A leading African-American historian of race in America exposes the uncomfortable truths about race, slavery and the American academy, revealing that our leading universities, dependent on human bondage, became breeding grounds for the racist ideas that sustained it.

Although they are identical, Ebony and Ivory are as different as night and day. Ebony will stop at nothing to have her sister's man, Black. From lies, to backstabbing, to purposely transmitting STDs, Ebony's determined to wedge the couple apart. Will Ivory catch wind of her trifling sister's scheme...or will she ultimately fall victim to her deceiving, manipulative ways?

This personal history chronicles the triumph and loss of a 1960s initiative to recruit minority students to Columbia University’s School of Architecture. At the intersection of US educational, architectural, and urban history, When Ivory Towers Were Black tells the story of how an unparalleled cohort of ethnic minority students overcame institutional roadblocks to earn degrees in architecture from Columbia University. Its narrative begins with a protest movement to end Columbia’s authoritarian practices, and ends with an unsettling return to the status quo. Sharon Egretta Sutton, one of the students in question, follows two university units that led the movement toward emancipatory education: the Division of Planning and the Urban Center. She illustrates both units’ struggle to open the ivory tower to ethnic minority students and to involve those students in improving Harlem’s slum conditions. Along with Sutton’s personal perspective, the story is narrated through the oral histories of twenty-four fellow students who received an Ivy League education only to find the doors closing on their careers due to Nixon-era urban disinvestment policies.