Monthly Archives: March 2015

Unwavering Dissent (Part I): Challenging a Curriculum of Racism in 1970

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by Emma Kioko 

Note: This is the first of a two-part post about the climate of racial activism on campus between 1970 and 1972. The two posts center on two events: the “near sit-in” of March 12 (1970) and the first fight for Perry House (1972). Woven through both events are incredibly intelligent and nuanced discussions of race introduced and led by students including Bryn Mawr’s Sisterhood. These women paved the way for truly engaged activism on campus and their efforts should be celebrated and remembered.

Read Part I here now and don’t forget to check back to read the second post: Unwavering Dissent Part II: Challenging the Rhetoric of Racism in 1972 and the First Fight for Perry!

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Bryn Mawr and Haverford College News, April 15, 1969. Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, Bryn Mawr, PA.

An Initial Upset in 1970 

We shall find you a house for a cultural center. As you know the Spanish house by a two-year old agreement is currently being planned as a Russian house. We shall nevertheless find a house and I understand that it will be as are all residence halls open to students on invitation, white or Black…

-President Katherine E. McBride

The Black women of Bryn Mawr College were upset. In the 1968-1969 academic year, concerned with Bryn Mawr’s academic and administrative “patterns of falsification and omission that characterized the treatment of the role and contribution of the Black people in America, and all the world,”  a group of students created the Black Students Committee to review the status of Black Studies on campus. In Spring 1969 the committee issued a list of curricular proposals in the hopes of forcing Bryn Mawr to acknowledge “racism on its campus and in its courses.”1 The “reasonable and just” proposed changes were given with an action deadline of April 25, 1969. Continue reading →

  1. 9JAF Diversity African-American, Sisterhood, Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, Bryn Mawr, PA. [↩]

Black Labor at Bryn Mawr: A Story Imagined Through Census Records, 1880-1940

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A maid on the steps of Merion Hall, ca. 1898.

A maid on the steps of Merion Hall ca. 1898. | Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, Bryn Mawr, PA.

by Grace Pusey

Before Bryn Mawr: 1880-1885

Five years before Bryn Mawr College opened its doors in 1885 to young women seeking the kind of rigorous academic training that was then available only at a few elite institutions for men, only fifteen Black people resided in Lower Merion Township.1 Most were young, single men from Pennsylvania and its neighboring states — the youngest among them, a nine-year-old servant named George Taylor, was from New Jersey. There was only one Black family among the residents of Lower Merion Township in 1880, a married couple with five children.2 Continue reading →

  1. 1880 United States Census, Lower Merion Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. [↩]
  2. 1880 United States Census, Lower Merion Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania: p. 24, family 202, dwelling 195, lines 31-37; June 9-10, 1880. [↩]