Joyce Tompkins:	Good afternoon.
Speaker 2:	Good afternoon.
Joyce Tompkins:	Thank you for being here this afternoon as we celebrate Martin Luther King Week. This is our collection, which is the summary and conclusion of the week, but not the end of the dream. Don't forget that. My name is Joyce Tompkins. I work with Religious and Spiritual Life here on campus. I'm a part of the Martin Luther King Planning Committee.
	Our theme for this year is The Dream, but we have a little spin on it this time, and we are talking about the dream deferred. Because of all the conversation that's been going on about the growing inequality in our country, and, in particular, in education and higher education, we chose to focus this year on that part of the dream that has not been realized, and the role that Swarthmore College has played and continues to play in the struggle and challenge to fulfill the dream that King had.
	In just a minute, I'm going to introduce our three speakers. First, I'd like to just explain how the collection time will work. We will begin with a short moment of silence in which we collect ourselves, a time to bring ourselves present together into this community and into this time, open ourselves to receive the words that will be given whether spoken or not spoken.
	After our three speakers have finished, there will be a time of quiet. Anyone who feels moved to speak during that time is encouraged and invited to speak. All you need to do is stand in your place, and speak what the spirit moves you to speak. It does not have to be in direct response to anything else that's been said. That's the way the collection works. Following the time of silence, our gospel choir will present us with several beautiful musical pieces. Following that, we're all invited to a reception in the Whittier Room, which is through that door right there.
	I'd like to read short poem by Langston Hughes. "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?"
	To speak to our theme today, we have three speakers. Maurice Eldridge, class of 1961, who actually graduated in '62 after taking the year off between sophomore and junior year. He was politically active on and off campus, a member of the track team, co-managed the recorded poetry and literature collection that was then maintained in Bond He briefly tried radio theater on WSRN.
	After graduation, he became a teacher of English and American History, first, in public school. Then, the in the private boarding school he'd attended, where he also coached track, and became assistant head master. Following that, in graduate school at UMass Amherst, he became principal and director for 10 years at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington DC. He returned to Swarthmore as Associate Director of Development, became Director of Development, and now serves as Executive Assistant to the President.
	Keith Reeves graduated in 1994. He was raised in Chester. He graduated from Westtown School, and graduated from Swarthmore. Was it '94 or '84?
Keith Reeves:	'88.
Joyce Tompkins:	'88? You sent me the wrong date, Keith.
Keith Reeves:	You can make me younger.
Joyce Tompkins:	Okay, I'm making him younger. He, then, graduated from the University of Michigan with a PhD in Political Science. He spent the 1990 to '91 year as a Henry Luce Scholar in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and was a faculty member at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard from 1994 to 2001. His current role here at Swarthmore is Associate Professor of Political Science. He's now in his 11th year of working with men who are incarcerated and/or formerly incarcerated.
	Paul Cato, class of 2014, I'm making you a lot older, is a Religion major. Currently, a senior, and co-president of SASS, and co-manager of the Swat Team. He's hoping to earn his PhD in Religious Thought and Work as a professor and religious philosopher in the future. We'll have a short moment of silence. Then, our speakers. Thank you.
Maurice Eldridge:	Good afternoon. It's an interesting moment. I noticed when I looked at the graduation years of the three of us that there are 26 years between each. I thought that was an unexpected symmetry. I'm not sure that I can match that symmetry in what I say, being asked to look back at my life when I started at Swarthmore at age 17. That is a while ago. I think living a life that has been an active one, but also lived with reflection may mean that my sense of what it was like then and how I look at that now may have some differences because I've experienced so much of the world and the life in that period of time. I've been back here for 25 years, so I have some sense of the difference of those years from those first years when I was here.
	The world that I remember is one that the majority of you in this room can only see as part of their country's history, rather than its former realities. I have said this before, I grew up in officially and, in any ways, legally, segregated America. I grew up in the nation's capital, Washington DC, which was a southern city in many ways, a segregated school system, and under the rubric of separate but equal, which, of course, we know because of today's realities, certainly, wasn't true then if you look at education, in public education and its condition in too much of the country.
	I had the good fortune in 1954, which is the year the Supreme Court desegregated the system of education in America, of being a senior in my junior high school in Washington DC, the Banneker Junior High School. I was one of the three top male students in our honors division of the ways school was divided up in those days. Those other two guys and I were all considered. Before the Supreme Court made its announcement, we were all being considered. We didn't know what for, but it turned out, they wanted to desegregate the school where Capitol Page Boys went before they went public with this announcement of what they were going to do for the nation. They were looking at one of us to become the first pageboy of the Capitol Page Boys School.
	One of the conditions for that, besides being a good student, was that you were short enough to not be too apparent behind the benches of the court. I was too tall. I didn't make that, but one of my best friends did, who later became one of the first students to attend the US Air Force Academy, and had a distinguished career in the Air Force, and a distinguished career after Harvard Business School in the business world. Sadly, he died a year or so ago.
	There was a way to get at the promise of America from that moment that hadn't been there before that moment, although many made their way in the struggle that was necessary to do that. I was raised in this segregated world. I was raised by parents who thought that education was the key to the future, and who also gave the message to us as young black folks that we had to be, not just good, but as better than everybody else in order to make it. We were driven to go forward.
	That same year, a Swarthmore graduate and his wife, also a Swarthmore graduate, who were headmaster and headmistress of a small progressive boarding school in New England that had been founded in Germany, and fled Germany as the Nazis rose to power, by his mother and father, a very progressive for Germany's brand of education found me and others in DC, and invited us to their school, which, believe this, in 1954, a coeducational boarding school in New England that was integrated. Among my classmates, there were refugees and people who had survived the camps in Nazi Germany.
	My path to Swarthmore seems to have been marked at that point by having been educated in that school. Certainly, there wasn't any question that I would go to college by then. I applied to Swarthmore, to Oberlin, to Wesley, and to Tufts. I was accepted by three out of those four. I won't mention which one I wasn't accepted by, but I think we had a mutual agreement that that wasn't the place for me.
	I came here with the expectation that Swarthmore would be quite like my high school. It's a progressive place where I had every chance to be my best self in lots of ways. I had enjoyed a leadership role in my high school. I was a leader in the student government, and a pretty good athlete, and a quite good student, and all of that. I got here and found that I was the only African American in my class. That I don't think surfaced immediately as a concern to me as I felt comfortable in this setting. It was a much smaller school. There are about 900 of us in those days. I didn't feel threatened by being among white people. There's a whole other story of my life, how I came to engage and encounter white people in different ways in our society before I got here, but there are some things that started to stand out.
	In my introduction, you mentioned my flirting with radio theater. In high school, I've just acted. I auditioned for a role, and got it, and acted. We did what was later to become called nontraditional casting. That is to say you can play any role. Not having to do with race, you're playing the role. When I got here, they weren't doing that. I couldn't do theater in the way that I had come to enjoy. I tried radio, but I guess I had enough sense of self and enough ego to want an audience that I could relate to. In the radio, it's just you and the microphone, and maybe your fellow actor. That didn't give me any satisfaction. That was something that started to give me pause.
	One of my friends in the class was from DC. Sometimes, we would drive back or to DC or back from DC here. I found myself his companion in discovering the limitations. As we came up Route 1 and Route 40, and stopped to get a bite to eat, he could and I couldn't. We could take it out but not eat it in. This was a rude awakening for him. What it also was for me as a part of the experience was not only having to endure that but to also be the teacher and the mediator for him, and to make somehow this passage of us together bearable for both of us. That was an element of the experience.
	One of the things I did, you know where the library stands now, there was a building called Summerville. It was the sort of the women's gym. The upper level was a big dance floor where folk dance and so on was taught. Downstairs was the snack bar, the Essie Mae's of its day. It's a common new place, and wonderful drawings on the wall by a guy named Ryan, and they're cartoonish. I had a job there. Other people who were working there were working for dining services, or majority of folks working for dining services, then, were African American. One of my buddies there, I used to babysit his kid for him sometimes. Other times, he'd lend me his car, and I could get off of this campus for a while, and go visit my cousin in Philadelphia, and all of that, and collect myself in various ways.
	Once, when I arrived early for work, the phone rang outside of the shattered service area. I answered it. It was the woman who managed the place. When she learned that he who was supposed to open it hadn't arrived yet, she let loose with this racist tirade about such workers. I don't know what it is but I didn't sound black. She does didn't know who she was talking to. I don't take such things lightly, so I reported it. I thought this was unacceptable, and something needed to be done there, and nothing was. Nothing was done about that. Perhaps, she was charted but there's certainly no sense that the folks who had to hear that got any relief.
	As we must always understand, if we are educating or being educated here or anywhere, we are a part of the world that exist beyond these walls and beyond this shore. Don't mistake these parts of my memory as dream-shattering because they're not. They're not for me. They weren't for me. I even found myself strengthened in some ways. What should happen here, and does, and did then too was the people learned and changed.
	The final incident of that time that I'll speak about is the one that was most shattering for me, and led to the year off that I took. After all here, I was a student. I thought, "Hey, I'm a great student. I came from this wonderful school. I was in the top whatever of my class." This is not an easy school. I learned that everybody else was as good or better than I was at this or that. I needed some help. Some of my teachers were terrific to me in terms of paying attention to my writing and helping me learn to be a better writer and all of that kind of thing. I was getting my education.
	My sophomore year, which was '58-'59, I was engaged in organizing on campus part of a national march on Washington to push forward the speed with which the schools were going to be segregated across the nation. You might recall that that decision said with all deliberate speed. Well, that was subject to a lot of deliberate interpretation. We didn't have a lot of speed on that front. There was a march being organized. Bayard Rustin and others in New York did. As I recall, when I went to the 50th reunion of the march that came in '63, my first time marching on the monument grounds at DC was in '59, and Martin Luther King happened to be there at that march as well.
	I was running track, and it was on a Saturday, and there was a meet, and I asked to be excused from the meet, and was denied that permission even though I was a principal organizer of this event. That seemed to be quite significant. I quit the team, of course, and did the march. Prior to our leaving this place, I got some rather nasty hate mail, racist hate mail. That's what really cut the ground out from under my feet, and my academic work really tanked at that point.
	My friends responded in a way that I understand, which was I think important, but missing an ingredient. I've told this before. They stoned the campus in a way, in a particular way. They published copies of the letter, and wanted to make this whole community feel ashamed for something that someone had done, and to combat this racist manifestation. As a part of our community, it didn't feel good and right. They forgot about me. There was this person who actually was feeling something very hurtful by that as it happens.
	I hope I can get through this next moment without a tear because I often can't. My mother came to visit me, my parents. My mother saw the letter. I had to tell her what it was and how it came about. That was really hard. Needless to say, we did the march. We got that done. I got through the year in pretty bad shape. I think we must have had some form of what happens here now in January when we review the academic standing of people and so on, and it was felt that I should take some time off. I was ready. I thought, being home and in the bosom of my family would restore me for sure.
	My dean said to me maybe I should consider whether this is the right place for me. That was a good thing he said that but not for the reason that he may have thought because I just got my backup, and I said, "Yes, this is the place for me, and I intended to be back here, and I intended to finish here." I didn't say that to him then. Again, that was a message perhaps not intended as it was received but received as it was and telling me no about this and me.
	I couldn't accept no about this and me. I took a year. I was a year at home. Actually, by January I felt like I was ready to come back, but I continued out for a year. I met some new people. I had a decent enough job. In fact, while I was there, we created ... The guys I met who are off from their own schools, did a literary magazine. We only did that one edition but there's a copy in the library in my file there. I have a file in the library. Perhaps one in the FBI too. I wouldn't be surprised.
	For me, the journey at Swarthmore was a mixed bag but life is a mixed bag. Life is demanding, and the unexpected happens. The things that you can't predict or necessarily control happen. The family I grew up in, the Windsor Mountain School that fostered me and helped me believe that, yes, I could certainly do and be anything, and didn't matter who the majority, if you'd go by things like skin color were. It's all about who you were, and what you wanted, and what you expected.
	There at that school and here too, there was the possibility of friendship, deep and caring. There was the possibility of collaboration and mutual understanding and mutual growth. All of those things happened for me here and there, even this awful experience with the racist letters. When I found out the person who did it, the dean found out. We didn't have computers in those days. All we had to do was match the handwriting in the registrar's office with the letter, and the person was found out. It turns out he was somebody who is going through his own deep and unsettling problems. There, I was a highly visible target. There weren't too many like me in that, so there I was. I took it and got it.
	In my sense for him was, wow, that's enough. I asked them not to expel him. He was expelled. Something was done. People I know from the days after my time here, including Keith [Lucraprone 00:25:21], and me as a pioneer. Maybe in some sense that's true. I came to Swarthmore at a point in its history where it needed to confront and deal with a more diverse population than it had up to that point.
	This wonderful Quaker institution started itself out as a coeducational school, a brave and daring act when it did it. It was founded by people who were abolitionists who were not interested in war but they were interested in ending slavery. If you study that set of people, you'll find a whole range of who they were in terms of their convictions. Yes, enslaving fellow human beings was not the thing to do, and we must oppose this, but some of them couldn't get pass that to say, "These are my equal as human beings." Some of them could and did go all the way.
	That's a part of the complexity of who we are as human beings, and who they were as Quakers. I think those human conditions continue to this day. Why wouldn't they? We've made huge amounts of progress, obviously, since those days, but I'll now close with one small quick other story, but we haven't gone far enough.
	I have a grand nephew, my sister's grandson, who's a senior in high school. As part of his senior exercise and his private very prestigious day school in Minnesota has a tradition where seniors give a talk to their fellow students. My niece put it on Facebook. I listened to his talk. He stood, as I'm standing now, and talking to his audience, and he talked about an event that happened in Mcdonalds where he was buying whatever those things are called. I don't eat them anymore, so Mac something.
Speaker 5:	It's Big Mac.
Maurice Eldridge:	Yeah, Big Mac, Big Mac. As he proceeded to go to his table, an elderly white woman let loose with a bunch of racist expletives in his direction. I said, "Well." His response from my perspective was a mature, and courageous, and humane. He didn't unleash any anger on her. He didn't even really give her his attention. He took it all in, and he was sorry that it was happening. He had a later encounter with this same person in the same place.
	He used it as an opportunity to say to his predominantly white classmates what the world offers and what they could do is understand from this that as a bystander have they been there, there was something they should have done and could do that would have spared him the burden of having to be the teacher again. Of course, he didn't think he could teach a woman of this age. He just let it be, and gave her the grace of his forgiveness, and went on upon about his business. I thought, "Wow, what a courageous kid." Here we are.
Keith Reeves:	Reflecting upon the theme of this year's Martin Luther King Day celebration, holding on to a dream on whole access to education for an underrepresented America. I want to suggest that as a nation, we are standing at the corner of progress and peril. Standing at the corner of progress and peril, this may struck some as a bit odd given the election, and as my students at American Politics remind me the reelection of Barack Obama as the country's first African American president.
	Indeed, there have been profound improvements in the employment, education, and life experiences of African Americans in this country. Dropout rates have fallen. Blacks are obtaining more advanced degrees. Only 25% of black families live below the poverty line before, as compared to 41% in the mid 1960s. 66% of blacks report that race relations between blacks and whites are very good or somewhat good.
	However, there was another side of the coin. 68% of blacks surveyed believe that the justice system is bias against black people. The unemployment rate among African Americans has nearly doubled that of whites. Blacks today are less likely to have health insurance. The median income for black men is 67% that of white men, while the median income for black women is 92% of that for white women. While blacks make up 14% of the US population, they comprise 37% of the prison population in this country. 42% of death row inmates, 32% of juvenile arrests, 45% of drug offenders in prison, and remarkably 8% of the black population has lost the right to vote, as a result of a felony conviction as compared to 2% of other racial groups. Standing at the corner of progress and peril.
	When my late twin brother, Ken, and I graduated from Swarthmore in May of 1988, our grandfather who he had not yet ... He only completed the fourth grade actually, was in attendance. He grew up in a segregated North Carolina, and he took the train up. I picked him at 30th Street in Philadelphia. He was joyed beyond belief. He could see and sense that Ken and I were blessed with engaging and caring professors and staff who challenged us to be our best selves academically and personally.
	Years later, I would come understand on a more analytical level that our Swarthmore professors teaching and mentoring philosophy seemed to rest on what Professor [Jean Meroff 00:32:55] at Columbia calls the four senses, giving people, young people, a sense of connectedness, a sense of wellbeing, a sense of academic initiative, and finally a sense of knowing that is providing us with a sense of what to do with our Swarthmore education and the knowledge that we were acquiring here.
	Our grandfather remarked to everyone in our native North Carolina that seeing his twin grandsons graduate from Swarthmore was the proudest day of his life. We adored our grandfather. He knew, and this was what he said to everyone, he knew that with our degrees, the family leapfrogged out of poverty in just two generations. In short, my twin brother's and my Swarthmore experience was a catalyst for greater education and personal growth and discovery. Despite a few personal and financial and academic struggles coming from a single parent household in Chester, our Swarthmore years exceeded our wildest expectations.
	The Pulitzer Prize Historian Taylor Branch reminds us that Dr. King lived only 39 years. From this point on, he would be gone longer than he lived with us. Two generations have come of age since Memphis, but for far too many generations, far too many in those generations since King's assassination, the pipeline to educational opportunity is severely constricted.
	I spend a fair amount of my time working with folks in prison. One of the things that cuts at me is many of them believe that they are throwaways. In fact, they say to me, "Doc, I wish I had your cards because I'm a throwaway guy." They don't believe that educational opportunity exists for them. While the nation continues to encase Dr. King and the electrifying 1963 oration on the mall, extolling the dream of racial brotherhood and harmony, it is imperative that we grapple with the Dr. King of 1967 and/or the Dr. King of 1968.
	Here, we will find a far more radicalized King than that of 1963, a Dr. King who warned of an economic and spiritual death from our failure to invest in the social uplift. He was speaking specifically about education, affordable housing, healthcare, and a guaranteed income for all of our most vulnerable citizens whatever their color.
Paul Cato:	Before I begin my thoughts, I wish to frame them around two quotes. The first is taken from James Baldwin's essay, Everybody's Protest Novel. It reflects on modernity's dependence on essentialism. As he wrote in the book, "Our passion for categorization, or for life neatly fitted into pegs, has led to an unforeseen, paradoxical distress; a confusion, a breakdown of meaning. Those categories, which were meant to define and control the world for us have boomeranged us into chaos; in which limbo we whirl, clutching the straws of our definitions, we find ourselves bound, first without, then within, by the nature of our categorization"
	The second, it's a segment taken from Martin Luther King's 1967 Address to the SCLC. It details the importance of self-determination. In Dr. King's words, "As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery. For the Negro will only be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the ink and pen of assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation."
	These two passages are especially important to me for a number of reasons. For the first point, I'm an African American. Dr. King and James Baldwin have been vital parts of getting me through the difficulties I've faced in my life. In particular, my experiences as a black man do not reflect those of the stereotypes we see on TV. Both my parents graduated from college. Though they were both impoverished as children, they made it up to the upper middle class. My father went to Morehouse College in Atlanta. He's a very proud black man, and he will not let me forget it. My mother was able to earn her way to the University of Pennsylvania. Though she was in debt for a long time, she was able to pay her way through.
	I do not struggle in the same way that some of my cousins do down in North Carolina, or in Georgia, or up in North New Jersey. My experiences don't reflect what I see on TV. Dr. King's quote, in particular, this discussion of physical slavery and the difficulties of physical turmoil, it speaks to me in another way as you see right now. As I speak, I'm experiencing a seizure. I'm epileptic. For a long time, I've had to come in terms and deal with how this epilepsy affects my interactions with other people, and affects my experience as a black male. The black community, historically, has not always been the most embracing of mental health issues, of issues related to brain issues. There are fewer resources in the black community. Even some of my cousins have said things to me, "If you prayed more, you'd have fewer seizure," things of that sort.
	I realize after listening to Vice President Eldridge speak that I do need to frame my experiences around Swarthmore, but around what came beforehand. I went to an elite private school in DC. My parents sacrificed a great deal to do so. While I was always one of the few black people in our class, even though DC is known as chocolate city and it's predominantly black. My racial interactions were an interesting one. My father used to have conversations with me about black history, and used to try to impose his wisdom, more house-mannered and extremely forceful. While I used to roll my eyes at his history lessons, I thought I'd heard enough about Martin Luther King. I have enough more house shirts. I have enough this and that.
	He didn't part wisdom that though I didn't take it into account, I realize I should have, he warned me that at some point, though I had spent all my life around my white classmates, I was going to realize that I was different than them, even some 40 years after the Civil Rights Act and such. While I always knew the skin color was different, and that my parents were of different backgrounds, and this, and that, we weren't of the same social class, and all of these sorts, I never really understood the difference until around age 12. In response to that, I responded with anger. I was very angry. I took on a persona that I'm now ashamed to think of. Being in an all-boys setting didn't help. We were already combative and argumentative as it was. I took calling people racist constantly. They made a joke out of it in their minds, and they didn't take it as seriously. When incidents did come up, it was more difficult to deal with, but it was my coping mechanism.
	In the book that James Baldwin's quote comes from, Notes for the Native Son, Baldwin talks extremely about this anger being the first response that African American sometimes have to racism, but it's also the simplest. In many ways, people turned to Dr. King. They look to his talk about love and forgiveness, acceptance, and such as the ultimate answer, but they're clear that there's a misunderstanding in this case because they forget that anger is an inevitable part of the response to racism, and it must be first conquered. I've been told to go, accept, and love your peers, but I've never been taught how to deal with that anger. I now see that my experiences as a black male have been a lifelong struggle to deal with this anger.
	I first attended Swarthmore as a member of the class of 2013. I should have graduated last year. In the fall of 2009, I entered TriCo, and I was ready to go and get engaged in discussions about diversity. I assumed that because I was black, and because I was not super rich that I had some great insight into diversity. I was pro-gay marriage. As far as I knew, I was a feminist. I was content to go and make the assumption that because I had experienced prejudice in some forms that I had some understanding as to the experiences of all disenfranchised people. I was shown that I was wrong. I make comments that were insensitive and ignorant, and I reflected my naivety and my immaturity of being an 18-year-old who thought I knew everything about the world.
	Yet, I thought I was going to find solidarity with the other black students at TriCo, and that was not the case. My peers essentialized what it meant to be a black person, and I realized that I had more in common in many cases with the white members of the TriCo community than I did with my black peers. I was going to put up a bunch of Beatles posters around my door, and put up things with posters with Socrates' faces and things like this, and I was called white. People mocked me for that. They asked me why I talked the way I did, and it felt strange and uncomfortable.
	I realized that for whatever reason, my body started to reflect it. I guess, three days into the week, I had my first seizure on Swarthmore's campus. The school wasn't sure what to do exactly. I was taken to the hospital. I think I finished out much of TriCo, an orientation intermittently between the hospital or in Worth Health Center. Such events would continue in the coming months. Freshman falls on me spending a night alone, either in my room in Warden, at Worth, or at the hospital. I couldn't help but question my decision to come to what I had previously believed was the perfect school for me. These feelings of self-pity that usually accompanies such behavior were ramping in my case. I found myself constantly attempting to remind myself that the problem was with Swarthmore, and the world around me, and not with me.
	A conversation I had with my advisor at that time, Dean Sams, who was the Director of the BCC before Dean Karlene. He reminded me that the world was bigger than I and that my problems, while they were legitimate, they were no more important or no more significant than anyone else's. He noted that fact that while in an ideal world, I should be able to rely on the sympathy and the concern of all those around me. Reality did not reflect those circumstances. He urged me to take ownership of my future success, and he stressed that it was up to all disenfranchised people to fight for their own agency, regardless of whether they be black, disabled, or anything else. Charity wasn't easily found, and the love and support that Dr. King spoke of so often was not a dream that have been realized in full, even 50 years after he gave that speech.
	Though I struggled with it, with this in mind, I entered the second semester of my freshman year with a positive attitude, positive for Paul Cato's sake, and it wasn't very positive. Willing to, in my self-seclusion, ask for them rather than expect or wait for it. I formed strong bond with many of my teachers and administrators. I finally began to feel as though I had made the right choice to attending. Unfortunately, this social progress was not paralleled health-wise, and I was subsequently forced to take a leave of absence the following semester.
	Like Vice President Eldridge, my experience has took a toll on my academics. I haven't actually revealed this aspect when I tell my story often. I was forced to withdraw because of academic reasons. I remember I was home, and I had received incompletes. I hadn't told my parents about it because I was ashamed of them. I was sitting on my computer, and I received the email from the school regarding the Committee on Academic Review's response. They're concerned that I wouldn't be able to keep up with my work, and that they thought I should take a time off. My body's first response was a seizure. It was a violent one.
	That was how my parents were informed of my difficulties at that time. It created a divide in my household. My parents, they wanted the best for me, and wanted me to transfer immediately. They saw no point at me struggling through school and having seizures constantly. They didn't understand why if they are paying this tuition, why the school could not give the support. When I applied to Swarthmore or any of the schools, the first thing we ask was, "Could you provide the academic accommodations and the physical accommodations that the ADA demanded I deserved?", and we were told yes. None of those accommodations were fulfilled.
	I think back to that spring, in one instance, perhaps one of the low points of my life wherein I had a seizure in one class that I would receive an incomplete in, though I had informed the teacher of what the seizures looked like, and how they manifested themselves, she disregarded my offer to explain in more detail what to do. A month later, I had a seizure in her room. For those of you who've seen my seizures, you know what they look like. I collapse and I fell in my arm like this. I looked like I was asleep, and I think she assumed that. She left me seizing on the desk for five minutes. Then, I went into a period of 15 minutes of unresponsiveness. Were it not for another student who thought something was wrong with the situation, I don't know how long she would have left me there.
	I have never told my parents this incident because, again, they would not be able to forgive or overlook Swarthmore for having this happen, but that marked my freshman year in my mind from henceforth. I felt ashamed of myself, and I felt I had let them down. I felt I'd let myself down. I felt that after all the work, and effort, and support that teachers like Professor Foy, and Professor Wallace, and Dean Sams, and Dean Small had put in that I'd let them down by not being able to make the mark and return the next semester. Anger resurfaced. It was the same kind of anger I used to feel in high school. This time, it was directed at Swarthmore rather than my white peers. 
	The following year, I took a year off, and I took classes at American University in DC. I commuted from home, and I worked on my health. At American, I saw what Swarthmore lack. The undergraduate population is only twice Swarthmore's size, but they had a fully-staffed office dedicated solely to disabilities. At the time, Swarthmore's Disability Office was combined with the Academic Support. Unfortunately, the focus was on SAMs, and academic support, and not on students with disabilities. We were dispersed forth throughout the campus. We knew each other. We sometimes complain to one another about your struggles, but they weren't addressed on an institutional or structural level. At American, it was different. I saw blind students, deaf students, and there were clubs for them, and they got the constant support they needed. I wondered why could this not be the case at Swarthmore if Swarthmore, for all its Quaker values and such, proposed to live through this.
	Yet, I wasn't happy at American University. Even though I was back in DC, and near my parents, I still felt as though I had let people down. For some reason, I still wanted to go back to Swarthmore. My parents didn't understand it. They were very practical in their views of things, and they thought I should move on and transfer somewhere, but I wanted to go back. My time away made me highly aware of Swarthmore's intellectual climate. Though the students at American were no more or less intelligent that we, students, here, I found it difficult to find the same intense debates and discussions found on all corners of Swarthmore's campus. My anger towards the school gradually were placed itself with longing and come the spring I could not wait to return to Pennsylvania.
	Perhaps, it is concerning that it took this time away from me to realize this, but (A), you showed me that the extent to which Swarthmore did hold a stake in my identity for when meeting new people during my year off, I did not introduce myself as Paul Cato, a black epileptic from Silver Spring, Maryland, but rather as Paul Cato, a student from Swarthmore College. My frustration could not maximize a sense of identification with the school despite all that had happened the year before. From time to time during the year, I would return to the CARs, the Committee on Academic Review's letter, and its question asking me to consider whether or not I believe Swarthmore is the right place for me. I told myself it truly was.
	Eventually, I was able to return. By my return to Swarthmore in the fall of 2011, I'd identified the contours of my previous problems. I was an individual trapped between ill-fitting categories. I was not yet an adult, but I was no longer a child or a teen. I was not stereotypically black, but I was certainly not white. I was not impoverished, but I was not rich. I certainly didn't know how to navigate all the nuances of stereotypical masculinity. Over the course of the next two years, I would progress to what I've come to understand as the opposite of essentialism and that self-determination.
	When I returned, I was pleasantly surprised to see that much of the work I'd expected to put in myself to ensure that accommodations were provided had already been done for me by Leslie Hempling in the Disabilities Office. Fall of 2011 was my most successful semester at Swarthmore. The frequency of my seizures decreased greatly, and I ran into no difficulties with teachers and the like. Nevertheless, I still felt out of place somewhat as I found more of the same challenges to my identity and more of the same failed attempts to fit the ill-fitting categories of which Baldwin wrote.
	Though the institution had acknowledged my disability and would accommodate my needs accordingly, such was not always the case on an individual level. I found myself conflicting with certain teachers, staff members, and my peers. My blackness continued to be challenged in small ways, and ableism seemed to go uncheck in many of the spaces I entered. At some point during my sophomore year, I found myself having fully embraced Baldwin's detest of categories and essentialization; whereas, two years prior, I found myself clinging to categories and boxes, assuming that a collection of shallow, one-word labels would successfully describe and define my identity.
	I later came to realize that it was up to me to provide that definition. Yes, I was black. Yes, I was a man. Yes, I was disabled, but it no longer mattered whether my blackness reflected itself, and my music choices, or whether my disability was visible to those who did not know me. In a similar vein, I began to make efforts to spread awareness regarding disability and ableism. I think back to that spring during which time I participated in a panel on disability alongside Hayden Dahmm, Leslie Hempling, and a transfer student at the time.
	As I look back at all I've been through, one thing is clear. All my progresses come with the help of those around me. It took several seizures in the presence of caring friends, faculty, and staff members to show me that it was safe to be epileptic at Swarthmore College. It took many deep conversations with the same people to lessen my dependence on essentialization and categorization. Without my first year advisor's push to take agency in fighting for my own needs, I might not be here today and I, certainly, wouldn't be here were it not for many of the people I see here today in this afternoon.
	When I think back to that seizure during my theater class in the fall and in the spring of my freshman year, I compare it to this past November wherein I had my worst seizure medically. I was in Michael [Lias' 00:55:57] office discussing plans for SASS Thanksgiving, and I soon had a grand mal seizure. I don't remember most of it. In the aftermath, within the next eight hours, I received no less than 25 texts, phone calls, et cetera, emails from friends and concerned people. As I set back in the hospital, I realized I would have never imagined this being the case four or five years ago. I'm proud to be a Swarthmore student since we made these progresses. I have to thank all the people here for having brought that about.
	My time at Swarthmore had been hard. There'd been many moments when I felt the various components of my identity attacked, totalized, or disregarded by those around me. At the same time, I must remember that living life is an exercise and self-determination, and a struggle where one must seek to define their own identities, despite the objections, protests, and skepticisms of others. For Dr. King was correct in his thoughts because with an enslaved mind, one's body cannot be free. Though I've not yet freed my mind of its dependence on categories in total, I now see that I have come a long way and with such progress due, in no small part, to my experiences here at Swarthmore. I now see that being disabled and being black are not mutually exclusive. I need not choose one like one student once told me. I could now go into a room firmly and describe myself as disabled without feeling ashamed of it.
	These have been my experiences at this point. I hope to keep sharing whatever wisdom I might have learned with people. I've talked to many freshmen this past semester, some of whom have gone through a lot of struggle and stress. I urge them all to keep their heads up and keep in mind the message that my advisor sent. It's up to us to take ownership of our problems, and our agency, to ask for help, and to fight for it, but the help is there. I hope my story can service as an example to show that progress can be made because I would never imagine I've come this far. Thank you.
Choir:	(Singing).