Rebels in White Gloves (9 page)

Though they would prove to be powerful leaders among their classmates, feminism was, for these women, secondary. “I identified much more as a black person than as a woman, and I didn’t get the double bind at all,” says Nancy Gist. “I thought of feminism as a white woman’s issue. I remember hearing Shirley Chisholm say she felt more discriminated against as a woman than as a black, and I thought, ‘What, is she crazy?’ In later years I came to think maybe she had a point.”

The fiercest voice in the class of ’69 was that of Francille Rusan, now director of the African-American Studies program at the University of Maryland. Though she came from an integrated school in Chicago, Fran was amazed at her Wellesley classmates’ crude naïveté. “People would say, ‘I know one black person,’ or, ‘Do you know my maid?’—the kinds of questions we couldn’t imagine they would say to other people.” Fran replied in the pages of
Keynote
, the college literary magazine, introducing to the campus the militant themes then sounding in the larger movement. “
Today
I’m not evil.
Today
I’m not dangerous. Usually I’m alienated by their simple ignorance and gross lack of everything else important except money. Pale fey mommas bore rather than threaten. WHERE is the fire of Columbus; of all those other great honkies who line the history books?… But today I will keep my heroes apart and my tastes distinctly watermelonsweetpotatoeseatchittlinsyesmam!”

With Nancy Gist and Karen Williamson, Fran led the protest on campus against grouping students in housing on the basis of religion and race. “I don’t think anything is strange at all,” Fran recalled for
Frontline
about meeting her roommate, Susan Liebowitz, freshman year. “And over the next few days as I’m meeting the other students I realize that all the other black students have black roommates, and when I talk to my own roommate, I discover that the college has called her and asked her if she would like to be part of an experiment. And I’m pretty upset, because they never called me and asked me if I would like to be a part of an experiment.” The girls founded a student organization, Ethos, to protest “the rooming of Jews with Jews, Negroes with Negroes, Chinese with Chinese.” Ethos complained to the National Scholarship Fund for Negroes that the college had offered the class of 1970 the chance to request a roommate with a “certain background” and “when no white student requested a Negro,” had put each black freshman in a single. The Fund responded with a letter advising Wellesley president Ruth Adams that other colleges, including Harvard and Dartmouth, had remedied their segregationist housing policies fifteen years earlier and that “Wellesley is as anachronistic as could be.”

In 1968, after the King assassination and the report of the Kerner Commission documenting the damaging persistence of white racism, Ethos threatened a hunger strike if Wellesley failed to join the new national movements toward affirmative action and multiculturalism. The college finally agreed to all of the group’s demands: It increased its recruitment
of black students and staff, allocated funds for black speakers, created an Afro-American Studies department, and desegregated its dorms. With the girls’ assistance in recruitment, Wellesley admitted fifty-seven black women into the class of ’73.

In the course of the debate, however, a remark by a faculty member sparked the most intense protest of all their four years. Echoing the public debate over whether racism or degenerate values best explained the failure of some blacks to succeed (a debate rekindled in 1965 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s doleful assessment of the deteriorating black family), a Wellesley professor complained that it was difficult to recruit “colored” students when so many came from homes “where the only literature was comic books.” Attempting to calm the resulting furor, the dean of students, who called herself Mrs. Harold Melvin, instead compounded the insult, asking: “What will happen to students from a community not on the cultural level with other Wellesley students?” and promising to bring students with “deficient backgrounds” up to Wellesley standards.

Ethos responded with a scorching letter denouncing “an atmosphere of bigotry and ignorance, an effort to destroy our pride and unity. We are deeply insulted by the deans classing us a lower race. We will not accept the idea that the existence of two different cultures calls for the superiority and more Wellesley-like qualities of the lighter one.… We realize the majority of the faculty and students has associated itself with African-Americans in a master/servant relationship, and may find it difficult to adjust to more equitable arrangements, but we insist on being called blacks or Afro-Americans, never colored girls, which alludes to latter day Prissies.… Wellesley is an institution whose function is to perpetuate the nature of white society under the guise of higher education.… This cheaply disguised bigotry is indicative of the morally bankrupt nature of this college.… We are tired of having our culture described as ‘comic book reading.’ Must the administration be changed or is there a good honkie in the house?”

Over time, Fran Rusan’s message grew increasingly separatist, focused more on the need for public solidarity among blacks than on private strivings. In the aftermath of the Detroit riots, she explained Black Power to the
Wellesley News:
“Hitherto worried about meshing carefully in the establishment, the African-American is now concerned with preserving
his negroness, his fraternal ties to the ghetto. The college-educated negro has an obligation to go back to the ghetto, not to a white environment. We have a foot in the door, and are the only ones who can push it open to other black people. We want to start black theaters, read black poets, teach American history that includes the history of the negro.” Her voice then grew less ladylike and more hostile to her liberal Wellesley classmates. “When slaves were freed we were promised 40 acres and a mule. That’s all we want, with interest. Violence is one means to what we want. We don’t like to use it, but we are not afraid to. It’s important to remember that the American tradition is a violent one and not see black nationalist activity as deviant from the norm. The objective is not to ease racial tension. The time when whites could play a significant role in negro affairs has passed. We don’t want white support anymore.”

Nancy Gist, also from the urban North, shared Fran’s misgivings at slipping too thoroughly into the world of the white ruling class. Nancy’s father was a Housing and Urban Development administrator, and in high school she’d gone to the University of Chicago’s prestigious Lab School, becoming adept at crossing back and forth across the divide between her white schoolmates and her black after-school friends. But by the time she reached Wellesley, such assimilation was suspect. “With the Black Power movement came a premium on being more ‘street,’ being from the proletariat,” she said. “Those of us who didn’t come from that background had to feel—and sometimes be—apologetic. At the same time, of course, we were expected to pay for everything.”

As the one black class member from the segregated South, Janet McDonald, then a somewhat awkward parochial school graduate from New Orleans, brought a substantially different perspective, one still rooted in the integrationist, pacific, aspirational vision of Martin Luther King, Jr. “My mother decided I’d go to Wellesley after she read of it in
Time
magazine. She wanted me to understand things like fine art and medieval history, wanted me to be forced to integrate and others to be given the opportunity to learn something other than their narrow understanding of black people.” Having never before known a white person who wasn’t also a nun, Janet found Wellesley utterly intimidating. “I’d never been in the North except to visit relatives in Harlem. The girls made fun of me when I’d ask for the bread and ‘buttah.’ ” Within days
of arriving on campus, she called home, hoping her father would answer the phone. “I was going to say, ‘Daddy, I hate it here. Everyone’s white.’ And he would say, ‘Yes, baby, hang on. I’ll come and get you and bring you home.’ But my mother answered instead. She said, ‘You can do it, and you are going to stay.’ I didn’t crumble again.” By senior year, Janet was chief justice of the college court. “Wellesley taught me that all white people were not like those I’d encountered in Louisiana. But I was also not as upset as the other black women that we were all roomed together. It didn’t bother me, because I’d come from an all-black environment. They all came from integrated schools, and were more militant and radical. They felt we needed to demonstrate and signify that we were black. I knew I was black. And I didn’t think an Afro or a dashiki was going to look good on me. It wasn’t that I was so anxious to assimilate. I had been perfectly happy being all black, and now that I’d had a glimpse of the other side, I wasn’t intrigued. But when we helped recruit the class of ’73, I opposed creating a relative standard for blacks. I think Wellesley made a mistake that way.”

Perhaps because the struggle for equality felt familiar—as Nancy Scheibner, ’69, would write in an editorial in the
Wellesley News
, “Wellesley was founded to serve an underprivileged population—women”—even for many of the white students, racial injustice became the defining issue of their college years. Fran Rusan’s polemic aside, “the black women could have separated out, but instead they remained good friends with us,” recalls Eldie Acheson. “Fran and I were in Roxbury together when King was killed. She drove me out to safety, then went back in. A lot of us would never have encountered anything outside of our suburban, white, intensely private experience if we hadn’t been there in our long Bermuda shorts and shell sweaters watching Fran take on the admissions office, battling for inclusiveness, questioning authority.” The white students’ allegiance to their black classmates did not always sit well at home. After Hillary Rodham took Karen Williamson with her to church, she called her parents, who listened to Hillary’s excited account with chilly disapproval. “I was so disappointed in their reaction,” she wrote to her hometown minister, Don Jones, who in 1962 had taken Hillary to hear King preach in Chicago. “My attitudes toward so many things have changed in just three weeks, and I think I expected Park Ridge to have undergone a similar metamorphosis.”

“All of us talked about the difficulties of going back home again,” recalls Kris Olson. “We were asking ourselves, How can we be the children of these parents?” In high school, Kris had been the sole girl in her affluent New York suburban community to opt out of the home economics club and join the boys’ service group working in Harlem settlement houses. At Wellesley she organized a political theory group to read Thoreau on civil disobedience, and wrote her thesis on John Rawls’s theories of compensatory social justice. A co-founder of Wellesley Against Racism (WAR), she organized students to tutor and baby-sit in Roxbury, worked for the black candidate running against segregationist Louise Hicks, and helped organize a boycott against Kodak to force the company to hire and train black workers. At an Ethos rally, she picked up a megaphone to condemn Wellesley’s “tokenism and gradualism” and the college’s expectation that the black students would simply “be patient and grateful for all we’ve done in the past.”

As she became more of an activist, Kris learned a lesson that she and many of her classmates would later apply in larger political and professional arenas: that the feminine demeanor which trapped them could also serve as protective coloration, and even be turned to their own ends. Kris gathered some like-minded classmates to pay calls on Boston-area corporate executives. “We’d go in our little Villager dresses and heels, meet sweetly with the board of trustees, and then confront them on institutional racism.” Pounding their little white-gloved fists on the table, these budding radicals camouflaged as ladies would demand of the stunned corporate leaders that they divest.

If the young women of Wellesley were stirred by the era’s first great defining issue—equality—the second registered more faintly on campus. Lonny Laszlo Higgins’s husband, David, who graduated with Al Gore from Harvard in 1969, believes the greatest difference of mind between his classmates and his wife’s is that for the men, vulnerable to the draft, the war in Vietnam eclipsed all else. Only a few Wellesley girls marched for peace, riding in buses from Harvard to the Pentagon. Chris Osborne, who had switched to the religion department the day after her father’s death to pursue her previously forbidden interest in Zen Buddhism
and wrote her thesis on Yale’s pacifist chaplain William Sloan Coffin, helped support the “sanctuary” movement at Harvard, bringing meals and blankets to draft resisters and AWOL servicemen taking refuge in churches. Nancy Gist got calls from home about neighborhood boys who had died in the war. Blacks accounted for a quarter of all casualties in Vietnam. “So many boys I knew were coming back in boxes. I was overwhelmed and confused.”

For Nancy Wanderer, the war came intimately home. In the summer of ’68, just months after her big wedding in the Wellesley chapel, the graduate school deferment was eliminated, and a year later her husband, Thomas, was drafted. She and Thomas were opposed to the war—“We felt like you were going for no reason and would come back dead”—but going to Canada seemed out of the question; Nancy was too close to her family to bear leaving them. “For me it was so complex. It involved my relationship with my family, and also Thomas’s dream of running for office. He was afraid that if he dodged, it would come back to haunt him someday.” Thomas rejected the more drastic alternatives proposed by a friend, who had recently severed all the tendons in his hand. Drafted into the mortar division of the army infantry, he shipped out and Nancy returned to her parents’ home.

Thomas did stay out of combat, landing a spot as a clerk-typist in Bien-Hoa, processing arrivals and orders home. “I wrote to him every day, and he wrote to me, describing how he had to notify families when someone died. He couldn’t bear to tell people the truth if their kid had been blown up on the latrine or in a whorehouse, so he’d invent a gallant death. He’d torch these little paper planes they got from the Red Cross so he could describe what they looked like crashing in flames. He also wrote to me all the time about what he was going to buy. Vietnam was a shopper’s war, a war of great deals on cameras and stereos. When he wrote that he’d tried marijuana, I went into a tailspin. I was convinced beyond all persuading that he would come home addicted to heroin.”