Confronting Swarthmore’s Painful History

An Annotated Bibliography About Race in Swarthmore

This project started with a memory. My family moved to Swarthmore in 1969, the summer before I started third grade. I was excited by the idea of joining the Swarthmore Swim Club and meeting kids there. But we didn’t join. I remember my mother telling me that Black people weren’t allowed in the club and that our family wouldn’t join until they were. As a clueless kid, I wasn’t happy about this. 

In 2018, I decided to see if what I remembered was true and to investigate the history of integration of the swim club. The story I found didn’t jibe with my memory, but it was eye-opening to me. The first Black family, the Crittendens, joined in 1963, well before my family arrived in town. This wasn’t as big a victory as it might appear. In 1962, a majority of the Swarthmore Swim Club membership voted to prevent a change to the bylaws that would have prohibited discrimination based on race. The vote, by secret ballot, was 267-212.

Continuing my research, I encountered similar stories about Swarthmore’s history. I was dismayed to find clippings in the archives of the Philadelphia Bulletin about 1960 cross burnings in Swarthmore. Rather than tell my personal story, I decided a more meaningful contribution would be to make my research available to the community in the form of an annotated bibliography about race history in Swarthmore. 

The bibliography contains links to news stories and other materials on topics such as segregated education, housing, the Swarthmore Swim Club, and the Historically Black Neighborhood of Swarthmore. Some of these stories are hard to read. Friends and family are not always shown in the most positive light. When I shared an early draft of this project with Allison Dorsey, professor of history at Swarthmore College and a resident of the HBNS, she encouraged me to keep going in the face of my apprehensions. “Yes, I can say in advance, you will get some pushback,” Allison wrote in an email. “Some good white folks will object, and one or two Black folks may say ‘Who are you to offer this information?’” 

Many of these stories have been shared with the community before. For example, in October 2017, Allison shared the story of segregated schooling in Swarthmore in a talk to interested neighbors. In 2011, The Swarthmorean published articles by Sue Edwards about an attempt to integrate Swarthmore housing. In 2009, The Swarthmorean published an editorial that gave a brief outline of the story of the Harvey family’s unsuccessful 1961 application to join the Swarthmore Swim Club. This bibliography includes the primary sources for those narratives. 

Sometimes, the bibliography offers more than one source of information about the same event, mostly contemporary newspaper articles. Such primary sources are excellent ways of learning about history, but they can also be problematic. News articles, as well as opinion pieces, embed the biases of the writer. It’s revealing to compare and contrast how The Swarthmorean reports the 1960 cross burnings with articles about the same events in the Philadelphia Tribune, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and the Delaware County Daily Times. 

One of the challenges of a resource like this is that some of the information is proprietary or only free for some users. Delaware County residents can get free access to the archives of the Delaware County Daily Times through their public library. Any Pennsylvania resident can get a Free Library of Philadelphia library card and see the Philadelphia Tribune archive. I hope the descriptions in the bibliography will serve as signposts to help readers decide if it is worth getting an account to access any particular article.

This project complements an ongoing oral history project, Making a Homeplace, led by Jeannine Osayande, a fifth-generation resident of the HBNS. Osayande says, “As a documentarian, I can record and produce our local stories from our voices. Our community local news stories are America’s news stories. The annotated bibliography and the HBNS Making a Homeplace oral history initiative provide much-needed source materials about the Black experience in Swarthmore.”

The bibliography is not comprehensive. I intend to continue this work and welcome suggestions of other stories to research and add. Please email me at historyswarthmore@gmail.com with ideas. 

In the face of the painfulness of many of these stories, I keep in mind the hope that we can pull together as a community to do better. I keep in mind that the difficult stories referenced in the bibliography don’t represent our entire history. We are also part of the community that protested the skeleton wearing an Obama shirt hung from a tree on Hillborn Avenue, and the community that joined the HBNS in celebration and memorial on Juneteenth 2020.

I also hope that readers will use this resource to find stories that celebrate the considerable achievements of Swarthmore’s Black residents. And I hope that those of us who are part of the white majority in this “nice” town will acknowledge our significant history of racism. We need to learn these stories in order to do better now and in the future. In the spirit of journalist Ida B. Wells, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”

Note: In the summaries, I preserve the terminology used in the original sources. – A.B.S.

The Swarthmore Race Annotated Bibliography is here.
An introduction to the bibliography is here.