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

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