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Kent Garrett

Biography

Kent Garrett

Kent Garrett was born in the Fort Greene Projects in Brooklyn, New York. He excelled in the New York City Public Schools and went on to Harvard College in 1959. He was one of the producers of the ground-breaking public TV program "Black Journal" and went on to a long career with CBS and NBC News. In 1997, he left the rat race and became an organic dairy farmer in upstate New York.

Kent Garrett

Books by Kent Garrett

by Kent Garrett and Jeanne Ellsworth - History, Memoir, Nonfiction

In the fall of 1959, Harvard recruited an unprecedented 18 “Negro” boys as an early form of affirmative action. Four years later, they would graduate as African Americans. Some 50 years later, one of these trailblazing Harvard grads, Kent Garrett, would begin to reconnect with his classmates and explore their vastly different backgrounds, lives and what their time at Harvard meant. Garrett and his partner, Jeanne Ellsworth, recount how these 18 youths broke new ground, with ramifications that extended far past the iconic Yard. By the time they were seniors, they would have demonstrated against national injustice and grappled with the racism of academia, had dinner with Malcolm X, and fought alongside their African national classmates for the right to form a Black students’ organization.