When Ivory Towers Were Black: A Story about Race in America`s Cities and Universities, Sharon Egretta Sutton

When Ivory Towers Were Black follows two university units that steered the School of Architecture toward an emancipatory approach to education early along its evolutionary arc: the schools Division of Planning and the university-wide Ford Foundation-funded Urban Center. It illustrates both units struggle to open the ivory tower to ethnic minority students and to involve them, and their revolutionary white peers, in improving Harlems slum conditions. The evolutionary arc ends as backlash against reforms wrought by civil rights legislation grew and whites bought into President Richard M. Nixons law-and-order agenda. The story is narrated through the oral histories of twenty-four Columbia alumni who received the gift of an Ivy League education during this era of transformation but who exited the School of Architecture to find the doors of their careers all but closed due to Nixon-era urban disinvestment policies.