Different

By Corinna Fales

Plunging readers into disturbing and contemporary terrain of the human heart, the author (a daughter of Jewish refugees) interviews individuals from Lincoln University-the first degree-granting historically Black university-where she grew up before passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. From a prominent Bl

• Language: English
• Publisher: Boone Street Books & Editorial Services, LLC
• Release date: Aug 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737638803

Book preview

Children at Lincoln Village School, circa 1953;

photo courtesy of Sandra Draper.

Back row, second from left: Tommy Wilson; fourth from left: Frankie Weaver.

Middle row, second from left: Sondra Draper; fourth from right: Marita Rivero;

third from right: Minnie Slauch; first on right: Bonnie Suthern.

Front row, fourth from right: Evan Fales; first on right: Gene Draper.

(Individuals noted were interviewed, as were others not in the photo.)

REVIEWS

A beautifully written story; fascinating and actual, commensurate with grace and simplicity. A deeply personal legacy about race, history, and culture, reaching deep into the American soul.

Terry Williams, Fellow at Yale University and Professor at New School University; author of Harlem Supers: The Social Life of a Community in Transition; The Con Men; and, with Trevor Milton, Hustling in New York

A wonderful book that my late husband, Julian Bond, was so looking forward to reading and which I believe he would have loved. I think other readers will enjoy it, too, and will learn a lot in the process.

Pam Horowitz, former staff attorney, Southern Poverty Law Center; and the widow of Julian Bond

Corinna Fales courageously looks human difference in the eye and has the guts to blink. She uncovers the experience of growing up in the community of Lincoln University through in-depth interviews with Julian Bond and others. She finds that the lenses of discrimination and race still show that people will be people, and just when you think you understand, you find the next layer of your ignorance. An ultimately triumphant group memoir well worth exploring.

Mack Lipkin, MD, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Division of Primary Care at New York University School of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital Center

Corinna Fales grew up at a pivotal time for race relations in the United States. The daughter of Jewish refugees, she lived on and near the campus of Lincoln University, a historically Black college. Returning to talk to the friends and acquaintances of her childhood, they share with her the complex experience of race and class in this unique community. In this fascinating book, she universalizes this experience for us all.

Carol Glassman, DSW, activist and social worker

An important book, beautifully crafted. At a time of division in our country author Corinna Fales gives us an intimate look at how being different feels for several quite diverse people. These highly personal interviews were possible only because the author grew up with her subjects, played with them, learned with them, cried with them, and laughed with them. This is also a look at a piece of history focusing on the historically black Lincoln University as it existed in the 1940s through the 1950s and on the adjacent village. In addition to being an important book for our times, it is often moving, humorous, and insightful.

Richard Brown, (ret.) General Counsel of a bi-state transportation authority

© 2016 by Corinna Fales

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from Corinna Fales.

http://boonestreetbooks.com

http://www.corinnafalesconsulting.com

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021914

BOONE STREET BOOKS & Editorial Services, LLC

Third Edition, re-issued in 2021

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 13: 978-1-7376388-1-0

ISBN: 978-1-7376388-0-3 (e-book)

Photograph on cover, Children at Lincoln Village School, courtesy of Sondra Draper

FOR US ALL

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

I. UNKNOWN TERRAIN

1. To My Surprise

2. Lincoln University: The First Degree-Granting HBCU

II. THE CAMPUS COMMUNITY

3. Yvonne Foster

4. Susie Grubb

5. Julian Bond

6. Austin Scott and Bonnie Suthern

7. Jimmy MacRae

III. THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY

8. Sondra Draper (Sonne)

9. Gene Draper

10. Tommy Wilson

11. Frankie Weaver

IV. THEY WERE ALONE

12. Mrs. Drummond and Eddie Benard

V. THE LIGHT OF HEART

13. Marita Rivero

VI. THE BEDROCK AT THE BOTTOM

NOTES

About the Author

List of Illustrations

1. Children at Lincoln Village School

2. Map of Region around Lincoln University

3. The Author, Age 5, on the Lawn in Front of Her On-Campus Home

4. Albert Einstein at Lincoln University

5. Yvonne Foster, Age 4

6. Children at the Tom Thumb School

7. Paul Robeson with Jane Bond (left), Sylvia Hill, and Julian Bond (right)

8. The Two Village Schools—Miss Brown’s Is on the Right

9. A Christmas Performance by Children Upstairs at the Village School

10. Girl Scout Troop #116, Lincoln University

11. Eddie Benard

12. Corinna (left) and Marita (right) in Swimming Tub on Lawn

13. The Author Today

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It really did take a village—and remarkable generosity on the part of many individuals—to bring this book to life. When I despaired that it would ever see the light of day, Robert Armbruster came to the rescue. I cannot thank him enough for his extraordinary financial support, which made it possible to finally publish this work, and for his special and true friendship. It also makes me very happy to thank my son Calien Fales-Jussel, for his support in publicizing the book.

Many other friends have wisely guided my hand and my heart in the writing process. Early on, Susan Gunn Pevar helped me to locate individuals to interview, and Minnie Slauch Pusey became almost my personal gumshoe at one point, locating folks from the Village whom I had sought for months and supplying priceless information and photographs. Deborah Putnam Thomas read and re-read the manuscript and always gave me sage advice.

Other friends read portions of the manuscript and provided at least one or more important pieces of advice. Eric Mann, Professor Samuel Roberts, Jr. (Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University), and Carol Glassman made me re-think specific content or change my focus in some way. So did my brother Evan and his friends, for this latest edition. I also want to thank Brian Ellerbeck of Teachers College Press for repeatedly asking me what the book signified, until I finally understood its relationship to the groundbreaking research on babies conducted by Dr. Karen Wynn and the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Wynn and to the Center for their work, which impacted me and this work so fundamentally. On a more personal, note I want to thank Dr. Wynn for reading the first edition (which I sent her out of the blue) and for letting me quote her response on the cover of this one.

Immense gratitude to John Streetz for his belief in me and the book, and his kindness in accepting the job of writing the Foreword. Many thanks, too, to the busy individuals who gave of their time and energy to read the manuscript and write reviews for the cover, to Peter Crown for enhancing the cover photo, to Sandra Schmitt for help with final formatting of the first publicication, and to Wendy Weinberg Beaudin for her design expertise for the second publication. A special thank you to Richard Rothstein for counseling me to add some important information to this edition.

Finally, my boundless gratitude to everyone who agreed to let me interview them and often surprised me with their candor—and a special shout-out to Yvonne Foster for knocking my socks off from the very beginning. Without all of you, there would obviously be no book, let alone the one that this has become.

FOREWORD

The almost magical bubble that was the Lincoln University to which I was introduced in September 1943 was a rare place in an America still plagued and troubled with the remnants of slavery and the Civil War. There was much to be done in developing honest efforts to truly build a country where equity and inclusion were more than empty words.

The university was peopled by a diverse group: a faculty made up of a number of Princeton PhDs, several Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany, and many highly trained African American young men who were prepared to face the rigors of a tough curriculum. For its small size, the college produced a disproportionate number of MDs, lawyers, educators, and successful artists and authors. The graduates include the United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and renowned poet Langston Hughes.

Corinna Fales has been known to me since she was a delightful toddler wandering around Lincoln’s campus in the 1940s. We later met at George School, a coeducational Quaker boarding school, where I taught and she was a student. She there developed into a beautiful, accomplished young woman, whose quiet, caring manner was admirable. Over the next fifty years or so, we have remained in touch periodically at alumni functions connected with the school.

My acquaintance with the author, and many of those she interviewed, gives me a different perspective of the professors who were my mentors at Lincoln. The thoughtful, often emotional presentation of the complexities of discrimination based on race, gender, color, and caste are shown in a relativistic way that gives this work an intellectual power. As the lives here are depicted through sequential and personal interviews, a mission unfolds and indicates that a redefinition of our efforts to bring our country together is required. And as the lives here are depicted in the interviews and photographs, I am struck by the fact that these individuals are now contributing to this mission in another way, through this book.

I am reminded of a quote by Buckminster Fuller: You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

As a nation, we must get past the usual habit of espousing the right and wrong technique when addressing any kind of discrimination. It will be best if we work at creating devices that lead to equitable treatment and open participation of all of our citizens.

—John Streetz

Lincoln University, Class of 1949

Advisor to George School, Class of 1961

MAP OF REGION AROUND LINCOLN UNIVERSITY

Photo from Lincoln University website.¹

People can’t stand different.

Even children can’t stand different.

—P. K. MacRae (Interviewee)

I.

UNKNOWN TERRAIN

The Author, Age 5, on the Lawn in Front of Her On-Campus Home.

Lincoln University’s science building is pictured in the background.

1

TO MY SURPRISE

I grew up at the first degree-granting historically Black college/university in the United States—Lincoln University, in rural Southeastern Pennsylvania—at a time when the local schools and facilities in the nearest town, four miles away, were segregated.

A community where Blacks and Whites lived together and socialized on an equal footing both within and beyond their community was virtually unheard-of during the 1940s and 1950s. But we were that place, and it was a singular and stunning thing.

Lincoln was always different, and so were those of us who grew up there. Or were we?

I interviewed a group of us with the intent of creating a sort of lyrical group memoir about an enchanting place, then slowly realized that the book I was given was far more complex and altogether different from the one I had envisioned. I had inadvertently stumbled upon an ancient and universal theme—prejudice—and I felt obliged to follow where it led.

And lead me it did—to surprising individuals and to territory I resisted. It became a long, bumpy, and uncomfortable road that pulled me down through the layers of Lincoln’s community into unknown terrain. But I never lost trust in the integrity and irreplaceable value of that process of discovery, so I have unfolded it for you the way it unfolded for me, though you will experience it in your own way. And, as we slowly descend to the bedrock at the bottom, we will explore the familiar and unfamiliar features of the landscape that we pass along the way.

There were actually two Lincolns: the university campus and the Lincoln Village. They existed (and still exist) side by side, but the distance between them is far greater than the narrow country road that connects them.

Although I am White, I lived in them both. My father, who taught at the university, died when I was eight, and we were required to move out of our campus home. My mother eventually found a house she could afford to rent in the Village, and we moved, literally and figuratively, across the railroad tracks. That experience—of growing up in both Lincolns—gave me the perspective that called this book into being.

It might seem that I am going to write about race, or about race and class. But my larger focus here is the age-old and worldwide aversion we all tend to have to any kind of difference, and why I think prejudice is so important to us that it has caused suffering and devastation throughout human time, routinely overriding our ability to empathize.

Theoretically, we could just as easily be predisposed, as a species, to value, appreciate, and celebrate difference. But we aren't, and we don't. And we never have. Why is that?

This is the fundamental question I finally had to grapple with. And it has become my purpose here to signify this universal human characteristic within the context of our Lincoln community, and to set existing research on diversity into the context of the personal: a story. If we want genuine change, I have come to believe that we need to address our difficulty with diversity in a new way—with courage, honor, and integrity—not with political correctness.

Because the Lincoln we grew up in was so geographically insular and insulated—a little island—it is an ideal lens through which to see what remains true about human reaction to difference when a community’s values are radically progressive, and when its members have great freedom to create the kind of human environment they want to live in. We interacted daily with people who were different, and those of us who grew up there were and are much more open-minded about difference than are most people. In addition, the fact that many people and businesses in the surrounding area were hostile to Lincoln created in us a strong sense of belonging—a kind of ingroup—which included our small student body. It was a tiny rural place—our postal address was simply Lincoln University, for both the campus and the Village—so many of us knew each other or knew of each other. The campus kids knew each other, the Village kids knew each other, and some of us from both communities knew each other, primarily because we went to school together (as the school photo on the inside cover shows).

We were Black and White, light-skinned and dark-skinned, financially secure and extremely poor, highly educated and barely educated, the children of refugees and the great-grandchildren of slaves. You will hear what we thought of each other, what we didn’t know about each other, and what we thought we knew about each other but didn’t know. We loved each other and hurt each other. You will hear many sides of the same issues and events, as well as things that were known only to the person speaking. Perhaps you will question what you believe or think you know, or even who you think you are. It’s all part of the human territory we will cover together as we journey down through Lincoln’s social layers, from the campus kids to the Village kids to the poorest of the poor—and end with an encouraging interview, followed by some reflections and my conclusion about our universal difficulty with difference (whether differences in race or education or family status or intelligence or anything else). Our conversations were richer and more honest than I could have imagined, and constantly astonished me. It was a great privilege to learn, so many years after we grew up together, what people really thought and went through and came through.

Lincoln was a truly exceptional and extraordinary place, as well as a historic one. But, for all its remarkable qualities, it was still a human place. Let me tell you about it—and let me share with you these stories, which carry the love, prejudice, anguish, hope, and longing for community that affect all of us, everywhere.

2

LINCOLN UNIVERSITY: THE FIRST DEGREE-GRANTING HBCU

We grew up at Lincoln University during the tenure of its first African American president, who held the post from 1945 to 1957. The grandson of slaves, Horace Mann Bond (1904-1972) graduated from Lincoln in 1923 and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1936, at a time when few Whites, let alone Blacks and other minorities, even attended college.

Lincoln was founded in 1854 for the higher education of colored youth of the male sex, two years before the Thirteenth Amendment would outlaw slavery.² It was, as Bond writes in his history of Lincoln, Education for Freedom, the first institution found anywhere in the world to provide a higher education in the arts and sciences for male youth of African descent.³ Author Pauli Murray, whose family lived in the area, describes this landmark achievement: That a tiny outpost of higher education for Negro men should be set up seven years before the Civil War, within a few miles of slave territory and in quiet defiance of threatened border raids and stubborn local opposition, was one of those remarkable flashes of idealism which light up the pages of history.⁴

Lincoln’s founding (originally as Ashmun Institute) was a radical act of faith in the intelligence and ability of Black men on the part of its White founder, John Miller Dickey. A graduate of Presbyterian Seminary at Princeton University, Dickey intended Lincoln to provide Black men with a classical education to become preachers and missionaries for the Presbyterian Colonization Society in Liberia, Africa.

During its first hundred years, the university graduated approximately 20 percent of the Black physicians and more than 10 percent of the Black attorneys in the U.S., according to Lincoln’s website.⁵ This was a highly disproportionate number of notable men for the tiny size of its student body, which had only once reached five hundred by the 1950s. In Education for Freedom, Bond writes: [I]t is important to understand how such a small institution could graduate within the space of ten years (1929-39) Thurgood Marshall . . . [;] Nnamdi Azikiwe . . . the founder of African nationalism; and Kwame Nkrumah . . . the first Black Prime Minister of a sub-Saharan independent Black state.⁶ It was indeed a vibrant place.

For the university’s location, Dickey bought farmland in Chester County, just six miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line, in a tiny antebellum community of free Black property owners known as Hinsonville, whose families later comprised much of what became the Lincoln Village. To this day, many of these families attend the Hosanna African Union Methodist Protestant Church, which was built at the Hinsonville crossroads and holds barely one hundred people.

According to local tradition, the church was a way station on the Underground Railroad, the legendary network of secret locations and courageous individuals that enabled thousands of slaves to escape from the South. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman—two giants of that movement who had themselves been born into slavery and repeatedly risked their own lives to bring others to freedom—spoke at the tiny church; and slaves were hidden in a tunnel under its foyer (some say its pulpit). Surrounded by humble, worn tombstones, the church still stands amid tall fir trees, just 30 yards from the campus, where at least three old faculty homes were also said to be among the many stops on the Underground Railroad that dotted Chester County. Yvonne Foster (see Chapter 3) told me that her home, too, was said to be one of the three homes on campus that were used as stations on the Underground Railroad. A lot of those old houses had trap doors to the cellar where they took the coal in, and that’s where the slaves were supposedly brought in. No one can document it because they didn’t expose themselves.

The Underground Railroad was in full swing when Lincoln was founded. Its energy of struggle, hope, and freedom infused and shaped the character of both Lincoln communities, and underlay their strength and pride.

We came of age nourished by Lincoln’s rich cultural life, which was arguably at its zenith during Bond’s tenure. Albert Einstein came to speak, and Marian Anderson—the first Black opera singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera—sang in our beautiful little chapel, with its gracefully arched wooden beams. The African presence was strong, African art was always on display in the library, and African students in their traditional robes drummed together in the warm light of late afternoons.

The community was dedicated not only to academic excellence, but to excellence in living. It was gentle and bawdy and fun. Its spirit was strong, and filled with the righteousness and joy of its vision. It was staunchly a men’s school until 1953 (when my mother became the first woman to graduate), so it had a humor and camaraderie that were unmistakably male. The first Black professor—a Lincoln alumnus—had finally been admitted to the faculty in 1923, after years of resistance from the White board of trustees, who believed that Blacks were not yet ready; and, by the time we were growing up there, the faculty and administration were fully integrated.

Our grounds were a vast, carefully tended, and magnificent place for our imaginations and bodies to run free. We had enormous liberty to explore and to create our days, and no one even thought to lock their doors. It was an exhilarating time.

It was also a pivotal era in the history and life of the university and