AFRICAN AMERICAN HERITAGE at UC
by Deborah Rieselman
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photo/Lisa Ventre |
Squaring her shoulders and setting her jaw, young Georgia Beasley refused. Flat out refused.
It didn't matter that she was missing lessons that were part of her curriculum. It didn't matter that she was her sorority's first scholarship recipient and that she always followed the rules. These rules were unfair. Worse yet, they were insulting. So she refused to follow them.
As a future teacher in the University of Cincinnati's College of Home Economics, Georgia was required to take a physical education course, which included swimming lessons on Tuesdays. Actually, she wanted swimming lessons. On Tuesdays, that is.
But the problem was Georgia was banned from the pool on Tuesdays. She could only plunge her black body into the water on Fridays, the day reserved for the "coloreds" to use the university swimming pool.
The memory has haunted her. Enough that she readily speaks of it nearly 80 years later. "So many places we weren't welcome," she recalls. "It was known that we weren't wanted at UC."
While students may know the textbook details of segregation, they rarely relate it to their daily lives, failing to realize that many of the benefits they have today came from courageous students who refused to be overlooked, students who stood their ground on a campus that was far from just and in a society that condoned it.
To honor some of UC's alumni who have been "pioneers in the black community for the advancement of education," the university named 18 of them "Living Legends," representing the last nine decades. In November, they gathered on campus for a Living Legends Symposium at the African American Cultural and Research Center. Although poor health kept two of them from attending, they joined the event via large-screen video interviews. By the end of the program, students would learn of their predecessors' struggles for things as basic as the very building in which they were meeting.
Searching for alumni from each decade was not easy, as Eric Abercrumbie, PhD (A&S) '87, UC director of Ethnic Programs and Services, soon found out. Until the 1950s, race was not listed on student records. "Search" was indeed a key word here.
Yet as the millennium drew to a close, the effort became a passion for him. Alumni who endured prejudice and responded by demanding change, he said, were "trailblazers" who paved the way for the African American Studies program, the African American Cultural and Research Center (of which he is also the director) and other breakthroughs on campus and in society. "There's been a lot of blood, sweat and tears, as well as joy, in this century," he commented.
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