Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism

In this story, the Harvard African American Faculty and Administration organization and the president of Harvard meet to discuss the lack of progress on diversifying Harvard’s faculty, student body, and administration. Someone kills all of them with a bomb. In the aftermath, the group and president become martyrs, and their deaths galvanize the school, students, and the government to commit to real change. The notes from the meeting reveal the dismal progress on hiring and tenuring more African American faculty, admitting more African American students, and increasing the pool of African American Ph.D. holders. In surveying the faculty, the report writers note that African American professors without traditional credentials have often been very effective teachers and productive scholars while white candidates with such credentials have frequently been mediocre or poor teachers and scholars.

The president proposed that Harvard create a Talented Tenth program (after DuBois’s idea in his groundbreaking sociological work The Souls of Black Folk [1903] that developing the talented tenth of African Americans to support the rest could improve African Americans’ lives). Ten percent of the faculty and administration would be required to be African American, Native (Bell’s term for Indigenous people), or Hispanic (Bell’s term for Latinx people).