'And we are all better for it': A former Girard student recalls the fear and the courage

Forty years ago last month, following a decade-long desegregation battle that rocked the city, four African-American boys walked through the gates of Girard College for the first time as students.

I was almost 12 that fall, an eighth-grader at Girard. The memories of that tumultuous year helped shape my attitudes about race and the courage it takes to bring about change.

My first thought that September day, seeing those young boys arriving on campus, was entirely about survival.

It had been only three years since my own rocky "initiation" at Girard - leaving home, learning the Girard routine and navigating playground confrontations with some of the scariest kids I'd ever seen. One quick example: In my first month at Girard, I was pummeled twice by the same kid on the same night - first because I was a "newbie," and then again 15 minutes later for being fool enough to cry about the first beating.

Girard was no place for the meek. My friends and I gradually learned the routine, and Girard had in some ways come to feel like home to us. But we were white, and we hadn't had to confront the explosive issue of race, which was sure to make life infinitely tougher for these new arrivals.

Those four kids were being dropped into a steaming cauldron of trouble, and everyone knew it. I shuddered at what awaited them, and I remember thinking, "I wouldn't want to be those guys."

Race mattered, inside and outside the walls. It had dominated the public discussion about Girard for nearly a decade. We had argued about desegregation, had witnessed the marches around the campus and had regularly engaged in confrontations with our neighbors outside the walls. Racial tension - usually cast as us against them - was a fact of life at Girard in that fall of 1968, always there, bubbling at a low boil.

Sometimes it boiled over. Less than a month after the color barrier was broken, a small riot occurred just outside the campus as students were leaving for the Columbus Day weekend. It started when my older brother, David, one of his friends and I were attacked by a gang of local black teenagers as we walked to the SEPTA bus stop at 20th and Girard. One carried a two-by-four which he used to knock my brother down, and another brandished a car aerial that he swung at me. I can still hear that whistling sound as it whipped over my head (missed me!), and I remember David screaming, "Run!"