How do we remember our College days? When we think back, do we see them with clarity, objectivity, and historical accuracy, or do lenses of ensuing decades blur our backward vision? When I hear from alumni who are critical of the current state of diversity at the College—and especially of the various methods of support that have been devised to accommodate that diversity—I begin to suspect that one such lens affecting their vision is the progress that the College and society have made in racial matters.

Many recall Swarthmore as an ideal, generous, and inclusive community, and as far as their own experience went, it may have been. But it is easy to forget that until relatively recent times, the College was rather more homogenous than diverse. Some current critics seem unaware of the racism—both individual and institutional—at work in the College just as it was in the larger world. Springing from these blurred memories are a number of misconceptions about diversity today at our alma mater.

Forty-five years ago, when I came to Swarthmore to begin my undergraduate career, I was surprised and disappointed to discover that the student population was not as diverse as that of the progressive New England boarding school from which I had come. When I entered the Windsor Mountain School at age 14, I brought to it experiences of my segregated hometown, Washington, D.C.; of segregated Mississippi; and of an integrating neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The homes of my two sets of grandparents had taught me different lessons. My Mississippi grandmother told me how to talk to white people so that they would not find me uppity—and perhaps kill me, as they did Emmett Till one year after my last childhood visit there. In Brooklyn, where my other grandparents lived, I made my first white friends. Then, at Windsor Mountain, I joined an integrated community to which I readily and happily adapted—and in which I became a leader. There I found a school community ready to confront and oppose the prejudices of the larger society, working to foster the instincts and abilities of its students to do so as well. Because both the school’s headmaster and his wife were Swarthmore alumni, I naively expected that my college would be an extension of my high school.

At Swarthmore, I found a different reality. I found myself having to wear identities imposed by others—to represent what they thought they knew about blacks (we were Negroes then) or wanted to believe about us. My favorite was the expectation that I was an expert on jazz. Another was that I was primarily a sexual being who could score with enviable ease all the time. A third was that I was not up to it intellectually. I was once told that blacks could not “do” philosophy, for example.

Swarthmore has come a long way as an institution since those days but not without cost to those who helped to integrate the College in the ’60s and ’70s. Like me, they found a college that was not yet ready for them—and not ready to believe that there was racism afoot at both the individual and institutional level—in the classroom and in student life. Like me, they found they had to carry a double load: to study and to teach.

Even today, I hear complaints from students about the burden of explaining to members of the majority what is racist in a remark or action or of sensitizing them to elements of difference and human commonality. It was difficult and emotionally draining to constantly have to meet and defeat the stereotypical views and expectations of the community at large. It only made the true work of Swarthmore—to study and to learn—that much harder.

So it is no surprise that many minority students who experienced Swarthmore during those first two or three decades of ever-bolder experimentation with diversity feel deeply ambivalent about—and sometimes even hostile to—the College. It took many of us years to appreciate the value of the education we’d received and to recognize that Swarthmore really was always striving to be better. The College is a better place now than it was 40 years ago, and this evolution is due, in large measure, to the contributions of these pioneers and their allies among the students and faculty.

A friend from my class remarked to me recently that she didn’t know how I stood it or how I could forgive her and the rest of our cohort. I have stories to tell, of course, and some of them still bring tears; others, tinged with irony, amuse. One year, when I lived in the Preps, I was approached by one of the cigarette vendors who frequented the campus in those days. I refused his offer of free Winstons, telling him that they were the product of a racist company. He went away injured but returned to me eagerly a week later to tell me that my remark had inspired investigation, and he was happy to tell me that his company had just recently donated a new hospital for “coloreds” in Winston-Salem. The irony escaped him; I simply told him I preferred another brand.

When I received anonymous hate mail one spring, our dean, William Prentice ’37 scoured the hand-written registration cards until the culprit was found and expelled. Softhearted even then, I urged counseling rather than expulsion. Yet it was I who truly needed counseling and who found no one to suggest or offer it. During a visit to campus, my mother found the text of the hate letter in my dorm room. When I discovered her there, crying over it, I cried too and do so even today when I picture that scene.

I took a year off after that spring. When I returned to Swarthmore, I was determined to make it on my own terms. I chose my friends and associations outside of existing cliques across the range of students and focused on my academic work with a vision of becoming an English teacher. I continued my involvement in the integration movement and, by the time I graduated, became an activist in the Philadelphia chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. Eventually, I returned to the Windsor Mountain School as a teacher of English and became assistant headmaster, continuing the progressive work there that had inspired my first engagement with Swarthmore College. In 1979, my continuing commitment to educating for a better world led me back to Washington, D.C., to be-come principal/director of its inner-city magnet school for the arts.

When I came back to Swarthmore as associate director of development in 1989, I was dismayed to discover that black students not only continued to experience racism—and, therefore, to perceive it even when it was not there—but also that it followed much the same yearly pattern that I had experienced three decades earlier. It seemed that every spring, near exam time, there would be an incident against a member of the black community that exploded in their midst and distracted them from focus on study—forcing them to, once again, become teachers and healers in the community.

By then, there was a larger population of black students, and the College was working in earnest to further broaden the spectrum of its diversity. The community was learning through difficult and painful experience to combat racism within the institution and build more consciously on the lessons of the previous 20 years. Primarily through the Dean’s Office, Swarthmore began to create programs and mechanisms to develop and sustain a more diverse community.

We do a better job now of welcoming and including a diverse population through campus organizations like Swarthmore African-American Students Society, the Swarthmore Asian Organization, the Hispanic Organization for Latino Awareness, and many other support groups. These groups not only provide settings in which students who feel isolated from or excluded by the majority can gather strength from one another but also develop within them the tools they need to become fuller members of the larger community. The groups also undertake to educate the College as a whole about diversity, lifting some of the burden to teach from the shoulders of individuals.

The success of the College in creating a diverse community is gradually changing the role of such groups. Members learn about their own individual differences and begin to appreciate the complexity of creating community. They learn that racial and ethnic identities are not monolithic. Our support organizations are learning to respond creatively to the more diverse needs of their own membership while expanding their educational outreach to the rest of the campus. Increasingly, some members of minority groups are finding less of a need to participate in the support centers as larger numbers of students, consciously or unconsciously, simply integrate. In admissions, we have moved from the “we’ll consider them if you students recruit them” posture that I and my fellow crusaders heard from administrators in the late ’50s to an organized outreach and recruitment program that has achieved and sustained the highest degree of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity in the history of the College—without sacrificing Swarthmore’s quality and its commitment to rigorous intellectual pursuit.

Relatively new events such as Black Alumni Weekend or Hispanic Alumni Weekend came into being at the request of minority alumni who asked the College to facilitate. These events help draw back to campus those pioneers who are still struggling with the bitterness of their undergraduate experience. When they return to the contemporary campus, they discover a changed and better place and begin to feel more positive about Swarthmore. Many desire to reconnect more broadly at Alumni Weekend in June or through Swarthmore Connection events in their local communities. They also begin to network with current students who want both to understand the experiences of their predecessors and to take their own measure of the College’s commitment and progress.

Perhaps in our future there will be a time when support groups, admissions outreach, and counseling will not be needed. Until then, we can only hope that those who direct these activities will continue to accept the challenges they face on this much-changed campus—and to find new and daring approaches to building community.

To those who idealize the campus community of their day, I will say only that you remember it differently from the way I do. What we share, however, is a vision of an ideal Swarthmore that is not only inclusive and generous but realistic about what kind of effort is required to create and sustain a truly diverse community. Even though our struggles against racism as a college and a nation are far from over, I am proud of what has been accomplished here.

Maurice Eldridge ’61 is vice president for College and community relations and executive assistant to President Alfred H. Bloom. Before joining the College staff in 1989, he was a teacher, school headmaster, and principal/director of the Duke Ellington School for the Arts in Washington, D.C.