Freedom Summer and Beyond

For some Swarthmore students, activism in Chester and Cambridge led to further engagement in the Civil Rights Movement. In the summer of 1962, Swarthmore student Penny Patch '65 joined an integrated field project in Georgia. She was the first white female field worker in the Deep South. Mimi Feingold Real '63 joined CORE and the Freedom Riders in 1961 after her sophomore year at Swarthmore. She spent about a month in the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. Upon graduating, Real joined voter registration and community organizing campaigns in Louisiana.

Inspired by the SNCC organizers she met in Cambridge, Judy Richardson '66 left Swarthmore in 1963 to become a full time member of the organization. Richardson worked in SNCC’s national office in Atlanta before moving to Greenwood, Mississippi for Freedom Summer. She then worked for SNCC in Lowndes County, Alabama.

Ellen Arguimbau '66 and Gretchen Schwarz (now Hillard) '65 joined the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) in the summer of 1964. Both students worked on voter registration campaigns in Mississippi. Arguimbau worked in Vicksburg and Gretchen Schwarz worked in Indianola. Though white women such as Gretchen Schwarz and Penny Patch rarely faced direct threats of violence, their presence endangered the lives of the African American families who took them into their homes.