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Day Zero

Boiling Point

It was shortly before midnight on Wednesday, January 8, 1969, the third day of classes after students had returned to campus from the 1968 winter holiday break. We were seniors and juniors at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, eleven miles southwest of Philadelphia. In those days, fall semester didn’t end before the holidays. Classes resumed for two more weeks of instruction before we had to study for exams and turn in final papers and projects.

Even twenty-four hours before the planned action, most of those who would participate did not know the details of what would occur, not even who would be designated as spokespersons.

Only a handful of members of the Swarthmore Afro-American Students Society (SASS) were in on the planning. Since Marilyn A., Jannette, and Harold lived in New York, Marilyn A.’s house in Harlem was designated as the venue to work out details between Christmas and the New Year. Traveling from her home in Boston, Aundrea, the secretary of SASS, joined the three New Yorkers. We represented three of the group known informally as the Seven Sisters, along with Harold, the one brother among the original planners. Harold had visited the admissions office numerous times in the weeks before the holiday break to examine the doors and windows and develop a plan for securing them. He had managed to get floor plans of the office space, and the four of us huddled around them, spread across the Allmans’ dining room table, and plotted strategy. If this visit over Christmas week with its intense conversations seemed a little strange to Reverend and Mrs. Allman, they gave no indication beyond their puzzled expressions. It would make sense to them two weeks later, when they received a call from the College stating that their daughter was a ringleader of the group of black students who had occupied the admissions office.

Aundrea, as usual, was recording our decisions in her notebooks. Each of the collaborators had left the Harlem planning session with a list of items to purchase for the action that was beginning to appear inevitable. Now, after classes each day that week, we sisters were checking in at each other’s dorm rooms, to make sure we had everything we would need.

Don’t forget to bring Vaseline for your ashy legs.

We might have been preparing for a winter hike in the woods around campus for all anyone could tell.

Yes, and extra bars of soap and rolls of toilet paper.

Laughing and joking about everything, as we often did, no one observing us would have realized that we were organizing something that might be dangerous or result in our expulsion from college.

Put cans of sardines and crackers in your bags.

I hate the smell of sardines. Disgusting.

No problem, I’ve got them. I know how to make a great meal with them.

That would probably have been Aundrea. Her father was a military man. She had lived in Asia and Europe and, having been a Camp Fire Girl herself, seemed to know all about survival and making do in difficult situations.

We’ll need flashlights.

That would have been Harold, the practical one, the only brother present in those dormitory planning sessions. He was always a valued addition to our group of seven women because he practiced collaborative leadership as we did and could be trusted to do exactly what he said. We knew we could count on him to show up with the chains, padlocks, and other hardware on his list.

Together, we wrote and practiced saying the words we would use to begin our action. We decided we would rely on others outside our inner circle to be the primary SASS spokespersons to the administration, so we could focus on writing our positions and managing operations.

Don Mizell would be one of the spokespersons. In a 2014 video documentary, he recalls hearing a frantic knock on his dorm room door at midnight, to which he responded reluctantly. Several females from our black student organization, he says, summoned him to a meeting across campus that he was not expecting and didn’t know anything about.

Don was not the only one hustled out of bed that Wednesday night to come to Bond Hall’s lower level for an emergency gathering of SASS members. The sisters were not among the young ladies who called him. We were already at the surprise briefing getting ready to take and answer questions as various late arrivals, young men and young women, joined, bleary-eyed. The looks on some faces queried:

Did something happen today that we didn’t hear about at dinner?

Others had that knowing look, full of excitement. They had realized since before the break that we might have to back up our demands with more than words if the College administration did not respond with real solutions. Fifteen of us had already met with the faculty and administration on Monday morning, the first day back, to see if the administration had made any progress on our demands while we were away. People on campus in the Phoenix, the campus newspaper, and in open letters that were circulated as flyers, referred to these meetings as “negotiations,” and everyone on both sides knew that negotiations might break down. These black students were bracing themselves to know what we would plan to do if our demands were not met soon. Maybe this was the time they would find out.

Each of us who were in on the plan took turns carefully introducing it to the group.

Listen up, everyone. You all remember when SASS members walked out in October and refused to cooperate further with the College Admissions Policy Committee until our four demands were met. Well, our first demand was that the Committee’s report be taken out of “General Reserve” in the library and replaced by a new report that SASS would help the Committee rewrite and that would be “suitable for public perusal.” Every day that the original report remains open for everyone in the College to read is a day too many.

And every day that the Admissions Committee fails to add their resources to our outreach activities to recruit more Black students for the fall is a day we lose potential applicants to other colleges.

The same is true for recruiting black faculty. Their lack of commitment means other colleges get to hire the best candidates.

So, why are we here in the middle of the night? If you agree that the time for talk without action is over, we invite you to stay tonight for further instructions.

The offending report was the last straw after two years of activism focused on increasing black enrollment in the elite college and on recognizing the contributions of African Americans in academic study. An Admissions Committee set up by the College administration had spent the summer of 1968 preparing a study of all of the “Negro students” who had enrolled in the recent past to justify the slow pace of recruiting more of us. They had violated our privacy by publishing so many details about our families and high school preparation that, although names were not published, the small size of the College and the miniscule black population made it easy to match the data to specific students. When we got wind of the report being made available to the entire college in the campus library, SASS immediately demanded that the report be removed and revised to take out the inappropriate data. The administration took the high-handed position that they would not respond to demands and saw no need to withdraw or revise the report.

Even those black students who were not given to activism were angered by being treated with such insensitivity. Debates in the campus newspaper and a vote of support by the majority white Student Council notwithstanding, the Dean of Admissions had continued to refuse to remove the report. The editorial board of the newspaper and certain other campus constituencies backed the Dean. Things had come to a boiling point.

The midnight meeting at the end of what we would count as Day Zero was seared in the memory of Mike H., a freshman at the time. He recalled it forty years later when he recorded for the Black Liberation 1969 Archive:

…the leaders came to us and said, “If you cannot go all the way, leave now.” They did not define what that meant, ”all the way.” So, most of the black students stayed. There were some who did, in fact, leave…although those students who did not stay wrote a letter to the Phoenix stating that they were in support of what we were doing even though they were not in the building.

Even those who stayed behind when a few others left were not provided with the complete plan. Instead, we told them they would need to prepare backpacks with their books for studying and their most important personal effects in case it took all day and maybe longer to make our point. They should meet after lunch outside the dining hall the next day, where specifics would be given.

We explained that we felt strongly about the need to hold back details until the last minute. And, they trusted us. During more than two years, we had built a strong reputation for being very organized and for following through on commitments. This time seemed bigger and riskier than any previous project. Would we really be able to pull off a major protest that required this kind of secrecy?

When the meeting ended, we dispersed quietly into the starry cold to not draw attention as we fanned out in different directions to our rooms. Some probably had more work to prepare for Thursday morning classes. Everyone had to think about what they would bring the next afternoon.

It was difficult, but we knew instinctively that we’d be better off if we could each get a few hours of sleep. We had a strong sense that the next day would change all of our lives forever.