This is such an impactful book with memoirs, biographies, and historical moments of each person within this novel. This is a book for history buffs and those who need the confidence to go for their dreams.

Amazing, would highly recommend to anyone interested in history! I love that this is a first hand account of history while it was being made. I also love that Garrett reached out to his black classmates, and that they got the opportunity to speak on their experiences as student at Harvard during this time. The section at the end where he talks about where his peer are now was a really thoughtful touch. Fantastic overall!

This was an interesting subject and I enjoyed the parts that were written as memoirs, rather than journalism.

The Last Negroes at Harvard was an important book with a fascinating subject matter and a lot to say. It was part memoirs, part journalism, part dry-ish non-fiction, which is the only reason I didn't rate it higher.

The parts of The Last Negroes at Harvard that were memoir had the best literary style. They were emotive and involving, and really helped put me in the shoes of the authors; something which is essential for a subject matter that will be read by people from diverse backgrounds and levels of privilege. It was interesting to learn about the diverse backgrounds of the class of 1963, but in the parts were Garret writes about the history of education the book can get a little dry.

Overall, however, The Last Negroes at Harvard is well worth picking up, just for the personal stories, and its emphasis on the intersectionality of privilege.

Kent Garrett chronicles the lives of young Black men who were welcomed to the campus of Harvard College during a time of great social change.
If you are expecting, as the book states " 18 rags-to-riches stories about 18 geniuses plucked out the ghetto and plopped down in the wonderland of Harvard, where bratty aristocrats shunned or despised them" - this isn't that kind of story.
What Garrett does well is share the diversity within such a small sample of what makes up "the Black community" some of the men are from the Black elite who only know cotillions and Jack & Jill, some are from the south who arrived with large amounts of skepticism because of the racism they have endured from Whites in their hometowns, others where from New York, overseas, etc. All classified as "Negroes" and were a test-drive for the University to get ahead of the "increase diversity" train, later to be called affirmative action.
A huge takeaway from this book is the privilege that was allotted to these young men of attending Harvard, a heavily liberal school, for their college years, as opposed to Ole Miss, where young Black men needed military bodyguards to attend their classes. This was something that I hoped Garrett would acknowledge and he did in a later section of the book.
The writing seemed to jump from memoir to the drier styles of non-fiction throughout and it was often times hard to follow which young man was which. I would recommend that in future editions, the gallery be put in the front of the book, I only discovered this at the end and this would have been a tremendous help in keeping track of everyone and connecting to them.
A huge oversight was not covering the one Black woman who attended Radcliffe Class of 1963, I'm sure she holds a plethora of information that would have added even greater value to this book.