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BY HANNAH PURKEY

In print | February 21, 2008

In honor of Black History Month, Vice President Maurice Eldridge ’61 held a fireside chat sponsored by the Swarthmore African-American Student Society on Monday evening, in which he discussed the state of race relations during his own years as a Swarthmore student.

“It is Black History Month and SASS wanted to keep the focus local, on the institution of Swarthmore,” said Yoshi Johnson ‘08, one of the event’s organizers. “Specifically we wanted to bring Eldridge’s perspective on what it was like then, when he was one of the few African American students, and now, when over 36 percent [of the student body] are students of color.”

In his talk, Eldridge spoke about what it was like to be at the college at the height of the civil rights movement. Eldridge came to Swarthmore when he was 17. “It was a place I wanted to be – I was excited to come,” Eldridge said in his talk. Eldridge was in ninth grade in the D.C. public school system when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Brown vs. Board of Education to desegregate public schools.

He was then recruited to a progressive boarding school, and it was the headmaster of the school who encouraged him to apply to Swarthmore.

“When I think back on that part of the experience of getting to Swarthmore, I realized that my headmaster and his wife really pushed me out here as an experiment to push Swarthmore to go further in the right direction,” Eldridge said. At the time, there were very few students of color on campus, and when Eldridge arrived in the fall of 1957, he was shocked by the school’s atmosphere.

“Here I was, this naïve, eager, aggressive, liberal person, expecting to come to a paradise where what I felt and believed in and what was really true in life was going to be a part of my experience at Swarthmore, and sadly, it was not,” Eldridge said.

Eldridge explained that the social aspect of the college was split between two groups: the half of campus that was more progressive and socially active students and the half that was dominated by fraternities and athletics. Unlike Swarthmore today, both of these groups lacked diversity. “The black people were mostly people who made beds and served food in the dinning halls,” Eldridge said.

While at Swarthmore, Eldridge became politically involved in desegregation, helping to organize bus trips and marches on Washington. Partly because of this involvement and its effects on his academics, a dean advised him to take a year off from school. “He said to me that maybe I didn’t belong at Swarthmore,” Eldridge said. “That was the right thing to say because there was no way I wasn’t going to come back after hearing that.”

After his year off working, Eldridge returned to Swarthmore with a new motivation. “I came back determined to be myself, chart my own course,” Eldridge said. “Part of not being in a community is that it allows the majority to project onto you what a black person is.”

Many African-American students at the time lost track of their identities because of the lack of support systems for minorities in colleges. “In colleges at the time, if you were a person of color, and there were very few on campus, there wouldn’t be a large peer group, or black faculty,” Christopher Densmore, curator of the Friends Historical Library, said. “Those kinds of support structures were not there. It was a different kind of environment.”

Although he said it took some work, Eldridge was able to come back to Swarthmore as the person he wanted to be. “It happened because I took charge of my life,” Eldridge said. “It doesn’t only have to do with race. Every adolescent has to at one point.”

Student’s reactions to Eldridge’s talk were mostly positive. “It was really powerful to finally hear his story,” Ayanna Johnson ’09 said. “And it was interesting to learn what Swarthmore was like in the past. I felt like I was sitting at home listening to my grandfather tell me his personal history.”

“I’m really glad he could come,” Johnson said. “The turn-out was amazing.”

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