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Bryn Mawr helped define my life in ways unanticipated by the educational system of the era. The College made essential, urgent, and possible the sophomore summer living with a family in Cameroon in Central Africa that was the rite/right of passage that determined the rest of my life, about which I’m writing a memoir. Africa was the antidote to the alienation of my being the College’s last “only Colored girl”—African-Americans were Negroes or Colored then—in the Class of 1966.

Although grateful for, and not yet critical of, my Eurocentric education, when an international exchange program offered a surprise African nation amidst overwhelmingly European options, my choice was simple. Two months in the Bamum Kingdom, which challenged stereotypes of Africa, where I was welcomed “home,” as sociologists who studied us insisted that African-Americans had no African heritage, revealed to me my rich and empowering history and culture.

On my return to Bryn Mawr, a classmate informed me that “Negroes have contributed nothing to society.” My elite education gave me no response.

Today my classmate’s statement would be considered a microaggression. But in that era of shocking televised macroaggressions against African-Americans, such microaggressions seemed relatively less important. My classmate’s casually cruel assertion joined my informative and edifying experiences in Cameroon to make inevitable that I would become a cultural anthropologist researching the African Diaspora. Her statement has remained engraved in my mind as a wonderful stimulant encouraging me to learn and teach about all that Africans and Afro-descendants did in fact contribute to society, beginning with peopling the planet with modern human beings.

A half-century of research, publishing, making documentaries, and organizing and participating in cultural and intellectual activities throughout Africa and the Diaspora has led me to define myself as a citizen of the global African Diaspora, with a U.S. passport as a result of a slave ship. I now consider as my extended family the 200 million Afro-descendants scattered throughout the Americas from Chile to Canada.

This issue of the Alumnae Bulletin presents reflections from Black alumnae/i and students spanning 65 years in the life of the College.

• "The Myth of the Monolith" includes messages from guest editors Taytiana Welch-McLure '13 and Jacqueline Handy '14 and links to related articles from the Winter 2021 Issue.