by Anna Deavere Smith  |  February 2021
This article is part of “Inheritance,” a project about American history and Black life.
In 1968, history found us at a small women’s college, forging our Black identity and empowering our defiance. I knew nothing about the multitude of small colleges across the U.S. that had been founded, many by religious institutions, for the specific purpose of educating white women. Nor did I know anything about “suitcase schools,” some of which had reputations as glorified finishing schools where girls were focused on meeting boys attending nearby institutions. (They were called “suitcase schools” because on Fridays the girls took off to spend the weekend with their prospective husbands.) But in 1966, as my counselor put it to my mother, many of these all-girls colleges were “looking for nice Negro girls like Anna.” My father did not like the idea. He was adamant that I attend Howard or Morgan State or some other historically Black college or university, just as he and his siblings and my older cousins had done. My mother and I made our case about “opportunity.” He became emphatic: If I went to a white women’s college, he said, I’d have no social life. This was a legitimate concern—but up to that point, my father’s strictness had severely circumscribed my “social life.” Now he was suddenly concerned about it?
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [History] [Systemic Racism] [Black Lives Matter] [-ing While Black] [White Privilege] [White Culture] [Policing] [Social Justice] [Assumptions]