A.’s New York City in 1964. That same year, in New York City, protests of police brutality morphed into the six-day long “Harlem Riot.” Violent protests also erupted in response to police brutality and other festering injustices in Philadelphia in 1964, Watts in 1965, and Newark in 1967. On April 4, 1968, we were Swarthmore students, meeting with our counterparts at Haverford College, when we learned that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. In the days that followed, anger, grief, and pent up frustration erupted in riots in Chicago, Washington, DC, Baltimore, and more than one hundred other cities across the country.
College Students Take the Lead
When Joyce enrolled at Swarthmore in 1964; Harold, Marilyn A., and Marilyn H. in 1965; and Aundrea, Bridget, Jannette, and Myra in 1966, college students had become the cutting edge of the Civil Rights Movement as the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and then the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) rose to national prominence. In the early 1960s, college students’ non-violent confrontations with segregation and the violent responses to their lunch counter sit-ins, wade-ins at segregated pools, and pray-ins at whites-only churches drew greater national attention to the Civil Rights Movement. CORE’s Freedom Rides in 1961 and the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965, in which SNCC played a major role, were highly publicized events exposing the depths of American racism and arousing widespread outrage. SNCC’s grassroots voter registration campaign in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project and the murder of three of its young volunteers—twenty-one-year-old local organizer James Chaney and two white men from New York City, twenty-year-old Andrew Goodman, and twenty-four-year-old Michael Schwerner—starkly highlighted the commitment of young people to the civil rights struggle.
International conflicts increasingly shaped college students’ political perspectives and expanded the scope of our activism to include anti-war, anti-colonialism, and anti-apartheid protests. Opposition to the Vietnam War, in particular, overshadowed the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, forcing him not to seek reelection in 1968. Many of us participated in anti-war demonstrations on campus. Most of the troops were our contemporaries. Because young black men were disproportionately represented among the draftees, we all knew someone—a relative, friend, or acquaintance—who had been killed or maimed or lived in fear of being sent to Vietnam to fight and possibly die in this unpopular war.
Even as the Vietnam War dragged on throughout the 1960s, many African and Caribbean nations won their independence. Their victories generated pride for the African Diaspora and reasons to celebrate. But the ongoing struggles against intransigent regimes in Southern Africa, especially apartheid South Africa and Namibia, known then as South West Africa, resonated with our own African American experience. The 1960 Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa was recent history. As on many other campuses, student activists at Swarthmore commemorated the massacre and called for the College to divest itself of investments in South Africa. As students from South Africa and Namibia became 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,
