Slow to Justice

The national turmoil over racial injustice takes me back to Swarthmore in the late ’50s when the late activist Bayard Rustin called an upperclassman asking for “a Southern white girl” to participate in a March on Washington, D.C., to demand better integrated education. I found myself on a stage at the base of the Washington Monument, sitting between Martin Luther King Jr. and Harry Belafonte. King told me how as a seminary student in Chester, Pa., he would come to Swarthmore to listen to guest speakers. The event turned out to be a dress rehearsal for 1963. How frustratingly slowly human progress crawls.

—SUZANNE WRIGHT FLETCHER ’62, Chapel Hill, N.C.