Virginia

She Was Battling Virginia Segregation at the Age of 9

Published

1 year ago

August 19, 2023

Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover. That’s certainly the case with former Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust’s new memoir, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury. The last thing Faust wants her readers to care about is what she is best known for—being the first woman to lead Harvard.

The front cover of Necessary Trouble is a close-up of Faust at 19, lying on the lawn at Bryn Mawr College looking intently through oversize glasses at whoever is photographing her. The picture is from the period in Faust’s life when she was shedding her identity as a young woman from a wealthy Virginia family and becoming a political activist who in the 1960s would define herself by her participation in the decade’s civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.

Becoming Harvard’s 28th president and presiding over the university’s dramatic expansion during an administration that went from 2007 to 2018 may be a story Faust tells in a future book, but what matters to her in Necessary Trouble is explaining why her privileged background and her education at Concord Academy and Bryn Mawr College did not lead her to the conventional life she was expected to embrace.

Faust takes pride in being a traitor to her class—an epithet applied to President Franklin Roosevelt during the New Deal era. The title for her book comes from a speech that civil-rights leader John Lewis, later a friend of Faust’s, gave in 2020 on the 55th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery Voting Rights March.

At an early age Faust became aware of the genteel racism that prevailed at her home in Virginia. The Black servants who made her parents’ day-to-day life easier (her mother never learned to cook) were expected to use a separate bathroom behind the kitchen and were addressed by the younger Faust by their first names.

When the Montgomery Bus Boycott took place in 1955-56, it prodded Faust into thinking about how widespread racism in America was. In the fifth grade she sent a letter to President Eisenhower letting him know she believed segregation was unchristian. “I am nine years old and I am white, but I have many feelings about segregation,” she wrote.

Four years later, when Faust left home to enter Concord Academy in Massachusetts, she faced the same contrast between the comfortable world she enjoyed and the racism around her. Concord was, as Faust saw it, a “bubble for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants,” but it was also a bubble she did her best to reach beyond. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the nearby Groton School, Faust was one of 20 Concord girls who took the school bus to hear him.

Drew Gilpin Faust’s passport photo from 1963.

Courtesy of Drew Gilpin Faust

By the time Faust entered Bryn Mawr College in 1964, she was even more skeptical about the moral values of the world in which she was being educated. Rightly so. While Bryn Mawr was a highly intellectual women’s college, it embraced an unspoken racism similar to that which Faust grew up with. Bryn Mawr students were waited on at dinner by maids in uniform, and the heavy work at the school was done by porters, who, like the maids, were Black. The maids lived on the top floor of the residence halls, the porters in the basement.

It was a system that Faust was unable to change, despite the efforts she and a classmate made to expose the “plantation atmosphere.” Faust responded to her disappointment with Bryn Mawr’s administration by joining the college’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

In March 1965, when the voting rights protests in Selma, Alabama, began, Faust was at a point in her life when she felt capable of turning her words into actions. Seeing television clips of “Bloody Sunday,” the day on which John Lewis and other protesters were beaten as they marched in Selma, was a turning point for Faust. “From that moment, I knew I had to do something. If I did not stand up, if I did not act after witnessing this, I would be ashamed forever,” she writes.

With her Haverford boyfriend and a car borrowed from his roommate, Faust drove the 1,000 miles from Bryn Mawr to Selma and became part of the Selma protests. The march accelerated the changes she was already going through. Staying in Selma with a Black family who housed her and her boyfriend was eye-opening. The family’s goodness and the risks they were taking in a town in which whites controlled most of the jobs touched Faust profoundly.

The problem for Faust was she could not stay in Selma until the end of the march. “Soon I was back at Bryn Mawr, which had not changed a bit during the four momentous days I had been gone. Its quiet seemed surreal after the intensity I had experienced,” Faust writes. A professor, aware that Faust had missed his class in order to go to Selma, made sure she felt his wrath for the hastily done paper she turned in. “I cannot help deploring the effect on the paper that decision all too evidently had,” he wrote in his comments.

After Selma, Faust turned her attention to the protests over the Vietnam War. In 1967 she traveled to Washington to participate in the October antiwar demonstrations at the Pentagon that Norman Mailer so memorably captured in The Armies of the Night.

“Faust the historian has been fueled by the same awareness of racial injustice that moved her in boarding school and college.”

Finally, at the end of her senior year, at a time when she was president of Bryn Mawr’s Self-Government Association, Faust was instrumental in getting the college to abandon its rules forbidding Bryn Mawr students from signing out for overnight, off-campus stays. For a college that prided itself on educating independent woman, the change in rules governing students’ sexual freedom that Faust helped engineer was a breakthrough event at a time when the women’s movement was in its early stages.

Necessary Trouble concludes with Faust pointing out that in the 1968 presidential election, she voted for the Black comedian and activist Dick Gregory because she could not bear to support either Hubert Humphrey or Richard Nixon, the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. She is delighted to report that 40 years later her home state of Virginia broke from its past by casting its electoral ballots for Barack Obama.

The result is a bittersweet ending to a memoir in which Faust does not tell us that after leaving Bryn Mawr she earned a Ph.D. in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania and embarked on a distinguished academic career. Her modesty is admirable, but there is an important connection between the first decades of Faust’s life and her last half century. As her books, particularly The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War and Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War, make clear, Faust the historian has been fueled by the same awareness of racial injustice that moved her in boarding school and college. She has not mellowed with age.

In contrast to such civil rights memoirs of the 1960s as Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi and Paul Cowan’s Making of an UnAmerican—both published when their authors were young—Necessary Trouble has significant distance from the period it describes. In Faust’s case that distance is a plus. Her memory is sharp, and she has been able to put the successes and failures of the era in which she grew up in perspective. By coincidence Necessary Trouble was published just a month after Claudine Gray, Harvard’s first Black president, took office.

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American literature at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964—The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America.

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Virginia Football Injury Report: Brian Stevens Returns, McKale Boley ‘Hopeful’

Published

2 hours ago

August 20, 2024

Press Room

Virginia Football Injury Report: Brian Stevens Returns, McKale Boley ‘Hopeful’

Slowly, but surely, the Virginia offensive line is getting healthy. After missing starters Brian Stevens and McKale Boley for more than a week, Tony Elliott was happy to report on Monday that Stevens has since returned to being a full participant in practice and is “hopeful” that Boley will be able to return sometime next week in advance of UVA’s season-opener against Richmond.

“[Brian] Stevens is back, rolling, and we’re hoping that sometime this week, before we get ready to really dive in to Richmond prep, that we’ll get [McKale] Boley back,” Elliott said. “But, Brian’s been back practicing. He started back last week and has looked good. Boley’s doing some stuff, in the underwater treadmill, in the AlterG, trying to get his conditioning up. He’ll be back on the land this week and then hopeful for next week. But again, you’re dealing with a high-ankle sprain. Those things are tricky.”

The return of Stevens to practice is paramount for the Cavaliers, as he took over as UVA’s starting center in week 3 last season and was exceptional in that spot, earning an All-ACC honorable mention after rating as the top run-blocking center in the ACC according to Pro Football Focus. This year, Stevens has been named to the preseason watch list for the Rimington Trophy, presented annually to the top center in college football. Boley, meanwhile developed significantly in his sophomore season, starting all 12 games at left tackle for the Cavaliers. His return will also be pivotal for protecting whichever quarterback Virginia ends up starting.

READ MORE: Tony Elliott Open to Playing Both Quarterbacks

Elliott didn’t offer any specific updates on other injured Cavaliers, but emphasized that Virginia’s roster is getting healthier as a whole as fall camp comes to a close this week.

“We’re getting a lot of guys back this week, so for the next week and a half, as we prime up for gametime, we should have some more continuity,” Elliott said.

Of course, there are still a few notable players out for Virginia in addition to Boley. Junior running back Xavier Brown and junior wide receiver JR Wilson are both unlikely to be available in time for the start of the season, which is less than two weeks away, but Elliott expects both players to return early in the season, if not by week 1. Senior linebacker James Jackson missed most of fall camp rehabbing from an offseason cleanup, but should be ready to go by the time the season begins.

Senior defensive end Bryce Carter and graduate offensive lineman Drake Metcalf suffered long-term injuries, though Elliott noted that Metcalf could return from the Achilles injury he suffered back in the spring by November or even October. Unfortunately, four Cavaliers have been lost for the season: junior linebacker Stevie Bracey, sophomore defensive end Mekhi Buchanan, junior offensive lineman Noah Hartsoe, and freshman wide receiver Triston Ward.

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Virginia

Virginia Football: Tony Elliott Open to Playing Both Quarterbacks

Published

9 hours ago

August 20, 2024

Press Room

Virginia Football: Tony Elliott Open to Playing Both Quarterbacks

Tony Elliott held his final press conference of fall camp on Monday evening and, somewhat expectedly, he has yet to name a starting quarterback as the competition between Tony Muskett and Anthony Colandrea continues with less than two weeks remaining before the 2024 Virginia football season begins.

Here’s what Elliott said on Monday about his timeline for determining the starting quarterback for week 1.

“I’m hopeful that, as we get through this week, in fairness to whoever it is, he’ll at least have a week to prep as the starter, but we’re gonna have some tough conversations with all of our personnel over the next couple of days,” Elliott said. “This is a little bit different because of the times that we’ve had in camp. We’ve really been able to push these competitions to get a good body of work to make decisions. So, I’m hopeful that sometime this week, we should be able to settle in on who’s going to be the guy, or if it’s going to be a combination of both of them, again. For those guys, they’ve battled their tail off. They’ve both done a good job. And now it’s on us as coaches to do the right thing based on the body of work as we truly evaluate it and what gives us the best chance to go win football games.”

It was always a possibility, and a relatively likely one, that Elliott would wait until the week of UVA’s season-opener against Richmond to publicly name a quarterback. But not only has Elliott and the Cavalier coaching staff not given any indication as to which way they are leaning as fall camp comes to a close, but Elliott also said he hasn’t ruled out playing both quarterbacks. When asked about the possibility of playing both quarterbacks, this was his answer:

“That’s to be determined. If that’s the way that it shakes out, you know, that’s the way that it shakes out. And again, we’ll have those conversations and see what’s best for the football team,” said Elliott. “I think you got both guys that are very, very capable. But I’m not gonna say yes, I’m not gonna say no. Those will be conversations that we’ll have the rest of this week to determine as we get ready to prep and how we need to prep for Richmond.”

Tony Muskett and Anthony Colandrea both started six games last season and each had their ups and downs, which is why this quarterback competition is so close. But last season, all of the games Colandrea started were with Muskett unable to play due to various injuries. Now, both quarterbacks are healthy and Elliott and his coaching staff have a tough decision to make with many factors to be considered.

Which quarterback gives Virginia the best chance to win? How long is the leash for the eventual starter in week 1? Does Tony Muskett’s experience give him the nod or does Anthony Colandrea’s future potential as a younger player make a difference? Does playing both quarterbacks in the same game offer more benefits than drawbacks?

I, for one, do not envy the UVA coaching staff for the decision before them, but the clock is ticking.

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More than 100 Virginia Democrats attend DNC in Chicago. What they do and don't want to see.

Published

17 hours ago

August 20, 2024

Press Room

More than 100 Virginia Democrats attend DNC in Chicago. What they do and don't want to see.

RICHMOND, Va. — More than 100 Virginia Democratic politicians, activists, and voters descended upon Chicago this week for the Democratic National Convention.

The Virginia delegation wants to see Democrats come together at the convention as they formally nominate Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s presidential nominee, Democratic Party of Virginia Chair Susan Swecker told CBS 6.

While most Virginia voters have selected the Democratic presidential nominee in the last few elections, voters elected a Republican ticket for the top statewide offices in the 2021 election.

“I believe that there is a lot of buyer’s remorse for what [voters] did in 2021,” Swecker said. “Voters are seeing it, and we’re going to make sure they know what is at stake in this election.”

Protests over the war in Gaza are taking place in Chicago and have drawn comparisons to protests over the Vietnam War at the 1968 Democratic Convention, also held in Chicago.

“Democrats want to come out of this convention A, united, and B, really supportive of Kamala Harris,” CBS 6 political analyst Dr. Bob Holsworth said. “What they don’t want to happen here, and this is the one fear they have, they don’t want to have this convention in some ways defined by the demonstrations outside the convention.”

Gaza gets little attention inside DNC hall — except from Biden

“America, I gave my best to you”: President Biden concludes his speech at the DNC

Thousands of marchers churned through Chicago’s streets protesting U.S. support for Israel during the war in Gaza. But inside the convention hall, the combustible issue went largely unmentioned until President Joe Biden got to the microphone.

Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez got cheers when she praised Harris for working “tirelessly to get a cease-fire in Gaza and get the hostages home.”

Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia made a brief allusion to the conflict.

A handful of delegates who ran on an “uncommitted” ticket protesting Biden’s position on the war unfurled a banner during his speech that read “Stop Arming Israel.” But it was blocked by supporters waving Biden signs before it was wrestled away and the lights over that section of the audience were shut off.

Biden himself addressed the issue head-on, saying he’d keep working to “end the war in Gaza and bring peace and security to the Middle East.”

“Those protesters out in the streets have a point,” Biden said. “A lot of innocent people are being killed, on both sides.”

The crowd cheered, and for a moment the war didn’t seem like it was dividing the party at all.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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