Jump to navigation
The Making of a Black Scholar: From Georgia to the Ivy League, 2003
Porter, Horace A., 1950-
Stone, Albert E.
2003
University of Iowa Press
Iowa City, Iowa
This captivating and illuminating book is a memoir of a young black man moving from rural Georgia to life as a student and teacher in the Ivy League as well as a history of the changes in American education that developed in response to the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and affirmative action. Born in 1950, Horace Porter starts out in rural Georgia in a house that has neither electricity nor running water. In 1968, he leaves his home in Columbus, Georgia -- thanks to an academic scholarship to Amherst College -- and lands in an upper-class, mainly white world. Focusing on such experiences in his American education, Porter's story is both unique and representative of his time. The Making of a Black Scholar is structured around schools. Porter attends Georgia's segregated black schools until he enters the privileged world of Amherst College. He graduates (spending one semester at Morehouse College) and moves on to graduate study at Yale. He starts his teaching career at Detroit's Wayne State University and spends the 1980s at Dartmouth College and the 1990s at Stanford University. Porter writes about working to establish the first black studies program at Amherst, the challenges of graduate study at Yale, the infamous Dartmouth Review, and his meetings with such writers and scholars as Ralph Ellison, Tillie Olsen, James Baldwin, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He ends by reflecting on an unforeseen move to the University of Iowa, which he ties into a return to the values of his childhood on a Georgia farm. In his success and the fulfillment of his academic aspirations, Porter represents an era, a generation, of possibility and achievement.
English
African American college teachers African American scholars African American college students African Americans Civil rights Childhood and youth Education, Higher
Amherst College Yale University University of Iowa Wayne State University Stanford University Dartmouth College
1960-1970 1970-1980 1980-1990 1990-2000
United States -- Georgia -- Columbus
Singular Lives: The Iowa Series in North American Autobiography
https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/search/browse-series/browse-SL.htm
Singular Lives
x, 157 pages
Copyright © 2003 by Horace A. Porter. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Contact the University of Iowa Press at https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu
9780877458357.pdf
Text
autobiographies (literary works) memoirs books
pdf
9780877458357
https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/9780877458357/the-making-of-a-black-scholar
