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College has long been used by Negroes to escape the ghetto, but Ford feels that the real need is for them to return, join the struggle to expand the economic and political control of blacks within their own community. He worries about his own ability to make the transition from the campus back to the ghetto, where he intends to teach while working for his master's degree in sociology. Looking back, he wonders whether Northwestern treated Negroes much differently than the world out side. "You come into the university expecting to find an ideal situation," he says. "But an upper-middle-class conservative school isn't immune to bigotry. For the black man, there's no Utopia."
WHEATON: Lady Bridgebuilder
Liz Stevens, 20, an impulsive senior at fashionable all-girl Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., had a comfortable up bringing in affluent Greenwich, Conn. She attended Rosemary Hall, an expensive private girls' school, enjoyed the social life at The Belle Haven Club, to which her father, the president of a local radio station, belongs. But, she says, "I never realized how prejudiced I was. In Greenwich the blacks are all maids or something similar, and you don't have to think about them because you've put them in a category." Like many in the Class of '68, she has since discovered that prejudice can be checked only by shunning labels, committing oneself to personal involvement with others.
That awareness came through a spontaneous "guilty feeling" when three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. Liz "wanted to do something," so she gathered five Wheaton classmates, made weekly trips to Boston's Roxbury neighborhood to tutor Negro children. Liz recruited more student-teachers, created a program that now includes 60 Wheaton girls. She found the work so satisfying that she spent two of her college summers living and working full time in the slums of Hartford.
"Maybe what we're doing in Roxbury smacks a little too much of white paternalism," she says now. "And if the blacks don't want me, I guess that's O.K. But seeing so many white people who just don't care is also frustrating—and it's inexcusable." She recalls helping break up a knife fight between two Negro girls in Hartford one day, partying at Belle Haven the next. "When two worlds are as far apart as the slums of Hartford and the Connecticut suburbs," she says, "something is wrong."
Liz would like to help bridge those two worlds as a social worker, has been accepted for graduate study at the Columbia School of Social Work. She admires those of her generation-including both of her two older sisters—who have joined the Peace Corps. But she expresses the consensus of her class in insisting that there is a more urgent need for service in U.S. cities. Even the suburbs need help, she adds wryly: "A lot of white suburban society is sick."
COLUMBIA: Poetic Revolutionary