Since I’m on the subject…
You might imagine Dett during his year at Harvard, rolling of out bed from his lush accommodations in the Harvard Yard to dash to his courses or the library…except that Dett did not live in the Yard. I am of the mind currently that Harvard’s Housing situation was segregated at this time.
The 1919-1920 Harvard Catalogue gives Dett’s local address, 27 Walden Street, which is near Porter Square in Somerville (a distinct area of Cambridge that is famously not Harvard Yard which was named after Porter’s Cattle Market Hotel) some 1.5 miles away from campus. Walden Street in particular, was the locus of Boston’s cattle depot, where “until the 1920s, cows were unloaded here and driven down Massachusetts Avenue, through Harvard Square, and across the river to the Brighton Abattoir. Today, the only physical remnant of the cattle market is the Walden Street Cattle Pass, a brick tunnel beneath this bridge. When Walden Street was laid out across the feed lots in 1857, the underpass ensured that cattle being unloaded from long trains of stock cars would not have to be driven across city streets.” Not quite what you might have originally imagined, is it?
The Porter Square Neighbors Association bravely asserts that “Cambridge is a diverse community with a complex history in which the universities played a relatively small part.” Founded initially in 1630 by the name of Newtowne to be the Massachusetts state capital (!!!!), Cambridge yielded its capital status to Boston only four years later (1634) and was renamed. As a “consolation prize,” “the Governor and his assistants .. chose the nearly-empty village on the Charles instead of the port town of Salem as the site of a college to train ministers for the colony.” That would be Harvard.
An industrial powerhouse, “The city was home to steel fabricators, rubber factories, candy makers, a Model T assembly plant, and the main U.S. factory of Lever Brothers, the soap maker.” It was also a melting pot: “beginning in the 1820s, immigrants from England, Scotland, Germany, Ireland, Canada, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Czarist Russia, Barbados, and Haiti flocked to Cambridge, as did thousands of Americans from rural New England and the southern states.”
Cantabrigians have always included enterprising and successful women: “Squaw Sachem, a survivor of epidemics that wiped out Native American tribes in the 17th century, sold land that included Cambridge to English colonists in 1639. The first printing press in the colonies was brought by a widow, Elizabeth Glover, who married the first president of Harvard College, Henry Dunster. Anne Bradstreet became the first published poet in America in 1650. Margaret Fuller was the first American to write a book about gender equality, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). In 1889 Maria Baldwin became the first African American woman principal of a public school in Massachusetts. Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Annie Jump Cannon, and Cecelia Helena Payne Gaposchkin made numerous discoveries at the Harvard Observatory in the early 20th century. Sara Mae Berman was among the first women to compete in the Boston Marathon beginning with her run in 1969, though women were not officially allowed to register until 1972. Barbara Ackerman became the city’s first woman mayor in 1972, and E. Denise Simmons became the first openly lesbian African American mayor in the country in 2008.”
Where am I going with this? The non-Harvard part of Cambridge (that is most of it, by the way) was a safe place for Dett to live and was, by extension, perhaps the only place he could live so close to campus. So I wondered, who else from the Harvard student body might have lived in this area? I did not have far to look. During the 1919-1920 school year, David Alphonso Lane also lived at 27 Walden Street. Coincidence? Using the catalog as a guide, I looked for students who attended HBCUs prior to Harvard.
Another Black student, Henry Augustus Littleton Giddens (listed in a 1919 register for Howard University), lived across the river in Boston at 5 Holyoke Street near the present-day Copley Place and the Harriet Tubman House, which “took in young female boarders, providing them with food, clothing, shelter, and friendship while they adjusted to their new environment. It later adapted to provide housing for Black female students who were not allowed to live in the traditional student dormitories at some Boston-area colleges.” The house was demolished recently in 2020 to make way for high-end condos.
Yet another Black student, Robert Raymond Penn (named in a 1919 issue of the Black publication The SPHINX), also lived across the Charles at 21 Kenilworth Street in Roxbury, in between the Fort Hill and Nubian Square (formerly Dudley Square) areas, which was a Jewish center before it became an African one.
I found only one other Black student in Cambridge, Norris Bumstead Herndon, who lived at 1556 Cambridge St; he was the son a millionaire and could, conceivably, have afforded to live anywhere. This address lies halfway between Cambridge’s Harvard and Central Squares, the other main concentration of Black residents in 1920s Cambridge.
Just to be thorough, I also looked to see where Chinese students lived and found three living in the same vicinity on Harvard Street, also near Central Square: Hung Shen at 366 Harvard St; Tonjou Luen Hsi and Su Sun Chen at 386 Harvard St.
So there you have it. Is it coincidence that all of the Black students I found (I do not claim to have found them all, by the way) lived in areas traditionally associated with Black residents and not in Harvard Yard? And would the Tubman House have needed to exist had Black students been allowed to reside on local college campuses?