Timeline of Events

To provide a more complete picture of the state of Haverford’s campus for Black and brown
students of color, it's important to understand the tensions on our campus that have remained
unresolved while our administrators have attempted to gloss them over through appropriating
language of social justice. While it is difficult to consolidate all of the traumas that students of
color on Haverford’s campus have been subjected to into a concise document, it is useful to start
with the work of the Black women in BSRFI this past summer with their Open Letter to the BiCollege Community. In it they lay out both quantitatively and qualitatively, the different ways
that students of color and particularly Black students on Haverford’s campus have been
marginalized academically and socially. If you have not read the document or if you felt
impassioned when it came out during the wave of Black Lives Matter protests throughout the
country and have since forgotten its content, we encourage you to read through it again and think
critically about what has changed, what has gotten worse, and what Black students have been
forced to accept. Thank you to Camille Samuels HC ‘21, Aishah Collison-Cofie HC ‘22,
Lourdes Taylor HC ‘21, Aszana López-Bell HC ‘21, Zakiyyah Winston HC ‘22, Alma Sterling
BMC ‘21, Rihana Oumer BMC ‘21, Vic Brown HC ‘23, Mammie Barry BMC ‘22, Shaylin
Chaney-Williams BMC ’22, Mercedes Davis HC ‘20, Jasmine Reed HC ‘22 for your labor in
BSRFI.

June 17th 2020
BSRFI released their open-letter to the Bi-Co Community. What BSRFI highlighted through
their qualitative examples (small sample below):
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“Students from historically underrepresented backgrounds disproportionately left STEM
courses at a rate of 59% compared to other students at 28%”

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“Black students and transgender students were substantially less likely to think that
professors cared about their problems and the problems of students like them”

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“Black students and Latinx students reported feeling academics were inaccessible at a
significantly higher rate than white students, Asian students, or multiracial students who
identified in part as white.”

demonstrate the complete and total failure on the part of the campus institutions and
administrators in providing for Black and brown students at Haverford. Similarly, stories from
the instagram account Black At Haverford not only demonstrated the individual impacts that
Haverford’s administrative failures have had on Black students, but the specific ways in which
Haverford administrators and faculty actively engaged in anti-Black practices that led to students
feeling undesired, inexperienced, and under attack from the same people they trusted to help
foster their growth as students. Once again, if you have not read all of the stories on the page, or
if these students’ stories have lost their impact on you now that the wave of summer protests has
ended, we urge you to look through these them again.
July 1st 2020
President Raymond responds to the open letter. In her response, President Raymond refuses to
make a commitment to taking an active role in police and prison abolition. Rejects the demand to
donate to other BLM nonprofit orgs due to HC’s status as a nonprofit, instead saying students
can do “Anti-racist” CPGC internships. President Raymond does support the demands for
hiring/retaining Black faculty, DEI work, and Africana Studies, “I am happy to lead and
collaborate on the delineated items on curricular design (I), faculty hiring (III), faculty support
(III), faculty thriving (III), faculty retention (III), faculty and staff professional development in
diversity, equity and inclusion (IV), hiring faculty in Africana Studies to support creation of an

Africana Studies major (IX), and including a question on classroom racial climate in course
evaluations (XI).”
August 5th 2020
After meeting with President Raymond, Professor Helen White, other student allies and Senior
Staff at the college, BSRFI immediately updated the community of their disappointment in the
action taken by Senior Staff. While paid staff at the college were unprepared for the meeting, the
unpaid Black women of BSRFI had taken their due diligence to ensure the safety of Black people
on campus, yet were met with nothing. Most of the demands from the original open letter have
still not been implemented. In initial conversations with BSRFI, President Raymond seemed
more concerned with protecting the confidentiality of communications between the group and
the college than about quickly and decisively putting their plans into action. It’s important to
note that when BSRFI initially wrote their open letter to the campus, they had planned to send it
through an HC-All email to the whole campus for the document to be as transparent as possible.
However, the HC-All email was rejected as the primarily white Senior Staff at the college
instructed student-facing staff members who had access to the HC-All listserve to reject the
email.
September 28th 2020
Haverford College announces new initiatives they are beginning to support their mission for
equity, justice, and anti-racism. President Raymond sent out an HC-all email update the
following morning. She credits “a group of Black Haverford and Bryn Mawr students, Black
Students Refusing Further Inaction (BSRFI)” for the contributions they made towards the antiracism initiatives launched, but still never cites the group members by their names. Some of the
anti-racism action steps by the college include hiring and retaining Black faculty, expanding the
Africana Studies curriculum, professional development for staff and faculty in racial justice, and
the Presidential Endowed Fund for Anti-Racism. President Raymond states in her email that “We
are also launching multiple initiatives not necessarily identified in the BSRFI letter but which
speak to our shared commitment to be an anti-racist institution, as a college where all our
students can sense belonging and truly thrive” and then announces three more funds.

October 25th 2020
President Raymond spoke to prospective students of the college at the Have-A-Look event for
FGLI + students of color. During her speech, she spoke about Haverford’s plan for anti-racist
work, completely co-opting the work of the women of color in BSRFI without mentioning
anything about the concerns that led to the creation of the plan, or the students who worked so
hard to make the plan a reality. Rather than commit to crediting and honoring these students, the
president chose to use their message to market Haverford through the vision of women of color,
when the realities of the college’s administration are rooted in White administrators refusing to
take action on the issues that these women of color have tried to resolve. The Have-A-Look
program was eventually cancelled before the scheduled end of the event as a result of the
students who coordinated the program expressing their discomfort in continuing to advertise the
college to students of color after the response by administration.
October 28th 2020
Two days after the murder of Walter Wallace Jr and while Haverford students were in jail after
being arrested by the Philadelphia Police Department for protesting police murder, President
Raymond and Dean Bylander sent a response to Haverford College. In the response, which has
been thoroughly critiqued in the statement of demands from Haverford students, the
administrators spent more time policing how students on campus and activists in Philadelphia
should respond to the violence of Philadelphia Police than they did discussing police violence.
Students of color mobilized a response almost immediately, drafting letters to send to the
president directly and planning a sit-in on Founders Green that evolved into the subsequent
march and strike.