Grady Lights (Class of 1974) interviewed by Rhea Chandran (Class of 2023)

0:00:03.0 Rhea Chandran: And I'm starting a live transcript as well. Alright, so today is August 12th, 2021, my name is Rhea Chandran in the class of 2023, conducting an interview as part of the Documenting Student Life alumni oral history project. Could you begin by introducing yourself with your name and your class year? 

0:00:26.0 Grady Lights: I'm Grady Lights and I'm Class of 1974. I am originally a part of the Class of 1973, but because of a semester's leave of absence, I graduated with the Class of 1974, and I have, I guess something of a distinction that I have two reunion years and two reunion classes to enjoy that with. Since graduating, I have not missed a reunion.

0:00:56.5 Rhea Chandran: Wow, that is great...

0:00:58.2 Grady Lights: And I've been to both the Class of '73's reunion as well as the Class of '74.

0:01:07.5 Rhea Chandran: That's great that you were able to attend all of those reunions, and what did you do for work before you retired? 

0:01:14.6 Grady Lights: I was working in the administrative division of SEPTA. I retired after 25 years in that department, I wore a number of different hats within the organization, but always within the administrative division. After I retired, I was looking forward to enjoying my bucket list. However, after Trump announced his presidential bid, I felt my grip on the handle of my bucket sort of loosening, so I sort of split the difference, I said that I would be retiring, but not totally retired, so I'm very involved with my County's Community Action Network. I live in Delaware County, but my organization is the Havertown Community Action Network, and I'm very involved in the interfaith racial justice and Art Advocacy Action groups. And I think those names are pretty self-explanatory, get out the vote and voter awareness and fair districting is also part of my main endeavors.

0:02:33.6 Rhea Chandran: That's amazing. And where were you located before attending Haverford? 

0:02:38.0 Grady Lights: I am what southerners call a Geechee. Geechees are persons of color from the Lowcountry, South eastern part of South Carolina. I was born in Charleston, but I grew up in the Beaufort Hilton Head area. My father was a career marine, he was stationed at the Military Depot at Parris Island for the greater part of his career, so I hail from that part of the country, African-Americans known as Geechee speak a dialect of English called the Gullah, and it is a mixture of the West-African languages of the slaves and the simple English of commands and instructions which the overseers gave the slaves and it's still practiced today, the intercostal islands where the Geechees live have been relatively isolated for many years, and for that reason, many of the oldest traditions and legacies that we inherit have been preserved in many of our customs and most importantly in the Gullah dialect.

0:04:03.1 Rhea Chandran: Wow, that is amazing. So how did you find out about Haverford? 

0:04:07.8 Grady Lights: My first encounter with Haverford actually was in 1966. I was 15 years old, I was a sophomore at the recently integrated all-white High School, a member of the Haverford class of 1954, Courtney Siceloff, was the director of a social services center that is located on one of the nearby islands, St. Helena's Island, the name of the organization is the Penn Community Center, and Mr. Siceloff reached out to the principal of the all-Black elementary school I attended, the college at that point, earlier on in the civil rights movement, was looking for eligible prospective Haverford students, and she referred me, Courtney came by the house spoke with my parents, and I was 15, 16 years old, I wasn't really thinking much about college at that point, but that was my very first encounter, and I did recall it so that fast-forward to my junior and senior year when I took the standardized test, the SATs and the merits scholarship test, my scores, placed me in a database, by then integrating Ivy League schools used to recruit eligible persons of color. So the admissions office of Haverford reached out to me. And we proceeded from there.

0:05:50.0 Rhea Chandran: So were you able to visit campus before you decided to attend? 

0:05:54.1 Grady Lights: Unfortunately, I was not able to attend, but through a stroke of good luck, the admissions director was recruiting in the south eastern part of South Carolina around the time that my interview was to be scheduled, so I have... I guess you could say the bragging rights to being interviewed for admissions in my family's den...

0:06:23.9 Rhea Chandran: That's amazing.

0:06:25.5 Grady Lights: Yeah, there was a funny incident that happened. Well, my dad greeted him and chatted. And so Jack Williams, the admissions officer, was ready to get started with the interview, and my father did not realize that he had to leave. So it was an awkward moment where a United States Marine was being told by a total stranger, "Sergeant Lights, I have to interview Grady, and you have to leave [chuckle] us in order to do that." I can't describe the expression on my dad's face. There's a joke, among other jokes amongst Marine folks, and one of them is that there are three human beings on the planet, the males, the females, and the male Marines, so that gives you some kind of idea of the dynamic that followed. But after a while, dad adjusted. My younger sister, Vernada, she came to Bryn Mawr during my sophomore year. And once the interview got started, she actually came into the hallway, the door was still open, and she was making goofy, crazy faces at me trying to make me lose my decorum and laugh, which I thought was a rather impish thing to do so, I eventually shushed her away. [laughter]

0:08:06.3 Rhea Chandran: That's so funny. And so the interview obviously went well. And what were your first impressions of Haverford when you arrived for your freshman year? 

0:08:15.2 Grady Lights: Well, if I could just go back to my assessment of the interview. I actually didn't think that the interviewer liked me very much, for some reason. I don't know why, but I decided that at this age, I turned 70 last December, so I was just gonna tell the truth. [laughter] That's one of the privileges of your seniority, you're much freer about doing that. I don't know what it was. They were very tough questions, and I answered very conscientiously. I guess it was because he didn't let on how he responded, and I may have misread that. And in retrospect, I think that was a factor. But when you're 18, you look at things very, very differently. He asked me a very interesting question. He said, "What would you do if you had a million dollars to change the world?" So that was an interesting question.

0:09:13.4 Rhea Chandran: Do you remember what your response was? 

0:09:15.6 Grady Lights: I believe I said that I would distribute the money to needy people. [laughter] I guess he was looking for something more ambitious. But I just said, "Well, there are a lot of poor people in the area where I live." And I said "I would give them the money." And that was that.

0:09:38.0 Rhea Chandran: Wow.

0:09:38.6 Grady Lights: But as far as my first impressions on campus, there was a bit of a sort of jump in the deep end, because when I arrived, I just had no preparation other than the images that were in the view book, and so on and so forth. When I got to the Haverford Train Station, I ordered a taxi 'cause I had quite a bit of clothes. I didn't realize we were in a hippie dress down era. I was still in a prep school mode of [chuckle] haberdashery, if you will. So I was looking for Gummere Hall. I'm a real Francophile. So I pronounced Gummere “Goo-mare”. So I went on the proverbial ride in the taxi all over the campus, asking people, where is “Goo-mare” Hall? So finally, a member of the grounds crew, and I said, "Gummere, it's right here in my orientation material." And he said, "Oh, Gummere." [laughter] And so I ended up... So one impression that summer when I was going over the Customs orientation material, the selection of the name “customs”, I found so fascinating. But then after I found it clever, it seemed ominous, and I said, "Oh my God, I'm going into another country." [laughter] And in some respects, that proved to be true, and others it was not so true or intimidating.

0:11:27.4 Rhea Chandran: So did your Customs Week go well? 

0:11:30.5 Grady Lights: Well, I had to go through some decompression. I remember one of the resident customs men, Irv Ackelsberg. I would go to the mandatory activities, and then I was just chilling out in my room trying to collect myself, and I did that at the end of the scheduled day. I did not go out immediately and just hang out with the other guys, and Irv noticed that. So he sort of came into my room and just summarily commanded that I go outside to the Gummere lawn and play frisbee with the other students. I'd decided early on in the integration experiment, that that's the whole point. I was never one to segregate myself in mixed race situations. I always took the initiative to mix, so I lost a bit of my regimen, and he sort of very summarily jerked me out of it. [laughter]

0:12:35.6 Rhea Chandran: Very intimidating week. I wanted to ask, you mentioned you're a Francophile. But what did you major in? 

0:12:43.6 Grady Lights: I majored in Political Science, and that's an interesting story that I think touches on a personal side of your life in a college, because we were 700 students, small when I was there. So a major choice is, it is a model situation for intimate learning, 'cause there weren't that many professors. And honestly Rhea... The two French professors at that stage in my journey, frankly, as white persons, they were very different than white Southerners. One was a continental scholar, Marcel Gutwirth, who was a permanent proper European gentleman. The other person was a scruffy former World War II pilot, unshaven, rumpled, profoundly bright, just like a character out of a novel of some sort, and I just could not make the connection. And my next choice was religion because as all good Southerners during your coming of age, you're gonna go to school, you're gonna go to college, you're gonna get saved. I was raised a fundamentalist Christian, and you're gonna graduate and get a good job and be a success. So I was praying actually through my freshman year, but my faith was shaken during my first freshman seminar course, which was on the history of the Catholic Church, and therefore all of the hidden history of how the Bible came to [chuckle] become the Bible, was revealed in all that's inglorious and disillusioning splendor, if you will, and I had trouble recovering from that, it was very shaking.

0:14:49.0 Grady Lights: But that was... I was ambivalent about going into those deep waters and upending my faith in that way, but the professor... He read one of my papers and the way he commented on how well it was written... I don't know, I always trust my gut in situations like that, and he was a bit too surprised, and it seemed to imply a level of expectation that I thought was prejudiced, I'll have to say it. He was not overtly so, but like I said, I just trust my gut and that intimate student-teacher situation, personal rapport means a lot, I'm a very practical person. So sophomore year was coming to an end and I had to declare, so I chose Political Science because most of the members of the department were Jewish, Jews were allies of BIPOCs in our civil rights struggle, and I worked for Jewish proprietors in my hometown when I was in high school. The owner of the jewelers and the owner of one of the department stores, so I went with what was familiar, and that turned out to be a reasonable decision. I got along well with my advisors, there was one I didn't get along with so well, so you can't always bat a hundred, as they say.

0:16:31.8 Rhea Chandran: Definitely, and did you feel academically supported coming from your high school to Haverford? 

0:16:40.1 Grady Lights: I worked hard and our teachers were very good. South Carolina in the '60s, when I was a student at the integrated school, ranked 49th amongst the 50 states in the allocation for public education, so before we integrated, my Black teachers were thoroughly dedicated to giving us the basics, so I had all the basics, and I did well. The white schools, facilities were subsidized by private donations from the white families, so that additional financial infusion plus the serious dedication of the teachers, made up for a good part of that deficit. Where you experienced the difference was culturally, Rhea, there was an element of sophistication and cosmopolitaness about the intellection at Haverford that was cultural, and certain of the authors, how deeply people had read certain things, and then it was a matter of class, it was your appearance, professors were professional, so there was that extra-curricular part of intellectual culture that I didn't have, but as far as knowing how to read and write, I was hanging in there.

0:18:11.2 Rhea Chandran: That's great to hear. So when you have these things like these cultural differences, where did you find community on Haverford's campus? 

0:18:21.3 Grady Lights: Good question. A series of serendipitous events happened during Customs Week that made a huge impact on my life at Haverford. We faced a housing assignment mix up with the dorm rooms, and I and about maybe five or six other students, when we registered, we didn't have a room. [laughter] We didn't have a room assignment, so we were orphaned, and for the first day or two, we were shuttled from a faculty house to some place else, and so we were all scratching our heads saying, "Well, what kind of administration is this and how do we get that da, da?" So one of my friends I formed while we were trying to get primarily domiciled, he had a job as a head waiter in the dining center, which was the manager of student dining hall workers, and it was a cool job on campus, it paid for your board and you also got a very decent stipend. His name was Mike, so he said, "Oh Grady, I have a good job for you." And I said, "Oh, really?" And when he told me the benefits, I couldn't thank him enough, he was such a swell guy.

0:19:49.0 Grady Lights: Well so many of the parents of the students were notable, but Mike’s dad got a lot of buzz because his father was the President and the Vice President of ARAMCO, which at that time was the world's largest oil consortium. And he grew up in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. So, he was one of the most cosmopolitan and sophisticated persons I had met, and I learned so much from him.

0:20:25.3 Rhea Chandran: And did you eventually get housing after that first few days? 

0:20:28.7 Grady Lights: Yes we did, yes we did. But it was a couple of days though before it got settled down.

0:20:37.7 Rhea Chandran: Definitely. And I wanted to ask, when did you join the BSL? 

0:20:42.7 Grady Lights: Good question. Once I took the job, my classes were very demanding, and I kept an ear on what the BSL was doing, but honestly, Rhea, I really wanted to stay focused. Joe Mason, who was in the class of '68... Let's see, I think he started in '68. Or maybe '67. He was the only person of color in his class. And so he had a very unique experience, and I'm sure that that inspired him to form the BSL, and I was impressed with his dedication, and I thought he was a real hero, for being able to withstand that freshman year pressure, as he did. So I started attending the meetings out of a sense of obligation to him.

0:21:39.3 Rhea Chandran: And what were those meetings like during your freshman and sophomore year, I guess? 

0:21:42.7 Grady Lights: He was really trying to raise awareness, and his focus was two fold, Rhea. He was interested in the issues that have been on the table at the college, but he was very interested in the relationship between the college and the Ardmore community, and he was part of the project that culminated in a day camp on campus for the Ardmore teenagers and kids, called the Serendipity Day Camp.

0:22:14.1 Rhea Chandran: And that day camp is still running today. It's amazing.

0:22:16.1 Grady Lights: Yeah. This is an amazing thing.

0:22:21.8 Rhea Chandran: So as you moved into your sophomore year, I believe that was the year of the boycott, correct? 

0:22:27.0 Grady Lights: Actually, that was my junior year.

0:22:28.7 Rhea Chandran: Junior year, oh right.

0:22:30.5 Grady Lights: It was... Yeah, it was my junior year. I had adapted well by that time, Rhea. If you look at my past, I came of age in Jim Crow, South Carolina. When we first integrated in '65, those first two years were very dicey, very rough. Your classmates were white supremacists. The way the township dealt with the civil rights laws, half of the upper class families, raised funds and built a private Christian Academy, which under law did not require integration, and the other half of the upper class, roughly about half actually, sent their kids to the integrated school. So when I arrived at Haverford, it was a relief because [laughter] I had gone through so much stress under the pressure cooker of the forced integration in the Deep South, and when I got to campus, it was like this brain time, it was... Just the ease with which the upper class students were socializing with the whites, and it just had an air of openness. But we were in the Woodstock era of love and goodwill for all, in all of this. So there was a clear liberal ethos on campus, that really was pretty breathtaking for me, because it was very visceral, it was very, very visceral. Of course there was an underside to it, but for the most part, I was having no problems and issues.

0:24:24.0 Grady Lights: And in fact, at the peak of the boycott, Bill Ambler, who was the Admissions Director, he expressed some surprise that I was involved in the protest, because at that point, I was giving campus tours to prospective and the new students, and I had worked on campus in the admissions office the summer after my sophomore year. I was commended for the tours that I gave. I did some archival work in your field on the old admissions records that were in the basement of the admissions building, and it was very fascinating to read the journals and ruminations of the early classes. The more things changed, the more they remained the same, there was just much conflict in identity, and belonging, amongst an all-white campus that was reflected in their personal, spiritual journey, so that was very interesting.

0:25:32.0 Rhea Chandran: It is so interesting that you had that unique perspective. You mentioned that it was a period... You felt like it was a period of liberal-ness and love, do you feel like those... What emotions were you feeling as the boycott began? 

0:25:52.9 Grady Lights: A couple of things Rhea, my plate was very full. I was dealing with my gender identity... Well sexual preferences... I'm a guy, so I'm not queer. I did not have that uncertainty. It's just that I didn't know how to deal with that aspect of my life. I dated at Bryn Mawr. I got scared off of that by a pregnancy scare, which turned out to be a lie, so [chuckle] that sort of cooled my jets, and because I said to myself, "A woman I didn't love and a child I didn't want, I did not need that in my life, it would be unfair to all of us." So that venturing was shut down pronto, so to speak. So... And that got worse. Repression is like that. And then my studies were demanding, I was working and the head waiters job was very demanding. I was not having any issues myself, so I could have very well not have been involved, okay? [chuckle]

0:27:13.3 Grady Lights: And I was tempted at times not to put something else on my plate, but my empathy got the better of me. And as I connected with the distress and the reports of the difficulties that my fellow on BIPOCs were having, and what was frustrating for us and for the admission staff, as you'll see in the documents, is that all of the the predictors of success for the students who were having difficulties, were all on target. So there was some confusion, so they had to by process of elimination, conclude that there was some other factors going on. So after that, admittedly I said I was gonna be honest, [chuckle] uncertainty, I just jumped head first, into the thick of it.

0:28:05.9 Rhea Chandran: Thank you for sharing that struggle of yours during that time, so when you were in the boycott, it was a two-month boycott, did you feel like the campus community related to it... Yeah, what were your thoughts about what the white students had expressed to you? 

0:28:27.1 Grady Lights: It ran the whole gamut of reactions... At that point, I was a resident customs man in Barclay dorm, so I had many associations with the underclass and the students in order to meet the staff shortages in the dining center, I had to troll the queue of students waiting to get their meals, to snatch people to work for me, so [laughter] I was fairly well known because it was part of my job actually. All of my friends had benefits, let's put it that way, okay? For them and for me, because they got paid of course. And they were confused personally, and I'll keep it on that level, and then I'll speak about some of the reactions that were in the newspaper about the boycott, which I included in my written responses for future reference, but it was at the peak of the boycott, I was in the dining center wrapping up my shift and a group of my white friends saw me from a distance, and they were near the sunken dining... Sunken lounge in the dining center, and I was with some off-campus friends from home and some other people of color who had heard about the boycott, so it was a group of people of color together, and I was in the midst of them, and I saw my friends pass by and they looked at me and then they stopped, and they just looked at me in the midst of the group.

0:30:17.0 Grady Lights: So I had to move on and go to the library to work, so I bid my friends goodbye, and as we were exiting, they approached me at the door and they said "Grady you don't love us anymore?" It was really very touching, that was personal and politics aside, I knew the rapport that I'd established with them, and I said, "It's not about that at all guys, it's just not." And then like I said, I don't know if I mentioned this, but Bill Ambler was surprised that I was involved. And I explained to him sort of what I said to you, 'cause I couldn't deny what he saw in me, and I told him that is... That's just it, it's not about me, it's about, about us, and about all of us, and so... But there were... Some people just didn't get it. They were concerned about missing their film series and they saw it as a loss for them, and a gain for us, there was a Caucasian men's caucus that got 400 signatures, but then when they tried to have meetings to take next steps, they couldn't get more than 25 or 30 people. And then when that amount assembled, half of them left, at least according to one of the news reports.

0:31:31.4 Grady Lights: Then there was a significant group of responses that really got the overall critique of the community and the failings of governance, the fact that the student voice is really not represented, that the administration really was for the most part, paying lip service to it. All of the false, all of the chinks in the armor of glorified Haverford, when the BSL saw them through our lens, which of course made them even not just chips, they were like gashes, [chuckle] real tarnishing. It just highlighted a lot of criticisms that were already afoot in the community. And the college was very aware of it, because half of the students are outspoken. So we really became a lightning rod and a galvanizing point for a lot of criticisms amongst some white students who were disenchanted with the notions of community and so on and so forth.

0:33:00.3 Rhea Chandran: And one of the demands or symbolic gestures of good faith that the BSL put together was pausing or halting some of the admissions materials that was being sent out to prospective students. Were you a part of the reform of these admissions materials? 

0:33:14.7 Grady Lights: I was not directly involved in that. There was a committee of people, I saw the documents. And I felt that the review and adjustments were in good hands. I assigned myself a task during the boycott, Rhea, to make sure that we did not shift too far into the dramatic and the symbolic, like putting the Black liberation flag, the signs and so forth. My input and my voice was to make sure that we focused our criticism in the realm of ideas. And if you look at the documents that we produced, it was a clarity and the simplicity and straightforward analysis of those documents, they were good papers. And for that reason, we got the attention of the faculty and the administration.

0:34:22.9 Grady Lights: And so I have to pat myself on the back for standing up for that. I'm going to give you a little story as a background. The French call stories like that, like I'm about to share la petite histoire. These are the little, not necessarily gossipy, but these are things that you might not find in the public record. The writing quality of our documents was the handy work of an English major of color. He was from an upper class Washington, DC family. He was very aloof, brilliant. He was only interested in James Joyce. And initially he was not interested in the boycott, his level of intellection was so high. And he was... And there were many Haverford students like that. Everybody did not buy into the Haverford community, there were lots of idiosyncratic, intellectual types that were just very remote.

0:35:27.1 Grady Lights: I believe one of the terms was, there was the smart Haverford student, there was the genius and then there was the freaky genius, who everybody just pretty mostly bowed down [chuckle] to. And this person of color was one of them. When I went to his room in Barclay, he had stacks of books that were commentaries on James Joyce's Ulysses. So as the boycott developed, and we conceptualized the documents amongst ourselves, but then when we had to get the final draft, I said, "We need an excellent writer to pull all these ideas together." And I knew that he was, so I went to him. And I didn't know I was such a good salesman. [chuckle] But I think, we made a deal. I told him that I would write the rough drafts, that I would take the ideas and outline them logically and so on. And because I was a Poli Sci major, so I understood the power dynamics and all that, and that if he would do the final draft and give it that last finish and polish, and he sort of groaned and looked at me with a withering look. And he said, yes.

0:36:51.2 Rhea Chandran: That's amazing. So is that your role as the Communications Committee man? 

0:36:55.1 Grady Lights: Pretty much, pretty much. There was a cohort within the communications committee that wanted to keep the fires burning and keep the pressure up. And we allowed diversity of thought and opinion in the group and they did that. But because we had gotten the attention of the faculty with those landmark documents you might say, we allowed it. I didn't take much issue with it.

0:37:24.1 Rhea Chandran: And you mentioned how there was diversity of thought, did you ever find that it was difficult to maintain unity within the group? 

0:37:32.4 Grady Lights: There were some dicey moments. [laughter] There were some dicey moments about how to proceed. And when you create pressure over a long period of time, people reach a limit of tolerance. And then people just get tired. And it's at that point that certain feelings and emotions came out. And the powers that be... Let us know that they are the powers that be. [chuckle] And I thought in some cases, we'd gone too far, especially with the President Coleman, drawing on my political science point of view, I told him, "We're just one of his constituencies so you cannot hold him accountable?" Well, I said that first. And I said, "We can't beat him up for not rolling over to us, because he has several stakeholders. And he's not gonna do it, not because he wouldn't want to but he can't. So I think we're just wasting too much political capital, beating up on him... " Oh, my God. [laughter] But I found Jack Coleman to be a great person. I actually... The summer that I worked in the admissions office, I lived in his home with his family, his kids. So I got to know him, his wife... And there were two other students who were not of color who were living in the house, and so again, that was another level at which I was integrated into the life at the college, and felt a part of things, actually.

0:39:20.9 Rhea Chandran: Did he offer students to live in his house, or was that just part of summer housing options? 

0:39:28.1 Grady Lights: I'm trying to think how that happened. I think when I took the job, I think the admission staff told me that I had the option of living there if I wanted to. I think he made the house available to students who were working on campus, and the admission staff gave me that option.

0:39:48.4 Rhea Chandran: Wow, that's amazing. So I wanna talk a little bit about the relationship between the Black Students League and the Puerto Rican Students of Haverford. Do you remember what that relationship was like? 

0:40:06.7 Grady Lights: Well, the realities of race are that the closer an ethnic group looks to white, the more easily they're integrated. So for that reason, we heard the Puerto Rican students' complaints. Their complaints were programmatic about the status of Spanish as a major, and the under-staffing in faculty and the curriculum for Spanish. There was a Spanish House, which was an acknowledgement of Hispanic culture, but that was not enough. So their engagement with us was based on the critique of the curriculum and culture diversity. I did not personally agree, though I didn't make this an issue with them, but their sense of exclusion was quite the same as ours, because Mexicans and Puerto Ricans can easily marry a white girl, or vice versa. But if you're Black, that's not so easily accepted. So I'll put it that way.

0:41:26.1 Grady Lights: But that did not become an issue for our working together. The spirit in which we were engaging with the college, and in the case of the Puerto Rican students, whose leadership... They were just very bright, very serious intellectuals. So the landmark documents that we had produced early on engaged them, and that brought our alliance together. We also received allyship from the women students on campus, and that happened a little bit later. There were about... maybe about 10, maybe a little less, transfer students from the seven sister colleges who were on campus, and they were feeling the sexism that's unavoidable at an all-male college, and they were in sympathy with our critique of inclusion. And they signed on with us.

0:42:34.1 Rhea Chandran: That's amazing that you got that support from both those groups. I actually wanna go back a little bit. You were talking about the politics of the boycott and as a political science major, your knowledge, your background with it. I guess one of the other alumni I interviewed for this project, Gregory Patrick, mentioned that the seniors in the class of '72 in the Political Science Department wrote their theses on the boycott itself as opinion pieces. And these are the white students. Do you remember these theses being produced in the department? 

0:43:04.8 Grady Lights: Yes, I do. Yes, I do. But I did not read them. But I heard that they were... they... I also heard that a sociology major made the boycott the subject of his thesis. So I'd heard about the political science one, but the one that got more discussion was the sociology major's thesis, if my memory serves me correct. One of the helpful aspects of my political science major, in terms of the boycott, was actually my freshman seminar first semester, which had a unit on the governance of the university. And the case study was University of California at Berkeley, and the Berkeley free speech protest movement. And there was one statement in that class, and there were two others that were in classes I took, that I kept all my life, actually. And I brought this one out during the boycott... Regarding the governance of the university the statement is, "A college is a place for the authoritative allocation of values."

0:44:39.6 Grady Lights: And I thought that was a very clear, comprehensive explanation of the challenge that we were facing in its broadest terms, because many of the discussions we had with the faculty and with the students was not so much about the intellectual level of the Haverford curriculum and instruction and so on and so forth, but it was the relevance of the values that were being prescribed. A simple example I used was... moral accountability, your conscience, and making informed moral decisions that respect your position in society and your obligation as a member of society, that was presented in the Quaker Model as an individual search. You have to follow the light of your conscience, but in a case of an oppressed minority where there's so much injustice and inequities, is it really that difficult a decision [chuckle] what you should do with your life? And that was not part of the overall moral instruction. You were left on your own to figure that one out, but that was one area where the values of the individual as opposed to those of the collective group that you're... That is your reference group. And when I shared that, that seemed to resonate with some of my listeners.

0:46:21.3 Rhea Chandran: That seems like a very interesting intersection of two different sets of values. So do you feel like you fundamentally changed as a part of the boycott, some of the values of Haverford? 

0:46:31.9 Grady Lights: Could you say that again, Rhea? 

0:46:34.7 Rhea Chandran: Sorry, do you feel like you maybe fundamentally changed some of the values, if the boycott was a discussion of values, is what I'm hearing... Of Haverford during the time? 

0:46:48.3 Grady Lights: Well... Let me think for a minute. Given the long haul, if you will, and the distance between the values and necessities of the lives of persons who are marginal in society, compared to the value trajectory of those who are in the mainstream, bringing about a changeover is gonna be very difficult. I mean, that's what all of the isms are about, the people are not embracing you as all of one humanity. So there's this false distinction and separation. Until and unless that sea change occurs one has to be open minded. One has to be flexible. One has to understand the resistance and the fear that people of a dominant group have in giving up anything. Who wants to change? [chuckle] I saw a funny cartoon online, and it was a speaker addressing an audience, and the question was, "Who wants change?" All hands went up in the room. And then the question was, "Who wants to change?" [laughter] No hands went up. So I found a deliberate kind of analytical move toward understanding resistance.

0:48:40.2 Grady Lights: An important value. That became more important because I saw how deeply entrenched the resistance was to racism, sexism and so on and so forth. And I had the odd experience, Rhea, which happened in South Carolina when I became friends with former white supremacists, is that your ideological beliefs and values don't fully constitute you. There's still something leftover that is your person, and people responded to the personhood in Jim Crow's South Carolina, that happened. And that, I'll never forget that, and I speak about that to make the point that I'm making right now. So that part of my value outlook changed and it's an uphill battle getting people to take that move because they think that understanding is making a concession that you're exonerating and making excuses, when in fact, that's not the case, but that's another more intricate conversation.

0:49:54.6 Rhea Chandran: No those lessons definitely resonate as a student in the 2020s as well, given what we are experiencing on campus right now. So I actually just wanted to ask you a few wrap-up questions before we run out of time, and thank you so much for sharing. This has been a really insightful conversation of values...

0:50:12.3 Grady Lights: You're very welcome.

0:50:13.9 Rhea Chandran: I guess what just interested you, in participating in this interview? 

0:50:19.8 Grady Lights: I felt that it was my obligation to share my story. During the story of the college, at a very... Oh my god, fundamentally transitional moment. What really deeply touched me, Rhea, was the realization... Before the boycott, before Gabe made the announcement, which really expressed the sense of the meeting that we had in Barclay before, because we had decided by consensus. We didn't even have to say anything that we needed to take a symbolic action. They'd realize that they had made a big mistake. That they'd overreached, they meant well, but they didn't think the whole experiment through enough and... I won't say the name, I won't give that petite histoire [chuckle] but Jim Pabarue actually shared this story with me, and he said one of the professors who was a young professor when they first started integrating Haverford he admitted while admitting that it was short sighted, that they just thought that any student who was intelligent and motivated could learn like Haverford students learn [chuckle] you could just fit in and... They genuinely believed that. And before we made our demands and wrote one document, they had already said in their own documents that either we do something quickly and correctly, or we have to re-evaluate continuing this experiment. So I thought because we were at the birth of change fundamentally, and I was right in the middle of it, that I had to let my voice be heard.

0:52:33.4 Rhea Chandran: It's definitely really impactful that you chose to participate and are helping tell this aspect of the college's history. Were there any other experiences or instances that you remember that we haven't talked about, either after the boycott or in your experience as a young alumni that you would like to share? 

0:52:55.6 Grady Lights: I'll share a few... That spring, at the end of the spring '72 semester, one of my very good friends, he was a student prince and whiz kid from West Philadelphia High School, he was famous on campus for having been admitted, from the Philadelphia newspapers, he was a student leader leading the West Philadelphia community and what was to become the creation of University City, so it was one of the most dramatic and aggressive gentrification projects in an urban area, and he was a leader at 16, 17, 18, so he was admitted from the news report, so that was his claim to fame. He unfortunately ran into academic difficulties simply because he was one of these freaky geniuses who was just too rarefied in intellect or into their own existential lengths. He just wasn't ready for Haverford, and I tried to talk with him, "When my dad was a marine, he just didn't have a marine dad, so [chuckle] I knew that I had no place to go, [laughter] freedom is not only it's an asset."

0:54:24.3 Grady Lights: But he just would get this wilted look in his face and so I gave up and in any event at that point, he had already left, but he came back to visit me and... We became friends, but the provost of the college, Gerhard Spiegler... You could have those kinds of relationships and Gerhard was a colleague and friend of the religion professor I told you about, they were at the University of Chicago together, and I actually had a casual and friendly conversations with that, would-be advisor, but it was a gut reaction and it could have been the wrong reaction, Rhea, I don't know, but it is what it is. So Carlton[?] and I, we were walking across to Founders Green and Gerhard saw us, so he came up to me and he said, "Grady, Grady, how are you?" We talked during the boycott, he was very supportive, and so we walked with him across the athletic field and we were on the way to his house to talk, sort of like a review of the boycott 'cause he had many questions sort of like what you're asking me.

0:55:40.9 Grady Lights: And he asked me a question, he said "Grady, if you had anything to do over again what would that be?" And I thought for a minute being conscious as I am, I knew the company I was in, and I thought I owed him a thoughtful answer, but before I could get going, he stopped himself, Rhea, and he stopped walking and he turned and looked at me, and in a typical Haverford professor fashion he said, "That's not a legitimate question, because when you ever attempt to go back to the past and look at things from your present perspective... " And this is where the Haverford [chuckle] professor came and he said, "You always use categories that don't apply." So he said, "You don't have to answer that question." [laughter] So there was... There was that. Another pivotal moment was the night before I left campus for my leave of absence, after I came out the summer of '72, an ill-fated affair with a Philadelphia school counselor with a brief partnering, one of those May, June or May, December romances or something like that... And it was just very difficult at that point to continue my full plate of activities at the college, so I told my advisors that I was leaving at that point in my senior year, I had been tapped to be a student intern with Robert Mortimer teaching in introductive Poli Sci class, I guess it was my profile in the boycott that...

0:57:37.8 Grady Lights: You know, got me selected for that, so I was doing that, the tours and everything else, and it just wasn't coming together, so all efforts failed 'cause the horse was already out the barn, as they say... So the night before I left, the following day, I moved to West Philadelphia, and Ghebre Selassie was kind enough to give me space in his apartment until I got adjusted. So I got a call from one of my first semester Poli science instructors Eric Hansen, he scandalized the campus when he came out on a Philadelphia TV interview show, and he later went on to write articles about gay and lesbians, they didn't have trans and queer as part of the alphabet at that time. And so, he called me and I was totally perplexed 'cause I had talked with him in 1969, and this is 1972. And he said, just piped up and said, "Have you ever been involved in homosexuality?" And I said to myself, "Why is he asking me this question? I don't know him." So I was just trying to figure out, "Well what's going on?"

0:58:54.1 Grady Lights: And then 50 seconds later, I connected the dots. And what happened is the Dean Potter, my advisors, who had called me into the dean's office to try to talk me out of my lunacy, they figured out by a process of elimination, and given the way that I appear... My father always told me, I was effeminate. So they connected the dots and figured, well, he's leaving because he's gay. So, they made the obvious choice of the 11th hour rescuer to try to get me to change my mind, but it didn't work. At my 45th reunion, I made a point of seeking out Jane Widseth because I wanted to tell her that when I was going through that semester debating if I should leave, she was the one person on campus that I thought I could reach out to because of her natural warmth and just the spirit that emanated from her. And every time I casually interacted with her, I knew Bruce Partridge, and she and Bruce were friends. They eventually married. [chuckle] And I just got that warm feeling from her, but I got chicken every time. I got scared and I told her that, and when I told her she started crying... But I had to tell her. But she thanked me. So that was an important touching moment, so when you talk about inclusion and exclusion, my experience, Rhea, is that these barriers are there, they're real, but I've had the good fortune of encounters and relationships and experiences, where my heart and my life have been touched by another person's heart and life.

1:00:57.4 Grady Lights: And that's really the heart of the matter, and I think that's the heart light that we have to follow. I've been attending Quaker meeting for 3 1/2 years now at the Haverford Meeting. I retain my... the spirit of Christianity, not the liberal dogmatism, but the spirit of the teachings of Christ, and lately, as the light moves me, instead of standing and speaking at the meeting, I've been singing, and a couple of weeks ago, I sang a Neil Diamond song, the lyric that always makes me cheerful. "Turn on your heart light, let it shine wherever you go, turn on your heart light in a young man's.." or I would say, any person's heart. The song says, "In a young man's dream, don't wake me up too soon. Let us take a ride across the moon." And when I sang that line, the image flashed in my mind, the scene from ET, The Extra-Terrestrial, there's a scene where the little boy in the movie and ET are on his bike and through the ET's telekinetic powers, they're elevated, and there's this beautiful shot of them flying across the moon.

1:02:41.4 Rhea Chandran: That is so sweet. Thank you so much for sharing that. I personally think that that's a perfect place to end our interview, if there's anything else you would like to share.

1:02:51.5 Grady Lights: I just wanna give recognition to Wendy Raymond. I included all the links in my answers as part of the archival record, and before we got on the call, I reviewed Wendy Raymond's response. I met Wendy and her husband at my class of '74, 45th reunion, okay. And she's just a wonderful person. And I look at the principles that she's using to guide the college forward after last spring, and her heart shined in those principles, she talked about evaluating courses based on racial climate. Her principles include... what I thought were spiritual things, training and development, making sure that the spirit of diversity is something that is administratively monitored and required and people held accountable for. Because I think if you look at the larger picture, what Haverford has done well, and as an intellectual institution of course they're gonna do well, but the letter of diversity, but the spirit of diversity is in a different dimension, and that's where our growth curve is. And I think Wendy is a perfect navigator and I have the most confidence that we're gonna reach port.

1:04:42.0 Rhea Chandran: I will definitely be sure to share your message with her as well. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Grady, I'll be stopping the recording now.

1:04:50.8 Grady Lights: Okay. Thank you Rhea.