Negotiating Integration: Black Women at Barnard, 1968–1974

Concluding Remarks

In 1973 the black floor at Barnard was eliminated because the New York State Board of Regents declared housing based on race illegal.¹ What legacy did the pioneering women of 1968 to 1974 leave behind at Barnard? I began this project wanting to look at the ways in which the integration project at Barnard has stagnated and try to understand why. In reading Christine L. Edwards’s essay “The Dilemma of the Black Student in the White University,” I was struck by just how much I could identify with her experiences as a black Barnard student even though I will graduate from Barnard exactly 30 years after she did. After completing my research, however, I have learned that the integration project at Barnard has not been stagnant and in actuality the black women who have been at Barnard before me, particularly those who were here from 1968 to 1975, have been active in forcing Barnard to examine its ideas about what integration means and what is ultimately the goal of integration.

Their influence on Barnard can be found in the current Barnard mission statement, which in part reads, “Located in the cosmopolitan urban environment of New York City, and committed to diversity in its student body, faculty and staff, Barnard prepares its graduates to flourish in different cultural surroundings in an increasingly inter-connected world.”² Here we see that Barnard takes as one of its primary goals the promotion of diversity. While the black women who were at Barnard were not the sole reason that the college began to move away from assimilation and toward the valuing of diversity, their presence and activities were very influential in promoting this shift. Their desire not to give up their identity in order to gain access and opportunity has a great deal to do with why Barnard is the school that it is today.

The school that Barnard is today is not the school it was 30 years ago. Barnard, in my opinion, is not where it needs to be. However, to say that the integration project at Barnard is stagnant is to deny the profound influence that black women have had on the shaping of this institution and their centrality to its history.

Black women have an incredibly rich history at Barnard. This project really has been the very beginning of what should be a larger socio-historical project to delve into and understand their contributions to this community.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Interviewees

Karen Butler, class of 1973 (graduated 1974)
Sylvia Farrington, class of 1975 (degree pending completion)
Rhonda Harrison, class of 1989
Mila Oden Jasey, class of 1972
Tara Jefferson, class of 1992
Barbara LaBoard, class of 1973
Delsia Marshall, class of 1978
Jonette Miller, class of 1974 (left 1973)
Frances Sadler, class of 1972
Marsha Simms, class of 1974
Haratia Trahan, class of 1974
Joyce Theobold, class of 1991
Katherine Wilcox, Barnard professor and administrator
Dara Williams, class of 1978

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1. Felice Rosser, “Barnard’s Black Women,” 5. [↩]
2. Barnard Mission Statement, http://www.barnard.edu/about/mission.html (accessed 23 April 2003). [↩]