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The Turbulent ’60s

We came of age in the turbulent decade of the 1960s. From Florida, Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and the Caribbean, we saw the protests, the beatings, the deaths. We were in elementary school when the black community of Montgomery, Alabama, boycotted segregated public buses and when Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi. We were in junior high school when Freedom Riders risked their lives to challenge segregated bus travel in the South. By the time we got to high school, NAACP leader Medgar Evers had been assassinated in Mississippi; four girls, close to us in age, were killed in the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama; and Bull Connor’s storm troopers unleashed fire hoses and police dogs on ordinary people peacefully protesting segregation in Alabama. In the summer of 1963, we were uplifted by the vision of countless people marching onto the mall in Washington, DC to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. affirm the dream of a non-racist America. Two years later he would be on the front line as state troopers savagely beat civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

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 itself of investments in South Africa. As students from South Africa and Namibia became part of our lives, Africa and African liberation movements became much more than just an idealized abstraction.

With anti-war and anti-apartheid activism, the Civil Rights Movement, riots in major cities, and increasing militancy, by the time we arrived at Swarthmore, protests had become commonplace on college campuses across the country. No one in our group knew about Swarthmore’s reputation as an activist campus when we applied, but once there, we took advantage of the fertile environment to expand our own political consciousness. In the fall of 1966, some of us were among the Swarthmore students who attended a conference at Columbia University on the role of black students on white college campuses. James Farmer, former director of CORE, was the keynote speaker. He called for a change in direction, emphasizing black empowerment and the right to make our own choices and build our own institutions rather than the push for integration that had been the hallmark of the Civil Rights Movement.4 Like Stokely Carmichael, the new chairman of SNCC, Farmer called for “Black Power.” The conference presenters urged the formation of black student organizations at elite white colleges like Swarthmore. This was a message our group was certainly ready to hear. We were already active on campus and would soon formalize a student organization, the Swarthmore Afro-American Students Society (SASS). We would later learn much from Philadelphia community leaders like Walter Palmer and William Crawford who were very supportive of our role as students, but who also admonished us to remember where we came from and to use our education to help others.

No one in our group ever debated whether to get involved in “the struggle.” The only question was what type of involvement we should pursue. Over countless meals in the College dining hall and late-night dorm and study room sessions, we debated the merits of Dr. King’s philosophy of non-violence versus the militant rhetoric of Malcolm X. The venerable NAACP had largely taken itself out of the competition after denouncing Black Power as reverse racism and condemning black college students’ demands for black cultural centers and black dorms as self-segregation. At the other end of the spectrum, Black Muslims and the Black Panther Party (BPP) focused on black institutions. We heard Louis Farrakhan and the young boxer Muhammad Ali, charismatic spokesmen for the Nation of Islam, speak at Swarthmore and nearby Lincoln University, respectively. The Nation of Islam offered an impressive model of discipline and community development, but their misogyny and rejection of Christianity limited their appeal. The BPP threatened violence with “an eye for an eye” rhetoric that could end in proponents being jailed or killed. Ultimately, the SASS approach to activism ended up being most like the principled non-violence of Dr. King and the consensus-seeking brought to SNCC by veteran civil rights activist Ella Baker. Baker critiqued “leader-oriented” institutions and movements and argued for participatory democracy and grassroots organizing. The leadership philosophy she described was much like the approach our group adopted at Swarthmore.

You didn’t see me on television, you didn’t see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders.5

Baker insisted that leaders should never become more important than the movement they were leading.

Prioritizing the Struggle

Within the 1960s fight for equal rights and empowerment, black women and men grappled with sexism. We college students, like our contemporaries off-campus, struggled to reconcile the demands of women’s liberation and black liberation. Even in new organizations like SNCC and BPP, few female leaders were widely recognized and celebrated, despite their critical creative and sustaining roles. In spite of Ella Baker’s central role in the 1960 founding of SNCC and her mentoring of its young male leaders, in 1964, even Stokely Carmichael, future SNCC chairman, could joke that the only position for women in the movement was prone. By 1968, Frances Beal and others found it necessary to form the SNCC Black Women’s Liberation Committee to begin to articulate and address the oppression of women within the organization.

Similarly, when BPP was founded in 1966, its rhetoric and militaristic image proclaimed the Party to be for men only. In 1968, a series of articles in The Black Panther newspaper maintained that black women’s place was to “stand behind black men” and be supportive. By then, women already made up the majority of BPP membership, and they were largely responsible for successful community organizing and implementation of the Party’s social service programs. The Party’s slogan soon evolved to “The Black Woman’s Place Is in the Struggle.” Although BPP rhetoric declared sexism to be counterrevolutionary, this new perspective would require a major paradigm shift and dramatic behavioral changes. There weren’t many young men whose life experiences prepared them to appreciate and thrive in non-sexist, collaborative relationships. The Seven Sisters found their brother, Harold, to be unusual in that way.

The movements of the day opted to call for a unified front against oppression by race and class, while leaving sexism to simmer on the back burner. We would do the same at Swarthmore. Although we seldom called out sexism and patriarchy by name or explicitly referenced the Women’s Liberation Movement, these tensions affected our approach to leadership. We knew that women could and should lead, but we believed we would be more respected if the image of our organization was strong by patriarchal standards because its men were visible and in charge. The Seven Sisters ignored or downplayed frictions with male classmates and camouflaged our strengths. We perceived public leadership as a zero-sum game not to be played at the expense of black men. At Swarthmore, our solution to the dilemma was not unique. The Seven Sisters and a Brother led as a group composed primarily of women who supported black men as the more visible representatives of our community.

Not Just Student Issues

Signs of political progress emerged with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and, three years later, the election of black mayors in Cleveland, Ohio and Gary, Indiana and the appointment of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967, but there was much more to be done. As the first chairman of SASS, Sam Shepherd, put it:

Black people look forward beyond the Civil Rights Act and the black professionals and see that 47.4 percent of black people and 59.6 percent of black children are classified as poverty-stricken. They see that the few who have made it are unable or unconcerned with doing anything about the others, and that they either deny or superficially affirm the racial aspect of themselves.6

Although SASS would be best known for demanding a black studies program, a black cultural center, and a greater number of black students and faculty, we did not limit our work to student-centered concerns. One of our earliest actions was to speak out about the lack of respect afforded to the College’s black employees. We were struck by the absence of black supervisors among the College’s blue-collar workers. It mirrored the previously uncontested absence of blacks on the faculty and in white-collar and administrative positions. The beautifully manicured rolling lawns of the campus looked much like idyllic representations of Southern plantations where those who tended the lawns, cleaned the buildings, and prepared the meals were all black and all dressed in service workers’ uniforms. All of their supervisors were white.

We realized that many of the black workers were underemployed. They worked in jobs that didn’t reflect their capabilities or the roles they played as parents, family members, caregivers, religious and civic workers, and leaders in the communities in which they lived. No matter how well they did their jobs or how senior they were in age, they were called by their first names while their white supervisors were “Mrs.” and “Mr.” Even Harold Hoffman, a particularly capable and distinguished black man on the custodial staff, was thoughtlessly called “Harold.” He was polished and responsible and everyone, white and black, looked up to him, though not enough to respectfully call him Mr. Hoffman. We asked him and his co-workers what their last names were and spread the word to other black students, insisting that the black workers be addressed accordingly. We had been taught by our families that the “help” were due respect, just like our parents and our church ladies and elders. Eventually we got the administration to add last names to their badges and to call them “Mr.” and “Mrs.” just like their white supervisors. We agitated successfully for Mr. Harold Hoffman to become the first black employee to be made a supervisor. Like Mr. Hoffman, several of our parents were blue-collar workers. If we had been born at a slightly different time or place, we could have been working beside those employees who maintained our splendid campus rather than enjoying the fruits of their labor.

More Than Friends

At Swarthmore, maids changed our bed linens each week. We enjoyed meals that were far superior to the cafeteria fare most college students complain about, and we dined in the magnificent chalet-like Sharples Dining Hall. As we entered Sharples, we off-loaded our heavy books, book bags, sweaters and coats onto unsupervised racks in the lobby. The New York and Boston women among us found this especially remarkable. Big city girls never left their pocketbooks unattended. We quickly adjusted to the unspoken norm that, no matter how long we lingered over our meals and conversations, when we finally left the dining hall, we would find our belongings safe and undisturbed. Swarthmore was a trusting place where students were regularly allowed to borrow college vehicles for personal use. We made good use of that resource as well.

Yet Swarthmore lacked the comforts of home. At home, no matter what challenges school might bring, we each returned to families and friends. The foods we ate at home reflected our rich African American and Caribbean culinary cultures. We danced our own dances to the beat of rhythm and blues and calypso. Our local black barbershops and hair salons were specialists in disguising our natural hair to approximate European standards of beauty. We attended churches where worship was more social than the solitude of the Swarthmore Friends Meeting House. On campus, we had to create our own community of friends.

Aundrea, Bridget, Jannette, and Myra entered Swarthmore in fall 1966 and quickly bonded with each other in the dormitory. They were soon befriended by Joyce, who was already in her junior year, Joyce’s official “Little Sister,” Marilyn H., and her sophomore classmate, Marilyn A. Harold, who was Joyce’s and Marilyn A.’s fellow math major, became a brother to the seven women. The four classmates cooked home-style comfort foods in the dormitory kitchen and, especially after holidays, shared “care packages” of homemade baked goods and other treats. When we all gathered for meals in the dining hall, we talked about the issues of the day amongst ourselves and with the other black students who gravitated to our table. After breaking bread together, we often continued the fellowship by singing spirituals together despite the consternation it caused among some of our white classmates.

More than friends, the eight of us felt like comrades in arms. We spent a lot of time together with little distinction between our social and political activities. We studied together, supporting each other academically even when we were studying different subjects in different majors. In the self-taught black studies course we designed for ourselves, we diligently fulfilled our responsibilities to do the course work well to make it a meaningful experience for each other. We traveled together to attend black studies courses at other colleges, black activist meetings in Philadelphia, New York, and on other college campuses, and to see black performers in Philadelphia. We planned and executed a host of events to bring black artists and speakers to the campus. We went together to nearby Chester to tutor younger students and attend church, and to Philadelphia to take African dance lessons. Those who could sew even set up an assembly line with sewing machines brought from home and made dashikis for all of the black male students so that they could be properly dressed for a Black History Week dinner that we had organized. By the time SASS was ready to challenge the College by occupying the admissions office, we had already engaged in many successful ventures together. In so doing, we created our own community and proved the power of collaboration.

Black Is Beautiful

When we started college, we were not that different from most “Negroes,” who had been taught to be ashamed of their own physical features and embarrassed by their African heritage. The high school yearbook photos we provided for the Cygnet, Swarthmore’s freshman directory, were remarkably similar. We looked as much as possible like our white peers—women with straightened hair and men with hair cut low. By the time we formed SASS, we thought and looked differently. In photographs taken in our final college years, we are wearing our natural hair. Some of us even went beyond the eventually stylish afro, and created elaborate West African-style hairdos like neat grids with a puff of natural hair in each section. Adding to the permanence of our transformation, most of us went into town to have our ears pierced so we could wear a variety of traditional and ethnic-inspired earrings to accompany our newly natural hair and African-style dresses. More than simple fashion statements, our choices were self-conscious, political assertions that “black is beautiful” and that we were proud to be connected to Africa.

Blackness became a desirable quality in the 1960s. Africa and Africans—leaders of newly independent countries, public intellectuals, and fellow students—provided positive points of reference. They were political, cultural, and aesthetic role models. We identified ourselves as part of the African Diaspora, “Afro” Americans. “Black is beautiful” was our American parallel to “Négritude,” a powerful, anti-colonial affirmation of African values and aesthetics. That concept was most closely associated with Senegal’s First President, poet Leopold Senghor. Like Senghor in Senegal, President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania exemplified the political import of culture. Nyerere gave us the Swahili word ujamaa to signify extended family, brotherhood, African socialism, and cooperative economics. It was a political concept that asserted that a person becomes a person through the people or community. The collaborative leadership that characterized SASS in this era was an affirmation of these values.

In the highly-charged environment of the late 1960s, even the College romances of the young women of our group were of political consequence, whether it was the rare involvement with a white activist or relationships with African students. When a contingent of African students from historically black and then all-male Lincoln University descended on campus for a meeting with us fledgling activists, they discovered among us a group of black female students, each one brilliant in their eyes, amazingly unattached, and mostly open to the possibility of cross-national relationships. The African students were older, more experienced citizens of the world and more mature and sophisticated than most of the Swarthmore men. They were from Eastern and Southern African countries that had only recently won their independence or were engaged in a liberation struggle. Through them, some of us gained a much more intimate understanding of African politics and liberation movements as well as validation of our own activism.

Images of struggle had bombarded us all of our lives. We found ourselves in college in the late 1960s, when it had become a norm for college students to speak out and act out against war, racism, and discrimination. We were very much products of our era. We would make the most of our time at Swarthmore with its opportunities to be independent, responsible, and assertive activists, and most of all, to grow as young black men and women.