Los Angeles Times: Students block the entrance to Avery Hall, home to Columbia's department
of architecture and planning, in the spring of 1968. (Office of Public
Affairs Photograph Collection, Columbia University Archives)
When Ivory Towers Were Black
Sharon Egretta Sutton
Fordham University Press; 1 edition (March 1, 2017)
Fordham University Press; 1 edition (March 1, 2017)
John Malveaux of
sends this link:
April 6, 2017
“This book tells the story of how I got a free Ivy League education.”
That's
the arresting opening sentence of Sharon Egretta Sutton’s “When Ivory
Towers Were Black,” an unusual hybrid of memoir, institutional history
and broadside against the entrenched whiteness of the architecture
profession in this country.
The institution in question is
Columbia University and, in particular, its department of architecture
and planning. The time frame is between 1965 and 1976, “mirroring the
emergence and denouement of the black power movement,” as Sutton notes.
And the narrative is really a two-part story, exploring how an era of
intense student protest at Columbia, which peaked in the spring of 1968,
gave way to a remarkably successful if short-lived effort to recruit
students of color to study architecture and urban planning on the
university’s campus in Morningside Heights, on the southwestern edge of
Harlem.
I could paraphrase the story of how Sutton, who is now
professor emerita at the University of Washington and a fellow of the
American Institute of Architects, became one of those students, but I am
unlikely to improve on her version. And the details, in any case, are
what make it memorable. It takes place in the dog days of summer, 1968.
“At
the time,” she writes, “I was working as a musician in the orchestra of
the original cast of the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, playing
‘The Impossible Dream (The Quest)’ on my French horn over and over,
eight times a week. As an antidote to that mind-numbing sameness, I had
begun taking interior design classes at Parsons School of Design during
the day (since I mostly worked at night). But in August … I received a
call from the secretary for Romaldo Giurgola, a famous architect who was
then chairman of the Division of Architecture. One of my teachers at
Parsons had worked in Giurgola’s architecture office and had told him
about this black woman who was in his class. And that’s how I was
recruited to the School of Architecture.”
(This is probably a good
spot to point out that 1968 was also the year that the civil rights
leader and National Urban League Executive Director Whitney Young delivered
a fiery keynote speech at the AIA convention, telling the architects
gathered there that they shared “the responsibility for the mess we are
in in terms of the white noose around the central city” and that a black
Yale architecture student he knew “did want you to begin to speak out
as a profession, he did want in his own classroom to see more Negroes,
he wanted to see more Negro teachers.”)
What Sutton didn’t learn
until far later was that she and the rest of the newly recruited
students were brought to Columbia by a pair of related forces. The first
was a $10-million Ford Foundation grant to the university in 1966 to be
used for “urban and minority affairs.” The second was the student
uprisings that peaked in 1968, when Avery Hall, which held the
architecture school, was occupied by protesters along with four other
buildings on the Columbia campus.
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