the dining hall and a white guy came up from minnesota and said listen, can i sit with you and the rule at that time was that 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 and he proceeded to ask freddie really reasonable questions and it was a pleasant interchange and they became good friends and e he invited fred to a lot of hockey games and that sort of thing and it was that kind of innocence that was also goingon at the time and finally now , part of the book is to find out where we fit into the historic arc of the Civil Rights Movement and what our place was and i think when we get down to it, that finally, that look at it, we did our part in trying to move the movement forward. Freddie has a good quote where he says he thinks that we all because our pressure was that if we all messed up, maybe harvard wouldnt let any more black sin, maybe they would say this is an experiment that didnt work and this black community has nothing to contribute to the Harvard Community but we feel that again, a football analogy that we carry the ball. We didnt fumble and i like to think that we got closer to the goalpost but unfortunately those goalposts keep changing and getting further and further away from that part of the problem. So if you have questions weve been asked to remind you to come to the microphone in the middle ill. [applause] kent, you touched on this but you know the question if you have dinner with anyone, whowould it be . Mine is malcom x so could you elaborate on your dinner with him, what it was like . It was a great dinner, he was charismatic. He was actually charming and he was very different in many ways from the rhetoric that you had heard, that he would give. I think at that time he was very religious to. He was really a great man and the dinner what happened, it was a time when there was controversy about Martin Luther king and Martin Luther kings womanizing. It had been exposed by a guess the fbi and that sort of thing and a big argument came up at the dinner about that between malcom x and the faculty sponsor, the guy who was sponsoring the dinner and it got so heated that they were going to call down to Martin Luther king and atlanta and resulted. But nothing showed a real bunch of, a lot of grace and just smooth it down and i left there on fire after that dinner. [inaudible]. He asks whether we know how those 18 were chosen and in particular how kent was chosen. Ill tell you a little bit about the 18 because we wanted to answer the question for ourselves, was this some kind of a form of affirmative action affirmative action the phrase. Would come around for a couple more years but it was. Harvard had, a couple of the men who you read about in the book in the admissions. They decided that it was the right thing to do. And they set about to make this happen. One of the gentlemen was on the board of an Organization Called the National Scholarship service and fun for negro students which was founded in theearly 1950s. So working with that organization , they sent out feelers and they provided counseling. Some of the guys in kent class were located in their high schools and they were sent to a year or even to a new England Prep School to get them ready. But we dont know exactly what happened with kent cause he doesnt remember and i suspect that miss sims or somebody at admissions at harvard had a connection with boys high. Because just cant, it was 2 blacks from his class that were admitted. I dont remember if i was recruited. I know i was recruited by dartmouth, im not sure about harvard but i know we get apply and all that read that anything at harvard and i must say they are really good guys in this, they were really ahead of their time and were really trying to do the right thing and they believe in diversity. So for example in my three years with, i was in a suite with David Rockefeller and another guy, Spencer Worden from the board and i guess some milk company folks and their theory was i would make rockefeller a better banker. And im not quite sure what they thought he would make me a rat but maybe i would understand whats more or the system more, whatever but they were really good people in this journey. [inaudible]. I wonder if they tried to get jobs to the 18 and getyou in good spots , if you go to harvarddont need any help. Thats the thing, it does give you an edge. What happened is when i went into advertising, most of the and even now if you look at some of the people in tv, news, theyre all from, a lot are from Ivy League Schools and does give you and allegra so even if itssubconscious sometimes. Did you find they had a nicestart in their career . Yes, they all have nice start read some went to law school, some were pretty successful on wallstreet. One gave up wall street and became an anglican priest down in st. Thomas. More than half of them continued in some vain work for civil rights. And you know, most were very successful in whatever field they chose. But not all. There was some sad stories to. You so much, im wondering after you spent four years in this idealistic bubble as you call it, what was it like to go out in the real world . It had to have been very different in your experience at harvard. Yes, going out in the real world , i think it was very different but they did prepare you read the thing about harvard is that they really emphasize Critical Thinking and you sort of challenge everything so that was i think the best preparation for me in terms of knowing out into the world. But you still want out into a world where there was awful thats true. But i think you feel that you can dealwith it. You feel better approaching it. You feel that you are able to compete with the big guys and the big guys are these, like the rockefellers and leaders of industry and all that so it gives you a certain confidence that you might not have had if you had gone to, not going to harvard, put it that way. You told stories of being studied by students when you were there. There were two studies to write their senior papers or Research Papers and you were doing yet another study of this group e. Did you get any resistance in mark did people not want to bestudied or was everyone very willing to participate . Oh no, they were really happy. What happened was the video project, we a grant from a foundation, mass. Humanities foundation to do a Short Documentary that we would use to raise money to do a longer featurelength documentary so we werent sure whether these guys, whether everybody still have their marbles and who was failing, but they were all articulate. They had a lot to say and i have a lot to say. They had been living in black america for seven decades so i have a lot to say. There was one of kens classmates whopreferred not to be videotaped. And i think he eventually responded to a number of questions we had about his life, but he preferred not to be in the documentary. This is an easy question quas freshmen, were you all in the same house . And did a film that movie couplehouses until your sophomore year . Harvard nowadays theres freshmen living at you move into a house. The way it was set up then the freshmen are about eight or nine freshmen dormitories. Ndkind of surrounded around the yard. And each of us live in some of us live in, there were five in my freshman dormitory, five euros spread around but where we always meet would be in the freshman dormitory hall area. Then after your freshman year you moved tothe houses and about 10 of those there like little colleges. And thats where we would. Harvard still does interesting things. My daughter had a muslim roommate from pakistan and an Orthodox Jewish roommate from boston and there was a cuban girl was jewish and then my daughter with blond hair and blue eyes and the four of them, it was interesting but thats why i wondered, when they went out they went in different directions. They didnt achieve blany sort of balance by living that way but i wondered if you all, you have five maybe in a dorm because the lunch table you talk about, that happens in every highschool in america. Ns we were curious about how harvard, they had the 18 negroes but what were they going to do about pairing them with guys for their freshman roommateexperience . What we eventually found out was that ronnie lau, the author of the paper remembered that he filled out the paper said would you be willing to room with a number of another race and he checked the box and he ended up with tents best friend. Cant and his roommate were friends in high school. There was another pair of black men who were friends before they got to or they had met oeach other before hand. And some of the other guys were matched up with white guys but then there were 2 sets of both black guys as roommates so my own mind is saying maybe they got back, they got that few peoplewho check box. So they find a guy, the freshman who check that box and they say we canput him with him and then they ran out , we dont knowsadly , i would love to know. Did harvard continue this in classes after yours is in mark. They did. I think that the numbers went down a little bit but they really exploded in the 19 68, 69. When there were hundreds admitted. Hundreds or so. If you were starting harvard in this day and age would your mission be the same and would you still be pushing for civil rights or be more careeroriented . I think i would be more into civil rights. The thing, im like 77 now. My dad is like 97 and we are still active, struggling and fighting. I thought by this time in my life things, we might have been closer to a postracial society. And everybody happy and all that but that really has not happened. So many of us, weve taken our reporting tools down from the shed into it again. N i do a from upstate new york i do a daily news show from eight until nine but its on the internet to read its wi oh radio. Org on the internet and im joined by two of my classmates come on as well so were still out there trying to do the civil rights and essentially i shouldnt say civil rights but it just to change the consciousness of people and to sort of try and get them to change some of theirattitudes. We live in Delaware County upstate new york and its a very red, its one of the reddest counties in the state. Very magna oriented and what i do is on the new show ill play a lot of Country Music so my hope is that someone is driving through the area would hook onto the Country Music song and then say to hear a news story. I dont know if that happens. Wended the documentary morphed into a book . When we couldnt raise the money or the documentary. No, can often is asked that question and hell say we thought it would make a better book read there were so many, we wanted to go into history but we were both retired and i was like, im notspending these years trying to raise money. I did that. I think in many ways i think it would make, it does make for a better book in the sense that we were all in our 70s and its not like we are running around doing interesting things. Its not very cinematic. Not cinematic things. Thank you very much. [applause] here are some of the current nonfiction bestselling books according to Publishers Weekly red topping the list is author and activist glennand boils latest memoir ,untamed. Then in the splendid end of the file, historian eric marson looksat british Prime MinisterWinston Churchills leadership during the london blitz. After that entertainer Jessica Simpsons memoir open book, followed by abc news chief Legal Affairs correspondent s recount of john adams representation of the british soldiers involved in the boston massacre. And wrapping up our look at some of the bestselling nonfiction books according to Publishers Weekly is talking to strangers, new yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwells examination of how we misread strangers were actions. Some of these authors have appeared on tv and you can watch them online at booktv. Org