would be more than a week before they would see their desks again. Neither did we.
A more non-threatening group of college students would have been hard to find. We were all in reasonably good academic standing at, arguably, the best small college in the nation. We had to prepare for fall semester final exams. We carried our books along with us, so we could keep up with writing final papers and test preparation in case the sit-in took a day or two longer than the one or two days we had anticipated.
Other SASS members waited at the back entrance for the signal to come in. Once all the office employees had left and Harold had secured the front door, Aundrea and Marilyn A. hurriedly unlocked the chained rear door and let in the rest. A flurry of activity followed as each one took in the premises and began settling in.
What needs to be done?
Help Harold tape the black paper to the windows and push the wedges under the door.
Organize the survival kit stuff and put it in one spot. We need to know how much we have so we can figure out how to make it last. How many cans of sardines did we list on that planning sheet?
Aundrea and Jannette will be in charge of food distribution to make sure we don’t run out. We know how to make food stretch.
Put the first aid stuff here, flashlights and batteries.
I brought my record player and Nina Simone, James Brown, Aretha, gospel music. Anyone else brought records? Put them over there.
Harold, do you have that guard duty schedule ready?
Yes, everyone has to take a turn at guard duty, all day and all night.
Two hours at a time. At the doors or at the window ledge.
The New York Times in 1969 was wrong in its estimate. It would actually be several days before the number of student protesters would reach forty. A 2019 New York Times profile of Ruth W., one of the freshmen occupiers, cited her fifty-year-old memory as counting twelve occupants. Perhaps twelve entered in the first hour, shortly after those who first secured the premises let them in. Before that first night ended, there were at least twice that many members of SASS who had brought sleeping bags, books, and enough snacks and personal essentials that would allow them to be away from their dorm rooms for a day or two. Other freshmen besides Ruth came inside on day one, despite some worrying about what their parents would say when they found out.
Setting the record straight may take decades. The official campus newspaper, the Phoenix, also got it wrong in many ways. Its coverage of the start of the admissions office occupation identified almost none of the students who led the action and invented an implausible narrative of the chain of events that claimed the spokespersons negotiated with the College dean to access the premises.
What we would later call the “Takeover,” but what the College administration dubbed the “Crisis” had just begun. While it was carried out under the auspices of SASS, in actuality the protest was the brainchild of a group of students known as the Seven Sisters, plus one Brother.
None of the media’s photographs or articles recognized that it was women who had organized and led the Takeover. No press accounts named or showed a woman. We had intentionally asked some brothers to be the media spokespersons. It’s likely the reporters never asked them who planned the Takeover, where or when.
Since its founding, Swarthmore College has had a mission of not just educating students academically, but of educating them to make a difference in the world. Swarthmoreans call it their “Quaker values.” It has historically been students of the College who have spoken out and protested about the apparent discrepancies between Quaker values and the College’s investments in things that don’t improve the planet, such as apartheid and fossil fuel. We were a part of that tradition when we peacefully took over the College Admissions Office in 1969. Little did we know that forty years later, the College administration would call our action the single most consequential event in its 150-year history. What they called the “Crisis” was the cataclysmic event that forced college administrators to wake up and respond to our demands for respect. Respect for black people. Respect for black history. Respect for black culture. Black students refused to be invisible.
The College would be put to a test of its values like never before. It had failed more than once in earlier tests.
Harold s. Buchanan
Experiments
Swarthmore College is a small, private, coed liberal arts institution located about 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia. The idyllic campus of more than 400 acres, shared by approximately 1,000 students during our years there, doubles as a free public arboretum complete with a creek and hiking trails through the private woods. The meticulously maintained rolling grounds and majestic stone buildings create a landscape that was the deciding factor for many of us to attend college there.
In 1864, one year before the end of the Civil War, prominent Quakers founded the College. Its founders included noted women’s rights advocate and abolitionist Lucretia Mott. One of the distinguishing features of the Quaker religion is the emphasis on individual responsibility. In examining ideas and seeking answers, everyone is free to speak until a consensus is reached.
Swarthmore College remains heavily influenced by Quaker values and traditions. Consistent with those beliefs, seeking and testing the truth is the basis for what Swarthmoreans call “academic rigor.” The Quaker quest for truth has historically extended beyond academics to social justice and led the founders to create the College as a “grand experiment” in coeducation, that is, teaching men and women together.
Quakers had a long history of fighting against slavery and participating in the Underground Railroad. When we arrived on campus in the late 1960s, we were surprised to discover that ours were the first classes with more than a handful of black students. Certainly, this socially conscious community with its long history of fighting against slavery and for the rights of blacks would not deny equal opportunity to attend their institution. It shocked us to later find out that the absence of blacks was intentional. Around 1920, concerned members of the community tried to get the College to correct its de facto exclusion of blacks. They found a qualified black student and money to pay for her education, but the president declined to admit her, citing other priorities. Later in the 1920s, the College accidently admitted a black athlete from Philadelphia. When the College discovered the error, it went into crisis mode and found a way to rescind his admission. Finally, in 1943, after years of pressure from students and others in the community, the Board of Managers determined that there was no actual policy to bar blacks and admitted the first black student. Over the next twenty years, through 1963, Swarthmore admitted fewer than thirty black students, an average of little more than one per year.
In 1964, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, the Rockefeller Foundation and other organizations gave grants to Swarthmore and other colleges, essentially paying them to find and accommodate black students. Swarthmore would not have to tap into its rich endowment for a second experiment with black admissions. It never occurred to the College that it might benefit from this endeavor even more than the blacks that they somewhat reluctantly sought to help.
Our group of seven sisters and a brother did not go to Swarthmore to change the College. Our aim was simply to get a good education and enjoy college life, but it didn’t take long for us to discover inconsistencies in the Swarthmore story. Elite colleges pride themselves on their rich heritage and time-honored traditions, and Swarthmore was no exception, priding itself on the number of Rhodes Scholars and Nobel Laureates it had produced. In the 1960s, there were other traditions, such as mandatory attendance at a weekly meeting called “Collection,” similar to an assembly in high school. Upon graduation, tradition permitted senior women to pick a rose from the Dean Bond Rose Garden. Swarthmore’s de facto policy to deny admission to black students was also a tradition and part of its heritage, but one that was wrong and contrary to the College’s espoused values.
With