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Seven Sisters and a Brother: Friendship, Resistance, and Untold Truths Behind Black Student Activism in the 1960s
Library of Congress Cataloging
ISBN: (p) 978-1-64250-160-5 (e) 978-1-64250-161-2
BISAC: HIS056000—HISTORY / African American
LCCN: 2019948615
Printed in the United States of America
Please note some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.
To our parents, whose love, sacrifice, hard work, and determination sustained us through college and who proved to us every day that Black Moms and Black Dads Matter!
To the College’s black custodial staff—our true in loco parentis at Swarthmore—who supported us, fed us, watched over us, encouraged us, and kept us safe.
To the SASS members and other black students who participated in the Takeover and all the supporters who took up our cause.
Table of Contents
The Takeover Day Zero: Boiling Point
The Takeover Day One: Locked Inside
The Takeover Day Two: Raising Our Profile
Not in Kansas Anymore—Myra’s Story
The Takeover Day Three: Flavors of Support
We Had to Do Something!—Aundrea’s Story
The Takeover Day Four: Sunday Morning
Fearful to Fearless—Joyce’s Story
The Takeover Day Five: Meeting the Press
Not from Around Here—Bridget’s Story
To See the World—Jannette’s Story
The Takeover Day Six: Keeping Up Morale
Seeing the Unseen—Marilyn A’s Story
The Takeover Day Seven: Standoff
From Down South to Up North—Marilyn H’s Story
The Takeover Day Eight: Change of Course
Tao: Finding My Way—Harold’s Story
We all met between 1965 and 1966 as undergraduates at the highly selective Swarthmore College in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was a time when elite colleges were just beginning to enroll significant numbers of blacks, several being first-generation college students.
We were seven young women and one young man from diverse families and backgrounds. We developed enduring friendships tightly intertwined with activism through the Swarthmore Afro-American Students Society (SASS) which we organized with like-minded black students on campus.
We didn’t know that our bond would take on almost mythical proportions and remain in the minds of generations of black students. The legends that emerged did not include our real names, and few knew anything about us as individuals, our motivations, our hometowns, or our stories. Little changed until 2009, on the fortieth anniversary of SASS, when the current black students at Swarthmore invited us to tell them about the founding of the organization.
They had not known about us as Joyce and Marilyn A., who became mathematics majors; Jannette, a political science/international relations major; Marilyn H., an economics major; Bridget and Myra, biology and chemistry majors, respectively; and Aundrea, a sociology and anthropology major. One of the revelations in this telling of our stories is that they didn’t know Harold, another mathematics major, was also an integral part of our group.
They had not heard how we drew on our family and spiritual roots and reached out to the black adults from nearby communities for strength and, ultimately, for rescue. They only knew that we called for black contributions to be represented in classrooms, campus culture, student life, and college faculty and administration, and that, eventually, we took over a major campus space to ensure those demands were taken seriously. That Takeover brought all academic activity to a halt to focus on our demands until a completely unexpected tragedy ended our action abruptly.
Some of the students at the fortieth anniversary event had heard that the period between 1967 and 1970 saw black student protests on hundreds of campuses. Indeed, some of their parents had been involved in these protests, but they had no way of knowing how much the actions at the College we attended were inspired by or looked like what happened elsewhere.
When we gathered at the College all those decades later to share what happened, the rapport that we had developed as undergraduates was still evident among us. We had the mutual trust to tackle and achieve the formidable task of recapturing our stories, some of them shrouded in inaccurate reporting and many others discarded over decades, buried under the dust of history.
After the anniversary reunion, the two Marilyns and Joyce returned home and began to carve out time to capture their memories; however, opportunities to do so always seemed elusive, and not being professional historians or writers, we despaired that we didn’t have the resources