In the midst of all this, Myra Rose was growing up in Virginia where they still celebrated Richmond’s glory days as the capital of the Confederacy. Despite the ostracism by white students, her teachers’ attempts to ignore her intelligence, and a guidance counselor’s efforts to steer her into trade school despite the advanced placement courses she had taken, Myra persevered at a newly integrated high school. Being the oldest sibling in a strong and nurturing close-knit family headed by college-educated parents, and her father’s encouragement of her love of writing and debate meant more to Myra than anything she faced at school.
Farther south in Tallahassee, Florida, Marilyn Holifield faced a more aggressively hate-filled environment in her newly integrated high school. White students vilified her daily and called her “nigger.” But the child who loved growing roses with her father was well aware of her family’s legacy of resistance. Her grandfather had stood up to racist terrorism in Mississippi, and her father had been able to make his way from the Mississippi countryside to college at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and ultimately to Tallahassee. Her mother had ventured into the South from Boston to practice nursing. Their strength and dignity became her own.
The rest of our group of eight attended high school up north in Massachusetts and New York where de facto segregation and institutional racism collided with the Civil Rights Movement. Aundrea White lived in Boston, a city known for its rabid ethnocentrism, segregation, and racism. Nevertheless, it was a city that was an important destination for southern black migrants like Aundrea’s parents as well as Caribbean immigrants like Marilyn H.’s maternal grandparents, who emigrated to Boston from Barbados and Suriname. There was no way Aundrea’s father would go back to the indignities he and her mother had suffered growing up in Mississippi. When he retired from the army, the family settled in Boston. Aundrea was an “army brat” who had lived in many different places. She never fully embraced the Boston accent or internalized a Boston-centered view of the world. The one constant was her loving and open-armed family which always incorporated newfound relatives and friends.
Joyce Frisby grew up less than one hundred miles away from Boston in Springfield, Massachusetts. Her parents had left Baltimore, Maryland with ambition and junior high and senior high school educations in search of fewer racially motivated economic limitations. They settled in an integrated neighborhood where class differences were more apparent to a self-conscious Joyce than racial differences. Despite her father’s resourcefulness, the family struggled financially, and Joyce would never lose the habits of frugality that she developed in those days. Joyce was the eldest daughter, second eldest of her siblings, and ever the responsible one.
Bridget Van Gronigen, Jannette O. Domingo, and Marilyn Allman lived in New York City and Harold Buchanan lived on Long Island, in the exurbs of the city. Jannette and Marilyn A. were children of working-class Caribbean immigrants. Bridget and her family had recently immigrated to the United States from the former colony British Guiana (now Guyana). Having grown up in British Guiana through her early teens, Bridget’s lilting Guyanese accent distinguished her from first generation Caribbean Americans. As a newcomer to the US, she was reserved and formal, negotiating a foreign education system and learning the implications of being black in America. Like those who migrated from the South, for Caribbean immigrants and their children, the promise of better education and health and higher incomes outweighed concerns of being victimized by racism.
Marilyn A. was the youngest child of immigrant parents whose religious and cultural values were reflected in her becoming an exceptionally articulate student. As a scholarship student in a prestigious private school, Marilyn bypassed the New York City public high schools. Her upbringing in the church was evident in the purposefulness and sense of mission that made her a leader. She was elected student government president and head of several clubs—even at a white upper-class girls’ high school. Jannette also bypassed the regular public schools, spending six years in one of the city’s most selective junior/senior public high schools for girls. She was a popular student, elected captain of the cheerleaders and chairperson—or producer—of the Senior Show, the annual musical revue that was the climax of senior class activities. But few of her friendships extended beyond school hours when she and her white peers returned to sharply different neighborhoods. Her church friends and family filled her social life, and African music and dance, as well as her father’s science fiction books, expanded her world. While neither the private school nor the selective examination high school environment was overtly racist, microaggressions communicated clearly that accomplished black students like Marilyn A. and Jannette were considered exceptions to stereotypes internalized by their classmates, teachers, and school administrators.
Meanwhile, Harold and his family had fled New York City for a small black community out past the city limits on Long Island. He was one of a few blacks in school, but he had genuine friendships with white classmates who shared his interest in music. He grew up in a close-knit and outgoing family in which his parents were great role models. They shared tasks and responsibilities without being strictly defined or limited by stereotypical gender roles, an approach to life that would later serve Harold well as the Brother among the Seven Sisters at Swarthmore.
The Northern “struggle for Negro rights”3 to equal employment, education, and housing opportunities provided the backdrop to our high school years in New York and Massachusetts. Thousands of students boycotted public schools in Aundrea’s Boston in 1963 and in Bridget, Jannette, and Marilyn A.’s New York City in 1964. That same year, in New York City, protests of police brutality morphed into the six-day long “Harlem Riot.” Violent protests also erupted in response to police brutality and other festering injustices in Philadelphia in 1964, Watts in 1965, and Newark in 1967. On April 4, 1968, we were Swarthmore students, meeting with our counterparts at Haverford College, when we learned that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. In the days that followed, anger, grief, and pent up frustration erupted in riots in Chicago, Washington, DC, Baltimore, and more than one hundred other cities across the country.
College Students Take the Lead
When Joyce enrolled at Swarthmore in 1964; Harold, Marilyn A., and Marilyn H. in 1965; and Aundrea, Bridget, Jannette, and Myra in 1966, college students had become the cutting edge of the Civil Rights Movement as the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and then the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) rose to national prominence. In the early 1960s, college students’ non-violent confrontations with segregation and the violent responses to their lunch counter sit-ins, wade-ins at segregated pools, and pray-ins at whites-only churches drew greater national attention to the Civil Rights Movement. CORE’s Freedom Rides in 1961 and the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965, in which SNCC played a major role, were highly publicized events exposing the depths of American racism and arousing widespread outrage. SNCC’s grassroots voter registration campaign in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project and the murder of three of its young volunteers—twenty-one-year-old local organizer James Chaney and two white men from New York City, twenty-year-old Andrew Goodman, and twenty-four-year-old Michael Schwerner—starkly highlighted the commitment of young people to the civil rights struggle.
International conflicts increasingly shaped college students’ political perspectives and expanded the scope of our activism to include anti-war, anti-colonialism, and anti-apartheid protests. Opposition to the Vietnam War, in particular, overshadowed the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, forcing him not to seek reelection in 1968. Many of us participated in anti-war demonstrations on campus. Most of the troops were our contemporaries. Because young black men were disproportionately represented among the draftees, we all knew someone—a relative, friend, or acquaintance—who had been killed or maimed or lived in fear of being sent to Vietnam to fight and possibly die in this unpopular war.
Even as the Vietnam War dragged on throughout the 1960s, many African and Caribbean nations won their independence. Their victories generated pride for the African Diaspora and reasons to celebrate. But the ongoing struggles against intransigent regimes in Southern Africa, especially apartheid South Africa and Namibia, known then as South West Africa, resonated with our own African American experience. The 1960 Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa was recent history. As on many other campuses, student activists at Swarthmore commemorated the massacre and called for the College to divest