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