‘We Were Curiosities’: One Of ‘The Last Negroes At Harvard’ Shares His Story

Kent Garrett Sr., 97, still remembers how proud and happy he was when his son was admitted to Harvard in 1959. “I invited everybody over for dinner,” he recalls with a laugh. Garrett was a subway motorman who worked a second job waxing floors. His son, also named Kent Garrett, was among an unprecedented group of 18 black students accepted into the class of 1963. Garrett chronicles what that time was like for him and his fellow black classmates in the new book The Last Negroes at Harvard, co-authored with his partner, Jeanne Ellsworth. Kent Garrett graduated from Harvard in 1963, one of 18 black students in a class of over 1,000. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt “We would be attending a school that was founded and funded on the backs of our enslaved forebears …” Garrett writes. “We were headed to a campus where, until about eighty years before, each student was given a personal Negro servant, a campus that in the 1920s barred Negroes from the dormitories and had a branch of the Ku Klux Klan.