Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools by Michelle A. Purdy, and: Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League by Stefan Bradley (review)

As the history of education and our public schools are increasingly scrutinized in the wake of privatization, presidential debates, and the anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, it is easy to succumb to easy generalizations that dismiss the productive tensions of our troubled past. Particularly in regard to privatization and student agency, history provides the tools to deepen our understanding of education and the freedom struggle—and the recently published texts, Michelle Purdy’s Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools and Stefan Bradley’s Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League, are critical to this larger project.

Together, Purdy and Bradley provide a stunning analysis of elite white private schools in the United States. These texts jointly remind us that private spaces are historically and racially exclusive, part of a national project that perpetuated racist discourse and white supremacy across the country. As these authors skillfully demonstrate, private institutions must be included in our analysis as they are instructive in expounding the role of student activism and the complexity of the Black freedom struggle while illuminating the nuances of school desegregation.

Michelle Purdy, in Transforming the Elite, examines the desegregation of the Westminster Schools, a historically elite white private, independent school, and one not founded on strong religious affiliation. By examining this school with impressive detail and precision, Purdy effectively compels the reader to understand the structural position of independent schools as “catalysts for the creation and maintenance of social and cultural capital and are the harbingers of middle- and upper-class white ethos” (5). In her analysis, Purdy provides a fresh view of desegregation through Westminster, differentiating it from the popular perception of Southern private schools that were for the most part established to avoid federal desegregation mandates across the South. Today, Westminster maintains an explicit commitment to diversity and thirty-one percent of students identify as students of color (2).

Purdy provides a layered analysis, examining a “constellation of factors” and showing how the history of desegregation at Westminster “blurred notions of public and private as they responded to multiple historical political, social and economic factors.” At the same time, Purdy examines this history with close attention to student voices and culture, arguing that youth “courageously navigated such schools, drawing on their experiences in southern black segregated communities and in southern black segregated schools” (3). In so doing, she places private independent schools on the larger desegregation plotline in the United States, necessarily complicating our understandings of this history and moving beyond the canonical work of Richard Kluger, Michael Klarman, James Patterson, and others who have crafted a metanarrative surrounding Brown.

Stefan Bradley, in Upending the Ivory Tower, examines the history of the students who transformed the quintessential institutions of white America, the Ivy League universities, or the “Ancient Eight.” Bradley astutely tracks a Black history of the Ivies, guiding readers through a history that covers the lives and experiences of Black students during the first decades of the freedom struggle, students who attended the Ivies during the mid-1960s and urban rebellion, and saw the birth of Black studies there. By focusing on the lives of Black students in the Ivy League and how they transformed the culture, Upending the Ivory Tower builds upon the work of Ibram X. Kendi (formerly Ibram Rogers), Martha Biondi, and Joy Ann Williamson-Lott, among other scholars, who have documented the role of Black college student activism. By providing a history of these highly regarded institutions, Bradley gives us a history of the Ivy League through the lens of students of color—pupils for whom these institutions...