of what we were doing even though they were not in the building.
Even those who stayed behind when a few others left were not provided with the complete plan. Instead, we told them they would need to prepare backpacks with their books for studying and their most important personal effects in case it took all day and maybe longer to make our point. They should meet after lunch outside the dining hall the next day, where specifics would be given.
We explained that we felt strongly about the need to hold back details until the last minute. And, they trusted us. During more than two years, we had built a strong reputation for being very organized and for following through on commitments. This time seemed bigger and riskier than any previous project. Would we really be able to pull off a major protest that required this kind of secrecy?
When the meeting ended, we dispersed quietly into the starry cold to not draw attention as we fanned out in different directions to our rooms. Some probably had more work to prepare for Thursday morning classes. Everyone had to think about what they would bring the next afternoon.
It was difficult, but we knew instinctively that we’d be better off if we could each get a few hours of sleep. We had a strong sense that the next day would change all of our lives forever.
Jannette O. Domingo
The Turbulent ’60s
We came of age in the turbulent decade of the 1960s. From Florida, Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and the Caribbean, we saw the protests, the beatings, the deaths. We were in elementary school when the black community of Montgomery, Alabama, boycotted segregated public buses and when Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi. We were in junior high school when Freedom Riders risked their lives to challenge segregated bus travel in the South. By the time we got to high school, NAACP leader Medgar Evers had been assassinated in Mississippi; four girls, close to us in age, were killed in the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama; and Bull Connor’s storm troopers unleashed fire hoses and police dogs on ordinary people peacefully protesting segregation in Alabama. In the summer of 1963, we were uplifted by the vision of countless people marching onto the mall in Washington, DC to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. affirm the dream of a non-racist America. Two years later he would be on the front line as state troopers savagely beat civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
In the midst of all this, Myra Rose was growing up in Virginia where they still celebrated Richmond’s glory days as the capital of the Confederacy. Despite the ostracism by white students, her teachers’ attempts to ignore her intelligence, and a guidance counselor’s efforts to steer her into trade school despite the advanced placement courses she had taken, Myra persevered at a newly integrated high school. Being the oldest sibling in a strong and nurturing close-knit family headed by college-educated parents, and her father’s encouragement of her love of writing and debate meant more to Myra than anything she faced at school.
Farther south in Tallahassee, Florida, Marilyn Holifield faced a more aggressively hate-filled environment in her newly integrated high school. White students vilified her daily and called her “nigger.” But the child who loved growing roses with her father was well aware of her family’s legacy of resistance. Her grandfather had stood up to racist terrorism in Mississippi, and her father had been able to make his way from the Mississippi countryside to college at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and ultimately to Tallahassee. Her mother had ventured into the South from Boston to practice nursing. Their strength and dignity became her own.
The rest of our group of eight attended high school up north in Massachusetts and New York where de facto segregation and institutional racism collided with the Civil Rights Movement. Aundrea White lived in Boston, a city known for its rabid ethnocentrism, segregation, and racism. Nevertheless, it was a city that was an important destination for southern black migrants like Aundrea’s parents as well as Caribbean immigrants like Marilyn H.’s maternal grandparents, who emigrated to Boston from Barbados and Suriname. There was no way Aundrea’s father would go back to the indignities he and her mother had suffered growing up in Mississippi. When he retired from the army, the family settled in Boston. Aundrea was an “army brat” who had lived in many different places. She never fully embraced the Boston accent or internalized a Boston-centered view of the world. The one constant was her loving and open-armed family which always incorporated newfound relatives and friends.
Joyce Frisby grew up less than one hundred miles away from Boston in Springfield, Massachusetts. Her parents had left Baltimore, Maryland with ambition and junior high and senior high school educations in search of fewer racially motivated economic limitations. They settled in an integrated neighborhood where class differences were more apparent to a self-conscious Joyce than racial differences. Despite her father’s resourcefulness, the family struggled financially, and Joyce would never lose the habits of frugality that she developed in those days. Joyce was the eldest daughter, second eldest of her siblings, and ever the responsible one.
Bridget Van Gronigen, Jannette O. Domingo, and Marilyn Allman lived in New York City and Harold Buchanan lived on Long Island, in the exurbs of the city. Jannette and Marilyn A. were children of working-class Caribbean immigrants. Bridget and her family had recently immigrated to the United States from the former colony British Guiana (now Guyana). Having grown up in British Guiana through her early teens, Bridget’s lilting Guyanese accent distinguished her from first generation Caribbean Americans. As a newcomer to the US, she was reserved and formal, negotiating a foreign education system and learning the implications of being black in America. Like those who migrated from the South, for Caribbean immigrants and their children, the promise of better education and health and higher incomes outweighed concerns of being victimized by racism.
Marilyn A. was the youngest child of immigrant parents whose religious and cultural values were reflected in her becoming an exceptionally articulate student. As a scholarship student in a prestigious private school, Marilyn bypassed the New York City public high schools. Her upbringing in the church was evident in the purposefulness and sense of mission that made her a leader. She was elected student government president and head of several clubs—even at a white upper-class girls’ high school. Jannette also bypassed the regular public schools, spending six years in one of the city’s most selective junior/senior public high schools for girls. She was a popular student, elected captain of the cheerleaders and chairperson—or producer—of the Senior Show, the annual musical revue that was the climax of senior class activities. But few of her friendships extended beyond school hours when she and her white peers returned to sharply different neighborhoods. Her church friends and family filled her social life, and African music and dance, as well as her father’s science fiction books, expanded her world. While neither the private school nor the selective examination high school environment was overtly racist, microaggressions communicated clearly that accomplished black students like Marilyn A. and Jannette were considered exceptions to stereotypes internalized by their classmates, teachers, and school administrators.
Meanwhile, Harold and his family had fled New York City for a small black community out past the city limits on Long Island. He was one of a few blacks in school, but he had genuine friendships with white classmates who shared his interest in music. He grew up in a close-knit and outgoing family in which his parents were great role models. They shared tasks and responsibilities without being strictly defined or limited by stereotypical gender roles, an approach to life that would later serve Harold well as the Brother among the Seven Sisters at Swarthmore.
The Northern “struggle for Negro rights”3 to equal employment, education, and housing opportunities provided the backdrop to our high school years in New York and Massachusetts. Thousands of students boycotted
