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BY AMELIA POSSANZA

In print | Published February 19, 2009

On Monday, Feb. 16, Vice President of Community and College Relations Maurice Eldridge ’61 shared his experiences growing up in a still-segregated nation. The event, hosted by SASS, gave Swarthmore students a glimpse of how race issues played out at the college.

Obama’s nomination and subsequent inauguration led Eldridge to consider the progress that our nation has seen in order to come to this point. Growing up, Eldridge did not witness a world that seemed ready for a black president. He lived in Washington, D.C., but he spent some time in both Brooklyn and Mississippi, two vastly different areas, visiting grandparents. In Brooklyn, he was immersed in a relatively integrated environment where he often played with white children. This atmosphere was sharply contrasted by the more segregated experiences he had in Mississippi.

Even on the way to his grandparent’s farm, he was led to a segregated train car. “My world was very much defined by race,” Eldridge said.

Eldridge gained a broader view of the world when he attended a diverse, progressive boarding school run by two Swarthmore graduates. With their guidance, he applied to Swarthmore as well as Oberlin, Wesleyan and Tufts. He decided on Swarthmore with high hopes. “I thought it would be as progressive as my boarding school. It wasn’t.”

During his four years at Swarthmore, Eldridge spent several terms as the only black student on campus. The predominantly male faculty lacked professors of color. Eldridge only saw people of his own race cleaning the dormitories and working in the kitchen.

A student question prompted Eldridge to share the fact that he took a year off from school after his sophomore year, in part due to these tensions.

He spent much of his sophomore spring organizing students to go to a desegregation march in D.C. This stress, compounded with racial difficulties, including receiving hate mail, caused his spirits and his grades to suffer. The deans decided that he should leave for a while, one even telling him that he didn’t belong at Swarthmore.

In spite of this experience, Eldridge said, “I was determined to finish college, and I was determined to come back here.”

He did in fact come back and finish, but with continued difficulty. A track coach refused to let him miss a meet for an equality march. Eldridge responded by quitting the team, only to come back the next year and become a co-captain. After graduating college, becoming a teacher and then an administrator, Eldridge found his way back to his alma mater.

Although many were at first hesitant, students asked Eldridge questions that led him to explain his interest in teaching and the arts and to give a rough sketch of Swarthmore’s history of integration, both in terms of its students and its faculty.

Although Eldridge was not here to witness either of these processes, he is familiar with the story. In Eldridge’s day, there were absolutely no attempts to bring black students to the college. “Those of us who felt there should be more [black students] were told by admissions that we had to go out and find them,” he said. Swarthmore did bring more black students to campus in the late sixties, but the school was not adequately ready to give these students the support they needed in order to succeed. Today, looking at student groups and the responsibilities of the deans, it seems that the school has made progress in this area.

To integrate the faculty, the college joined The Consortium for a Strong Minority Presence, known today as The Consortium for Faculty Diversity at Liberal Arts Colleges, in 1987 that actively sought to give people of color that had recently graduated from Ph.D. programs fellowships at their schools. These temporary job positions would either become a full time position or serve as a jumping off point for a new position elsewhere.

The students who attended the session appreciated Eldridge’s story. “It’s nice to have a sense of history — black history, Swarthmore history, student history. There’s a lot people have to offer that we don’t take the time to listen to,” Shameika Black ’11 said. Paul Wiggins ’11 was more interested in specific aspects of Eldridge’s story. “For me, hearing that what drove him to [return] was that he wanted to prove to himself that he had the strength to return is inspiring,” he said.

Though it was a small crowd, Eldridge said that he was happy with the response. “I’m happy with whatever turnout. The number doesn’t matter if people get out of it something useful for them.”
He gave the students a sense of hope and a sense of history. “From your perspective, this time is long gone. I’m here to tell you what a burden it was, but I’m not expressing this out of bitterness,” Eldridge said.

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