Seven Sisters and a Brother: Friendship, Resistance, and Untold Truths Behind Black Student Activism in the 1960s (African American Author, For Fans of Bryan Stevenson or A Drop of Midnight)

Copyright © 2019, 2021 Marilyn Allman Maye, Harold S. Buchanan, Jannette O. Domingo, Joyce Frisby Baynes, Marilyn Holifield, Myra E. Rose, Bridget Van Gronigen Warren, and Aundrea White Kelley.

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Cover Photo Courtesy of Marilyn Holifield

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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 Number: 2019948615

ISBN: (h) 978-1-64250-160-5 (p) 978-1-64250-771-3 (e) 978-1-64250-161-2

BISAC: HIS056000—HISTORY / African American

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

Foreword

Introduction

The Takeover Day Zero: Boiling Point

Children of the Sixties

The Takeover Day One: Locked Inside

The Swarthmore Experiment

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

SASS—On Our Own

Fearful to Fearless—Joyce’s Story

Photo Gallery

The Takeover Day Five: Meeting the Press

Not fromAround 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: FindingMy Way—Harold’s Story

Epilogue

Afterword

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

References

Foreword

The past is often a prologue. A view. A lesson. A window to what lies ahead.

The past—or in other words, history—is often a guidebook by which we either learn or decide to do better. Or it is an abyss into which we continually fall time and time again.

So it is with the present-day United States of America and racial justice. Social justice. Economic justice. And, of course, politics. After so many gains over the past six decades, in many ways since the historic presidency of Barack H. Obama, it seems as if America is sliding backward. It seems as if there is now a palpable rise in anti-democratic, pro-white nationalism movements and domestic political violence that we thought we had overcome as Americans.

The greatest example before us right now, beyond protections from law enforcement abuses on the Black community, is voting rights. Hard to believe that something my ancestors (and the ancestors of all Black persons descended from slaves) fought for since Abraham Lincoln was president, is now on the political chopping block again at the dawn of a new century, some 240 years after our founding.

We clearly have not learned the painful lessons of our past to secure a more perfect union.

Indeed, what is behind us often catches up if we do not find the courage to face it, challenge it, and work together to fix it. In that vein, it is hard to believe that it was some fifty-six years ago that eight black teenagers, seven young women and one young man, walked onto the campus of Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore College for the first time as freshmen—among the first in an era of dramatically increased numbers of first-generation Black students being admitted to elite colleges and universities. Beyond that trailblazing experience, just several years into their tenure as students, they worked in solidarity to overtake the administration building in 1969 and get the attention of the college leadership regarding racial equity and justice. As founders of the Swarthmore Afro-American Students Society, these women and one man became legends decades after their famous stand.

I am honored to re-introduce this outstanding autobiographical work written by heroes of mine. I learned about them in college in the late 1980s and I had the honor as a young female attorney of color to practice law with Marilyn Holifield at the international law firm of Holland and Knight LLP from 2004–2009. Marilyn, of course, is one of the eight trailblazers of a more diverse Swarthmore College.

The updated paperback version of Seven Sisters and a Brother retells the story of a Black Power sit-in protesting decreased enrollment and hiring of African Americans at Swarthmore College and demanding an African American Studies curriculum. The book also includes autobiographical chapters providing a cross-sectional view into their young lives, describing what it was like to be a young Black activist on a majority white college campus during the Civil Rights era of the late 1960s—a pivotal and earth-shaking moment in American history. These eight young people, uncommon for their time, summoned the courage and the action to make their voices heard, and in doing so had a powerful impact on their campus and the surrounding community for years to come.

I cannot recommend Seven Sisters and a Brother enough. For years, the media and some in the Swarthmore community portrayed the peaceful 1969 protest in a false light. These collective narratives provide a very necessary and overdue retelling of the revolution that took place. The group of eight student protestors have only recently begun to receive credit for the school’s greater inclusiveness, as well as the influence their actions had on universities around the country. As is true in our nation right now, their experience at Swarthmore reveals how often our experiences and impact as Black people are either overlooked, nearly forgotten, or hidden. African American history written by Black authors about the risks they took to achieve change that benefitted all must be shared to the broader American community. The reality is that the actions of these brave young people caused enduring change that resulted in a better, more vibrant, and more diverse Swarthmore. They paved the way to expand academic canons to include not only Black Studies but areas of study focusing on other groups that had been excluded or denigrated by Eurocentric canons.

I cannot think of a more consequential book than this one for a new generation of Black Lives Matter activists, lawyers, and advocates, as well as every American. It renews our faith in democracy, energizes us to always stand up for a just cause, and brings the American experiment full circle for us all: to constantly strive to become a more perfect union.

–Sophia A. Nelson

Award-winning American author, journalist, and adjunct professor of Philosophy and Religion at Christopher Newport University

Introduction

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 stories is that they didn’t know Harold, another mathematics major, was also an integral part of our group.

They had not heard how we drew on our family and spiritual roots and reached out to the black adults from nearby communities for strength and, ultimately, for rescue. They only knew that we called for black contributions to be represented in classrooms, campus culture, student life, and college faculty and administration, and that, eventually, we took over a major campus space to ensure those demands were taken seriously. That Takeover brought all academic activity to a halt to focus on our demands until a completely unexpected tragedy ended our action abruptly.

Some of the students at the fortieth anniversary event had heard that the period between 1967 and 1970 saw black student protests on hundreds of campuses. Indeed, some of their parents had been involved in these protests, but they had no way of knowing how much the actions at the College we attended were inspired by or looked like what happened elsewhere.

When we gathered at the College all those decades later to share what happened, the rapport that we had developed as undergraduates was still evident among us. We had the mutual trust to tackle and achieve the formidable task of recapturing our stories, some of them shrouded in inaccurate reporting and many others discarded over decades, buried under the dust of history.

After the anniversary reunion, the two Marilyns and Joyce returned home and began to carve out time to capture their memories; however, opportunities to do so always seemed elusive, and not being professional historians or writers, we despaired that we didn’t have the resources to do the stories justice. Marilyn A. contacted black faculty to see if there was a current history major who might tackle the task as a research project.

Five years later, with the support of the College’s then-President Rebecca Chopp and Dr. Allison Dorsey, a history professor and then-chair of the Black Studies Program, the College mobilized resources to offer a one-time course entitled Black Liberation 1969. For their rigorous historical research into the events surrounding the Crisis, students reached out to us and our contemporaries for photographs, artifacts, and interviews, and digitized the materials for permanent online access.

President Chopp’s support of that research and her formal invitation to return to campus deeply moved us. We had lived to see Swarthmore College acknowledge that what we had done had been a gift to the institution, exactly as we had conceived our actions to be, despite all the negative press to the contrary at the time.

As the College honors its 150th anniversary, or sesquicentennial, we seek to examine our history critically and with self-reflection…

…to specifically examine events at Swarthmore in 1969 that led to the creation of the Black Cultural Center, the formation of Black Studies at Swarthmore, and ultimately, to a much more vibrant, diverse, and inclusive campus environment.

…your involvement at this pivotal juncture in the College’s history is a critical part… Your story has not been documented formally, even though it is important to anyone who truly wants to understand how the Civil Rights Movement was reflected on Swarthmore’s campus. Your activism paved the way for generations of students who now enjoy the fruits of your labor and who…continue to carry your torch…

Because your story is so important to our understanding of Swarthmore’s history, I write to invite you…to come to campus Garnet Homecoming and Family Weekend…

[Your story will be] stored in McCabe Library, so that your [legacies] are forever a part of Swarthmore’s narrative…

I hope you will consider this invitation and the powerful impact your presence would have for our students and all of us here at the College.¹

In the 2014 sesquicentennial anniversary celebration, a chapter of the book published for the occasion, Crisis and Change, begins with this statement:

Institutions can seldom identify a specific moment when they changed direction, but it’s arguable that the Swarthmore College we see today—rigorous, creative, accessible, diverse, and committed to civic and social responsibility—issued from the eight-day crisis that rocked the institution in January 1969.²

Seeing the College acknowledge that the eight-day crisis was central to the College we see today—and knowing that the eight of us were at the heart of it—were key catalysts for us getting more serious to record our memories of it. We knew that we had a story to tell, and we had seen prior attempts by others that focused on the Crisis as it impacted the College, but did not adequately explore our motivations and actions.

In individual and group dialogue with the young researchers, we made it clear that Quaker values were, implicitly or explicitly, a key factor in choosing Swarthmore for our education. Academic rigor was another key factor. We were not afraid of a challenge. We had not, however, expected that head-on confrontation with the College administration would be the major challenge that it proved to be. Unbeknownst to us, the College was considerably reluctant to accept many of us. Some institutional leaders had expressed concern that we would not and perhaps could not perform up to their standards. Through our actions during the development of SASS, we challenged the administration as equals. In the end, we demonstrated not only that students of color could be the equals of white students, but that we even had something to teach the adults.

The strong interest of the current generation of students in understanding how and why we were able to do what we did made it clear that we needed to spend time getting back in touch with our youthful selves and reconnecting with the history we had created. When and how to do this? Marilyn H. suggested we meet in Panama, so Bridget could join us, as that was where she lived at the time. So, the next summer, after the sesquicentennial, we met in Panama, with several spouses, and began to document our experiences. The dynamics among us and the drive within us were the same as they were fifty years prior.

As we swapped life stories under cool breezes in tropical Panama City, we were stunned at the many commonalities in our backgrounds that we had not recognized before. Over a three-year period, we embarked on writing our individual and collective memories, and it became clearer why we bonded into an extended family on campus, and how activism in our individual lives since college continues and extends what we did there. The good news is that what we discovered is not specific to our era, but is accessible to any generation. We believe our narratives will answer questions the current college generation, and even our peers, have asked us, and will inspire and empower them and others.

As we unearthed memories during those Panama conversations, we arranged many versions of our common college experiences into piles and sorted them into themes. The most dramatic entries told about the January 1969 Takeover, but we became convinced that the Takeover happened only because of the metamorphoses in our individual lives. So, we interspersed the chronology among narratives of family, first encounters with the College, and lives changed as a result.

Writing a choral memoir matches the way we have always worked together: collaborating in analyzing our situation, planning solutions together, communicating in combined voices, and avoiding highlighting a single leader. This, then, is our shared story. The story of Seven Sisters and a Brother.

The Takeover

Day Zero

Day Zero

Boiling Point

It was shortly before midnight on Wednesday, January 8, 1969, the third day of classes after students had returned to campus from the 1968 winter holiday break. We were seniors and juniors at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, eleven miles southwest of Philadelphia. In those days, fall semester didn’t end before the holidays. Classes resumed for two more weeks of instruction before we had to study for exams and turn in final papers and projects.

Even twenty-four hours before the planned action, most of those who would participate did not know the details of what would occur, not even who would be designated as spokespersons.

Only a handful of members of the Swarthmore Afro-American Students Society (SASS) were in on the planning. Since Marilyn A., Jannette, and Harold lived in New York, Marilyn A.’s house in Harlem was designated as the venue to work out details between Christmas and the New Year. Traveling from her home in Boston, Aundrea, the secretary of SASS, joined the three New Yorkers. We represented three of the group known informally as the Seven Sisters, along with Harold, the one brother among the original planners. Harold had visited the admissions office numerous times in the weeks before the holiday break to examine the doors and windows and develop a plan for securing them. He had managed to get floor plans of the office space, and the four of us huddled around them, spread across the Allmans’ dining room table, and plotted strategy. If this visit over Christmas week with its intense conversations seemed a little strange to Reverend and Mrs. Allman, they gave no indication beyond their puzzled expressions. It would make sense to them two weeks later, when they received a call from the College stating that their daughter was a ringleader of the group of black students who had occupied the admissions office.

Aundrea, as usual, was recording our decisions in her notebooks. Each of the collaborators had left the Harlem planning session with a list of items to purchase for the action that was beginning to appear inevitable. Now, after classes each day that week, we sisters were checking in at each other’s dorm rooms, to make sure we had everything we would need.

Don’t forget to bring Vaseline for your ashy legs.

We might have been preparing for a winter hike in the woods around campus for all anyone could tell.

Yes, and extra bars of soap and rolls of toilet paper.

Laughing and joking about everything, as we often did, no one observing us would have realized that we were organizing something that might be dangerous or result in our expulsion from college.

Put cans of sardines and crackers in your bags.

I hate the smell of sardines. Disgusting.

No problem, I’ve got them. I know how to make a great meal with them.

That would probably have been Aundrea. Her father was a military man. She had lived in Asia and Europe and, having been a Camp Fire Girl herself, seemed to know all about survival and making do in difficult situations.

We’ll need flashlights.

That would have been Harold, the practical one, the only brother present in those dormitory planning sessions. He was always a valued addition to our group of seven women because he practiced collaborative leadership as we did and could be trusted to do exactly what he said. We knew we could count on him to show up with the chains, padlocks, and other hardware on his list.

Together, we wrote and practiced saying the words we would use to begin our action. We decided we would rely on others outside our inner circle to be the primary SASS spokespersons to the administration, so we could focus on writing our positions and managing operations.

Don Mizell would be one of the spokespersons. In a 2014 video documentary, he recalls hearing a frantic knock on his dorm room door at midnight, to which he responded reluctantly. Several females from our black student organization, he says, summoned him to a meeting across campus that he was not expecting and didn’t know anything about.

Don was not the only one hustled out of bed that Wednesday night to come to Bond Hall’s lower level for an emergency gathering of SASS members. The sisters were not among the young ladies who called him. We were already at the surprise briefing getting ready to take and answer questions as various late arrivals, young men and young women, joined, bleary-eyed. The looks on some faces queried:

Did something happen today that we didn’t hear about at dinner?

Others had that knowing look, full of excitement. They had realized since before the break that we might have to back up our demands with more than words if the College administration did not respond with real solutions. Fifteen of us had already met with the faculty and administration on Monday morning, the first day back, to see if the administration had made any progress on our demands while we were away. People on campus in the Phoenix, the campus newspaper, and in open letters that were circulated as flyers, referred to these meetings as negotiations, and everyone on both sides knew that negotiations might break down. These black students were bracing themselves to know what we would plan to do if our demands were not met soon. Maybe this was the time they would find out.

Each of us who was in on the plan took turns carefully introducing it to the group.

Listen up, everyone. You all remember when SASS members walked out in October and refused to cooperate further with the College Admissions Policy Committee until our four demands were met. Well, our first demand was that the Committee’s report be taken out of General Reserve in the library and replaced by a new report that SASS would help the Committee rewrite and that would be suitable for public perusal. Every day that the original report remains open for everyone in the College to read is a day too many.

And every day that the Admissions Committee fails to add their resources to our outreach activities to recruit more Black students for the fall is a day we lose potential applicants to other colleges.

The same is true for recruiting black faculty. Their lack of commitment means other colleges get to hire the best candidates.

So, why are we here in the middle of the night? If you agree that the time for talk without action is over, we invite you to stay tonight for further instructions.

The offending report was the last straw after two years of activism focused on increasing black enrollment in the elite college and on recognizing the contributions of African Americans in academic study. An Admissions Committee set up by the College administration had spent the summer of 1968 preparing a study of all of the Negro students who had enrolled in the recent past to justify the slow pace of recruiting more of us. They had violated our privacy by publishing so many details about our families and high school preparation that, although names were not published, the small size of the College and the miniscule black population made it easy to match the data to specific students. When we got wind of the report being made available to the entire college in the campus library, SASS immediately demanded that the report be removed and revised to take out the inappropriate data. The administration took the high-handed position that they would not respond to demands and saw no need to withdraw or revise the report.

Even those black students who were not given to activism were angered by being treated with such insensitivity. Debates in the campus newspaper and a vote of support by the majority white Student Council notwithstanding, the Dean of Admissions had continued to refuse to remove the report. The editorial board of the newspaper and certain other campus constituencies backed the Dean. Things had come to a boiling point.

The midnight meeting at the end of what we would count as Day Zero was seared in the memory of Mike H., a freshman at the time. He recalled it forty years later when he recorded for the Black Liberation 1969 Archive:

…the leaders came to us and said, If you cannot go all the way, leave now. They did not define what that meant, all the way. So, most of the black students stayed. There were some who did, in fact, leave…although those students who did not stay wrote a letter to the Phoenix stating that they were in support 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