Basic Black

What is the status of America’s promise of an equal shot at education for all – for descendants of slaves as well as first-generation immigrants? Where does the pressure to get into and through college come from?

A new provocative documentary film explores these and other questions by following two middle-class African-American boys from the time they enter kindergarten in one of the country’s most elite private schools through high school graduation.

On Friday’s Basic Black, Craig Wilder, Professor of History at MIT and author of the new book Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America's Universities, explored the connection of slavery to the beginnings of America's Ivy League schools.