Introduction

In the tumultuous years of the early 1960s, many Swarthmore College students actively allied themselves with the Civil Rights movement. Many of them supported community-based activism and demonstrations in nearby Chester, Pennsylvania and in Cambridge, Maryland. Other individuals worked with the American Friends Service Committee and with Black community organizing in the South. This site is a project of the Swarthmore College Libraries in cooperation with members of Swarthmore’s class of 1966, who realized at their fiftieth reunion that it was high time to document that activism.

In a time of ongoing and renewed struggle around systemic racism in the US, we offer these materials in solidarity with the Black communities of Chester, Pennsylvania, Cambridge, Maryland, Tennessee, and other communities across the South mentioned in these oral histories and documents. The voices collected here enrich our understanding of how liberal arts campuses participated in this historical moment, the ramifications of which we are still experiencing today. Our purpose is not to center or privilege these perspectives. The collective actions that comprise what we now know of as the Civil Rights movement were centered in the Black communities with the most at stake, often far from ivory towers. This project documents how these struggles galvanized a campus community.