white students come in droves, they even outnumber us. SASS also asked that they be consulted about anything on campus that affected black people. The school did not do this. Last year they had a South African (white) speaker that everyone was supposed to hear. Black students staged a peaceful walkout on the speaker at that time and still the school refused to listen to our requests and continued to walk over us. We were called “militants” and given all kinds of labels—even in the national news because we refused to listen to that man.
This year things really came to a head.… The Admissions Policy Committee, headed by Dean Hargadon, issued a report on black admissions…did not consult any black students when writing the report…and proceeded to write a very subtle racist document. What I mean is he used confidential information about our family backgrounds, incomes, etc., which really served no purpose and put them in the report (we could all identify each other).… Needless to say, all the black students on campus were very upset. An expert in black admissions, a woman from NSSFNS (a Negro scholarship group that helps black students get into white Ivy League colleges) offered to come down from New York to talk to the committee about the problem—they refused to see her. Their behavior indicates that they do not respect us enough to consult us on basic issues that concern us. They were ignoring our requests. Finally, we issued a set of demands in November about our grievances. The Student Council even endorsed our demands. The Dean of Admissions wrote them a scathing note saying in effect that he was sorry that he had let them into Swarthmore. President Smith asked for a further clarification of our demands… just one of their techniques to stall us. The final re-clarification was made just before Christmas and presented to the administration as non-negotiable demands. We still were given no answer. Two days after the deadline we held a meeting with the whole school to further express our grievances. The next day an effigy of the school was burned. The next day we occupied the admissions office…
Our occupation did what it was planned to do. We had finally shocked them into some action. Faculty meetings were held every day—an unprecedented fact. Administration efforts to alienate white students from us failed. Most students were in agreement with our demands. Others saw that the success or failure of our efforts had definite implications for student power. People from the black community helped tremendously and brought food and anything else we needed especially the moral support. …[Through] the news media we have been called everything from extremist black militants and murderers (as if we had control over Smith’s heart) to being a part of a Communist conspiracy. They will do whatever they can to discredit you and make you seem like an extremist when in reality SASS is one of the more conservative black student groups. I am enclosing a copy of the Phoenix, the school newspaper. It has the most accurate coverage of what really happened.
At any rate, we have not given up our objectives and we continue to press for them. The faculty is meeting at least twice a week now to bring about a settlement of the issues. I will tell you if anything new develops.
Our scholarships are not in jeopardy. The administration would look bad in the students’ eyes if it did something like that.
My arm is getting tired of writing, so I guess I will stop…
Keep the faith babies!!!
Myra
After reading the letter, I realized that now it’s an artifact, a hand-written record of what happened and why we did what we did. I read and re-read the letter and immediately telephoned Marilyn A. “You’ll never believe what I found,” I told her. That letter opened the flood gates of memory.
We were known as the Seven Sisters back then, but were actually the “Seven Sisters + Harold.” My experiences with this band of believers at Swarthmore pointed the way for me professionally as I learned to always seek the truth, stand for what is right, and model collective leadership long before I had heard of the concept.
Growing Up
I had a happy childhood and was the oldest of four children raised by Joseph and Ednae Rose. I was “the different one.” I was the brown one, the fat one, the ugly one who did not look anything like either my father or my mother. We lived in Liberty Park in Norfolk, Virginia, a Depression-era, pre-war housing project of pasteboard homes. The houses were connected with ribbons of asphalt on tar-based streets that wound through what had once been a large wooded area complete with ditches, winding streams, and lots of trees. We even had our own elementary school and city-run recreation center. The only black hospital in town, Norfolk General, was next to both the edge of the projects and one of the in-town enclaves of the black middle-class.
I never knew my maternal grandparents as they had died long before I was born. My mother and her four sisters were left to raise each other beginning in their late teen years. Ednae is my stepmother, the only mother I have ever known. She was short, light-skinned with full lips, a big nose, no hips, and short nappy hair that she did not like, but she was the prettiest woman I have ever known. She was a great dresser and the very definition of “style,” although she made almost all her clothes. She was never seen without makeup until her later years. I did not know that she had full dentures until I was a teenager. The fact that she was my stepmother only bothered me in that I did not look like her and did not have her style, her beauty, or her way of existing in the world. Ednae was an outgoing, gregarious person who “never met a stranger.” When she was in college, she was voted Miss Morgan State. Her confidence was awe-inspiring, and if she had any major insecurities other than some of her physical attributes, she hid them well. When her hair did not please her, she colored it or wore a wig. She was a master at makeup and had some foam rubber inserts that fit into the girdle that all women wore those days to give her hips. She was something else and my father loved her.
My father was a plasterer who learned the trade from his father. He did the best housing construction and decorative circle ceilings. He owned his own construction company. He was a true Renaissance man, born in the country, who later migrated to the city with his family. He graduated from college with a degree in animal husbandry, was a member of the Navy shore patrol during World War II, and organized and played with the Brown Bombers, one of the pre-integration black football teams. Daddy always took care of his birth family. He spent a lot of time helping my grandmother, who in my early childhood years lived with two of her daughters and my three cousins in a four-room house. We saw Grandma nearly every Sunday at Sunday School, church, and sometimes after church. She was a mother of the church, a deaconess, and quite formidable. Daddy was always respectful to his mother whom I later learned was largely responsible for my being raised by my father.
My real mother was named Marian and died in childbirth at the age of thirty. Her family lived across the water in Hampton. I never knew how my biological parents met, but I understand that she was a schoolteacher. They had been married for a few years before I was born. I look just like her, as people who knew her said—like she had spit me out. My parents’ wedding photo looks like my father could have been marrying me with an old-fashioned hairstyle. For most of my life, I believed that my mother died in the throes of childbirth without ever getting to see me. I later learned that I was born via C-section and that my mother died of complications a day or so later. So, she probably got to hold me and name me. My father gave me this information when I was middle-aged. I cannot tell you how it comforted me to know that I was not a truly motherless child.
Apparently, her death was a big surprise to the doctor and my father who was called in the middle of the night and told that his wife had died. He walked around in a daze for several days and forgot that I was in the hospital. There were plenty of people who were willing to take me and raise me as their own. Apparently, I was quite the prize because I was an exceedingly adorable baby. Daddy was so distraught that he was really considering these options when Grandma told him to bring the baby to her. I lived in my grandmother’s house for the first few years of my life. Grandma wanted to keep me, but when Daddy remarried, Ednae stated that I was to come home with them. I think that this was the only family battle my grandmother ever lost.
So, I had a happy childhood: loving parents, one sister, and two brothers. I was the oldest, but definitely not the leader of the pack. That title will always belong to my sister Joanne, who to this day is the boss of us. I was the smart one, the quiet one who stayed in the background, the one who read all the time. I felt invisible in this family of extroverts