Place of Privilege
Young, Black and in an Unexpected Place of Privilege
There are private schools all across the country, places with better resources, better teachers, better budgets. By definition, these schools are not for the public. They are private. They are exclusive. They are for those who can afford better. Rarely does that include black students. In the 1960's, it almost never did.And then there are the ultra-elite private schools, the super schools; places where the resources, the curriculum and the tuition are comparable to the best liberal arts colleges. These are schools where lineage is a factor in the admission process. These are not schools for those who can afford better, they are schools for those who can afford only the very best.These are places of privilege.In New York, the crown jewel place of privilege is The Dalton School; one of the most prestigious, elite prep schools in the nation, recognized globally for its visionary progressive educational philosophy and its ultra-wealthy, celebrity student body. Whenever popular culture needs a readily recognizable reference for the alma mater of the extraordinarily rich and famous, they simply say "Dalton." Dalton is where the purebred 1% are taught and groomed to become the next generation of America's power elite.In the mid-1960s, Dalton Dalton reached out to previously unfamiliar communities and actively recruited minority students. Written by two of the young black men who were among the new and very different members of the Dalton family during that historic time, "Place Of Privilege" provides the remarkable narrative of the pathfinder courses their lives would take. Co-written by Mark Robinson and Ray Smaltz, about the experiences of the first young black men to attend The Dalton School in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the book is both personal memoir and historical narrative.