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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
