Memoirs of a Young Black Scholar

Though the exact nature of the Summers-West dispute is still shrouded in mystery and clouded by finger pointing, its very public outcome was West's flight to one of Harvard's Ivy League rivals, Princeton University. The Harvard contretemps, coming while the U.

Larry Donnell Johnson Jr. (Author of Memoirs of a Young Black Scholar)

How fortuitous, then, that Horace A. Porter, chair of African-American world studies and professor of English at the University of Iowa, should step forward to offer us a glimpse into this rarefied world in his swiftly paced memoir, "The Making of a Black Scholar: From Georgia to the Ivy League. How disappointing, too, that Porter, a highly regarded member of that first cadre of "affirmative action babies" admitted to major colleges and universities in the late s, offers us little more than a snapshot of this complex environment where unmitigated ego, institutional racism and intellectual condescension often clash with the more noble pursuits of teaching and scholarship.

Though Porter's slim volume provides a rather interesting outline of the transcendent events and intriguing personalities that helped change the face of higher education in the last quarter of the 20th Century, often absent in the economic retelling of his matriculation through Amherst College and Yale University is a true sense of the drama and roiling emotions that swept the nation and its college campuses and helped push open the doors of some of the most selective institutions to an even wider swath of students of color. At times, the accelerated pace at which Porter plows through his autobiography serves the story well.

After all, his is a rather familiar up-from-poverty tale.

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Born in in the segregated country village of Midland, Ga. Growing up in a house without electricity, Porter and his eight brothers and sisters amused themselves with skits and a make-believe game called Magic Television when they weren't in school or working the fields or attending the Baptist church that was the epicenter of their parents' spiritual and social lives. When a catastrophic fire destroyed the family home, the Porters decamped and made their way into the nearby city of Columbus, where they finally had electricity and real TV.

But the move also shoved the Porter children closer to the harsh realities of the racism that marked life in the Jim Crow South. Not that Horace Porter dwells much on the racial tension that punctuated his youth in those heady days of the civil rights revolution. About Contact News Giving to the Press. Both Hands Tied Jane L. The Value of Labor Martha Lampland. Why has the large income gap between blacks and whites persisted for decades after the passage of civil rights legislation?

Memoir offers glimpse of an unusual world

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