I entered Mount Holyoke in 1965. I was a member of the first generation of Black students to be admitted to this nation’s white elite colleges and universities which until that point had either actively barred students of color or had never sought their admission. This was of course the Civil Rights movement era. To give you some context here are just a few historical markers. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech was in 1963. A few weeks’ later four young girls, Addie May Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley were murdered while attending Sunday school when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed. No one was convicted for their murders until 1977. In August, 1964 a Black man and two white men doing voter registration in Mississippi, James Chaney age 21, Michael Schwerner age 24, and Andrew Goodman age 21 were murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan during the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Mississippi Freedom Summer. The federal Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. When I entered Mount Holyoke the majority of Black people living in the South still could not vote.

    My understanding is that Whitney Young, the president of the National Urban League, spoke at Mount Holyoke in the early 1960s at a time when there were almost no students of color here and challenged the college administration by asking them what they were doing to address segregation on this campus. I have also heard that a major factor in institutions of higher learning beginning to desegregate during this period was that the federal government made evidence of efforts to desegregate an eligibility requirement for significant federal grants. So it was not just social consciousness and altruism, but self interest and the bottom line that contributed to the process of desegregation in higher education in the United States.

    I want to share with you more personal context for how I got to Mount Holyoke. I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1946 as was my twin sister, Beverly. Members of our family had begun to migrate from a little town named Dublin, Georgia, to Cleveland in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This chronology is important because there were two phases of the Great Migration that saw millions of African Americans leave the south for the promise of more economic opportunities and to escape the terrorism of Jim Crow. Those who came after World War I, as my family did, instead of after World War II, had gained more of a foothold in northern cities by the mid-twentieth century.

    My family placed the highest value upon education, or as my sister Beverly recently expressed it, religion and education were the twin pillars of our home. In fact the two were completely intertwined since our church consistently recognized and encouraged educational achievement. For example, students who returned from college during vacations were recognized during church services and were treated like visiting dignitaries. Despite the fact that every woman in my family except my sister and I did domestic work for a living at some point during their lives, one of the only jobs that Black women were permitted to have during this era, they were very well educated. My grandmother, Mattie Beall, who was born in 1886, three years after Hortense Parker graduated from Mount Holyoke, was my primary caregiver because my mother Hilda had to work. My grandmother and some of my great aunts had taught school in the post Reconstruction south which at that time did not require a college or even a normal school degree. Most segregated Black school systems in the south did not go to twelfth grade (one of many ways of ensuring that separate was not equal) so I don’t know what the highest grade was that my grandmother completed. However the brightest students who did complete the highest grade available were hired to teach. One of my great aunts, Aunt Rosa, who I grew up with actually went to Spelman College in the early twentieth century to take normal courses. Another great aunt, Aunt Bea, who died before I was born, graduated from the high school at Spelman in the early 1900s. She wrote her senior thesis on “The Oppression of Turkish Women.” Aunt Rosa taught kindergarten in Dublin and shared many of her skills with Beverly and me especially beautiful penmanship and great arts and crafts activities.

    My grandmother had three children and my mother, her youngest, was a college graduate. She graduated from a segregated Black school which still exists, Fort Valley State College, in Georgia in the early 1940s with a bachelor’s of science in education. During our short life with her (she died at the age of 34 when my sister and I were nine); she worked as a nurse’s aid and as a supermarket clerk, actually as a head cashier at a time when you had to be good at math to do the job. Like many Black college graduates of her generation she never got to use her education professionally because of the extreme racism in hiring practices at that time. Beverly and I, however, received the full benefit of her training as an educator, her intelligence, and of course her deep love for us and her desire for us to have more opportunities than she had had. I remember being four years old and when grownups would ask us what we wanted to be when we grew up, my sister and I would reply that we were going to college. It was my remarkable family that got me to Mount Holyoke. They expected excellence as a matter of course and did everything possible to make sure that we were able to take advantage of all the educational and cultural resources that a major U. S. city had to offer.

    Cleveland had an excellent public school system and I attended one of the top academic high schools, John Adams, in a very large school district. My sister and I were in honors courses and took Advanced Placement English and European history. We both did extremely well on our SATs. We had a terrific guidance counselor who held the rare belief that her best students should apply to the best colleges regardless of their race. When I entered Mount Holyoke there were less than thirty students of color on campus. There were approximately fifteen students in my freshman class, eight in the sophomore class, three in the junior class, and none in the senior class. Quite a few of those who were here when I entered came from Cleveland because it had such a strong public school system, but I was surprised to learn that some of those who were not fortunate to go to my high school had been actively discouraged by their guidance counselors from applying to Mount Holyoke.

    Because the Ivy League was closed to women, the Seven Sister colleges were widely considered to be the most competitive colleges for women in the country. Even well off students from the Midwest did not usually travel to visit colleges in the East in those days so alumnae teas were the mechanism for finding out more about these colleges. I went to a number of teas for Radcliffe, Pembroke, Smith, and Wellesley. Since segregation was absolutely the norm in social settings throughout the entire country, including the north, these teas were at the very least uncomfortable if not downright unpleasant for the Black girls who attended. But not the Mount Holyoke tea. When I went to the tea for Mount Holyoke the hostess and all the women who I met were genuinely welcoming and genuinely nice which was quite a contrast to the others. Based upon that experience, seeing slides of the beautiful campus, and reading admission materials I decided that Mount Holyoke was the right Seven Sister for me.

    A part of my thought process was that unless I went to a historically Black college I would definitely be dealing with racism, but if I went to a women’s college I at least would not have to deal with being considered inferior because of being female. My sister changed her mind about which college to attend every few weeks. At one time she was going to go to Smith and they actively recruited her, but she ended up going to the University of Chicago.

    Deciding to go to Mount Holyoke was a terrifying decision, separating from my sister, leaving my family, and being so far away from home. But I knew that I wanted to get the best and most challenging education I could possible obtain. After my mother died, her sister my Aunt LaRue became our legal guardian and parent. Based upon her income and perhaps the fact that we were orphans since we never had any contact with our father, each of us went to college on full scholarships. The National Achievement Scholarship administered by the National Merit Corporation was begun in 1964 and both Beverly and I received these prestigious scholarships during the first year that they existed.

    I have told you about my path to Mount Holyoke and now I will tell you what it was like to be here then. Nothing in my prior life could have fully prepared me for the trial by fire of being eighteen years old and entering the virtually all white, extremely elite world that was Mount Holyoke in 1965. I was struck by how similar my experiences were to those described by students interviewed in Camila Curtis-Contreras and Ahyoung An’s wonderful film, “Experienced Diversity.” I also find it truly heartbreaking that the racism, ignorance, and isolation that I faced here in the 1960s are still experienced by ALANA students today.

    The two things that most bothered me during my years at Mount Holyoke was the not-so-veiled message coming from more than a few faculty and students that number one, I did not belong here, did not deserve to be here; and number two, that I most likely would fail. I had excelled academically all of my life and suddenly I came here and was viewed as a high-risk student. I found it unbearable. The workload was daunting and for the first time in my life my highest grades were Bs and I regularly got Cs. The social and emotional isolation of being in such an alien environment also had impact upon my and other students’ academic performance. Every day was a battle on some level, a battle to be seen, to be respected, to be heard.

    The other students of color on campus were a lifeline for each other. There were so few of us and all of us were at the very least civil to each other and most of us formed close ties. There was one faculty member of color on the entire campus, Frances Kerr, who was an instructor and director of the Child Study Center. She and her family lived in Granby. Because she was Black she was not able to purchase a house here in South Hadley.

    Students also faced issues in relationship to housing. The college had not seemed to solve the problem that our physical existence posed. Some of us had roommates, but a high number of Black freshmen had coveted single rooms because as I said, the college did not quite know what to do with us. Some Black students were assigned Black roommates which seemed more than merely coincidental given our small numbers. I had a roommate and had written on my housing questionnaire that I wanted to have a roommate who was open to living with someone of a different race. My roommate was white and Jewish. At the time Mount Holyoke appeared to have statistical quotas for both Catholics and Jews since their representation in the student body stayed consistently at 12.5% for each group.

    Something that happened to a Black student in my class on her first day of college epitomizes the challenges we faced. S_____ had been assigned a roommate and her roommate had arrived before she did. When S_____ and her mother arrived her assigned roommate’s mother got extremely upset when she saw that S_____ was Black and insisted that her daughter be placed elsewhere immediately. As S_____ recounted it, the mother literally ripped the curtains she had just hung off of the walls. Just imagine the emotions with which my friend started her Mount Holyoke career. What compounded the hurt was that the girl whose mother refused to let S_____ live with her stayed in the same dormitory all year long, so S_____ had to see her constantly and be reminded of the ugly thing that had happened.

    There are so many stories I could tell about those days, but I guess the most important thing to tell you because you see me standing here tonight is that I survived. Most of us survived and went on to do important work in the world. But not all of us. Mount Holyoke contributed to undermining the emotional well being of a few of us. And no matter how we did eventually, all of us really struggled.

    The friendships that I made with some of the best women I have ever known were crucial to my survival here—and these were women of various races and ethnicities. The activities I got involved in and some which I helped to initiate also were key. There was an organization called the Civil Actions Group. Its leaders were really cool sophomores and juniors who I looked up to. I had been politically active in the Civil Rights movement in Cleveland so I naturally gravitated to students involved in activism. The Civil Rights movement was winding down nationally with the rise of Black Power and Black Nationalism, but racism was far from over and our group continued to engage with these issues. A major focus of the Civil Actions group was protesting the war in Vietnam. When I came to Mount Holyoke I was not against the war, primarily because my brilliant Advanced Placement European History teacher, who was a Korean War veteran and probably the most influential teacher I ever had, was in favor of the war. It did not take long for me to change my perspective and I was centrally involved in anti-war organizing on campus which included participating in fasts and weekly peace marches on College Street in front of the campus. Some of us also went to New York City to participate in the peace march to the United Nations in the spring of 1967 where I heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak out against America’s involvement in Vietnam.

    My sophomore year 1966-1967 was a transforming year in the history of Mount Holyoke. Twenty-five Black freshmen were in the class of 1970. Suddenly the number of Black students on campus doubled. Our greater numbers resulted in more blatant racism, but it also increased our militancy. There were some incredible student leaders in the class of 1970 and I was drawn to them because they were more willing to go for broke than some of the Black students in my class. It was students in the class of 1970 who pushed to start an Afro-American Society and I was very much involved in this effort. These demands heightened tensions among Black students as well as among white ones. Some Black students were uncomfortable with the explicit anti-racist stance that members of the Afro-American Society took and were more interested in “fitting in.” Fighting oppression is always complex and these tensions reflect that.

•    My junior year at the New School for Social Research.
•    My return to Mount Holyoke for senior year.
•    Going to Chicago in the summer of 1968 for the anti-war demonstrations at the Democratic convention. Another student I had not previously known, Betsy Pinkston, had also been in Chicago and we bonded because of the dramatic and radicalizing experience we shared. She was house president at Safford and although I didn’t live there, I supported her decision to have students vote to have parietals, that is, men in rooms in that one dorm. Men were not allowed in dorm rooms on campus at that time.
•    Another thing we did was to invite Mark Rudd, the student leader from Columbia who subsequently became a member of the Weather Underground, to campus during the fall of 1968. Mark Rudd had spoken the night before at another campus in the valley and our spontaneous invitation caused much consternation among the administration. We got great support, however, from the dean and assistant dean of the college chapel. We announced his speech that took place in the amphitheater at noon by writing messages in colored chalk on the sidewalks.
•    During my senior year, the Afro-American Society made the demand for a Black Cultural Center and when our discussions with the dean of students stalled, we held a day long silent sit-in in Mary Lyon. That resulted in our getting to meet with the members of the Board of Trustees at the top of the Time Life Building in New York City, which I believe was the first time that students had ever been permitted to meet with the trustees. We got our cultural center, which later burned under mysterious circumstances.

    When I graduated from Mount Holyoke I was well aware of the history I was making, but it felt more like a burden than a gift. I thought of myself as a living relic—those were the exact words I used because I knew there were such a tiny number of Black women on the entire face of the globe who had ever done what I had done. This was also a time when Black students were frequently questioned by other Blacks about whether we had sold out by going to elite white schools. It felt like you couldn’t win for losing.

    I continued to feel a lot of pain about the things I had experienced in college, but I also had strong ties to the college during the 1970s because of my friendship with Ellen Wade and Susan Woods in the class of 1970 and through them with Jean Grossholtz. I lived in Boston in the 1970s and other members of the Combahee River Collective including my sister and I spent many weekends here in South Hadley at Jean and Ellen’s home. I had come out as a lesbian in 1974 and was completely immersed in the feminist movement so we were linked not only by friendship but by commitment to our political ideals and our desire to build a just world.

    That is what I have committed my life to for the last forty years. I cannot believe that this year is my fortieth reunion.

    My perspective about Mount Holyoke began to change a lot in the 1980s, because it was during that period that I started getting awards from the college, was frequently invited back to speak on campus, and also taught a course on Black feminism in the fall of 1988. Because the college began to treat me as a valued alumna, much of my anger about how I had been treated as a student faded, but it has never disappeared. When I describe my relationship to Mount Holyoke in the most basic terms, I always say, I got what I came for, which was a stellar education. Getting through Mount Holyoke has given me a certain confidence about my capabilities in all the work I have done since.

    • What I’m doing now—My work as a member of the Albany Common Council.

    My hope for Mount Holyoke in the future is that it figures out the difference between being an actively anti-racist institution versus one that merely professes diversity. It is time to move to the next level, to address institutional racism seriously, and to come up with strategies for eradicating it. It is indefensible for a faculty member of color to be treated as a criminal suspect on the campus where he has worked for decades. It is completely wrong for students of color to feel like unwelcome outsiders more than one hundred years after Hortense Parker graduated. This day should become an official college sponsored annual event. We celebrate our founder Mary Lyon. Hortense Parker is a founder as well: a founder and path breaker who was instrumental in making it possible for Mount Holyoke to fulfill its vision and mission.

    I will close by saying what I most want to see occur in the near term and that is that the Presidential Search Committee identify and consider a large pool of women of color and that Mount Holyoke names a woman of color as its fourteenth president. Let’s face it. It is time for this to happen and for each of us to do everything we can to contribute to our college becoming a truly diverse institution in this new exciting era.

(c.) Barbara Smith 2009