625: Essay B

Ira Glass

Mariya is always a little embarrassed to admit how much she loved high school. But the truth is she really loved it. This is outside Houston. She had friends. Liked her classes and Friday night football and backyard pool parties. She was editor-in-chief of the school paper. Felt a lot of freedom.

And then this disquieting thing happened during her senior year, when everybody was applying to colleges. When you apply to a state school in Texas, Mariya explained to me, Texas has their own Common App.

Ira Glass

Mariya never actually answered Essay Topic B because she wanted to go to college out of state and she applied early admission. But there were a few days in her English class during that year where the rest of the class that was applying to state schools wrote and worked on their college essays. Because Mariya didn't need to write any essays to get into Texas schools, the teacher asked her to help edit them. Mariya ran the school paper, so she had some skills.

Ira Glass

Two key facts all of her classmates dwelled upon. Mariya is from Pakistan, and she's Muslim, at a high school that was mostly white and not Muslim.

Ira Glass

Mariya brought to the studio a couple of the essays written about her by her high school friends, including one written by one of her best friends at the time, Jenna, who's still one of her best friends. Mariya was a bridesmaid at her wedding. All of Mariya's winter stuff is stored in Jenna's garage right now. Here's Jenna's Essay B.

Ira Glass

Jenna then describes how someday she's going to meet this fictional Mari at college on the first day of Intro to Psychology in the middle of a sea of kids who were wearing T-shirts.

Ira Glass

This, in fact, had been a determined, calculated, five-year campaign on Mariya's part, starting when she was 12 years old and her family moved from Pakistan. She carried around a little notebook, where she'd record important details, like at her friend's house, the family drank milk with dinner. Mariya wrote in the notebook, "Americans drink milk with dinner," then tried to get her parents to serve it. To get rid of her Pakistani accent, she embarked on a project that took hours every day after middle school. On the VCR in the family game room, she'd record her favorite TV show, Lizzie McGuire.

Ira Glass

On the family computer, using Windows Media Player.

Ira Glass

Mariya is the first to say her friends were just trying to give the answer that Essay Topic B seemed to be asking for. It is a really weird essay prompt. It's basically telling 17-year-olds to imagine a stereotype of somebody who's different from them and then explain how they would learn the right lessons from this stereotyped person. The kids were basically writing what they think some admissions office wants to hear.

And of everything in all these essays, there was one section of one essay that got to Mariya the most. It was in the Essay B that her best friend Jenna wrote. Jenna has a scene in her essay where she pictures someday studying for a psychology final with this supposedly fictional girl, Mari, that she imagines meeting at college and befriending.

Ira Glass

The essay goes on to quote from the textbook, which says that the DNA that all humans share is mostly alike. And then when people are different races or ethnicities, the difference is less than 0.2% of their DNA. Here's Mariya reading more of Jenna's essay.

Ira Glass

They didn't talk about it. Mariya didn't know how. She was in this situation where their teacher and everybody else acted like this was normal, what they were all writing in their essays, and it was hard for her at the time to put her finger on what her problem with it was.

Ira Glass

Just this week, Mariya finally discussed all this with Jenna. She asked Jenna to go back and read her old high school Essay Topic B and then go into a studio to talk about it.

Mariya Karimjee

The parts that were especially hard for her to read were the fact that she made up that I wore saris, that she used my real name, the National Geographic bit. That was especially horrifying to her.

Ira Glass

And did you guys talk about the DNA statistic?

Mariya Karimjee

Yeah. I told her that it made me feel like she needed science to validate our friendship.

Mariya Karimjee

Jenna said that in the essay, she was trying to say that the DNA science just confirmed something she already knew from our friendship.

Mariya Karimjee

During the conversation, there was one moment where Jenna asked me something.

Ira Glass

A version of Essay Topic B is still on the website with the Texas Common App, but instead of asking you to imagine a person who you're going to meet in college someday who's going to change you in some way, it asks you about somebody who you've already met whose, quote, "experiences and/or beliefs differ from yours." The old Essay B went further than that, of course. It asked how somebody from a different culture or economic background would benefit a student's, quote, "future growth," which, Mariya points out, seems to assume something about the applicant.

Ira Glass

There are different ways to talk about why it's important to have a mix of people in a school together. Way back in the 1950s, when the Supreme Court decision mandated school desegregation, the language used was that this is the fair and democratic thing to do. It was just right for everybody to be treated the same. But in the years since then, another idea has come forward that you run into all the time in schools and in lots of other settings, that diversity is important because it's good for the majority. It's good for white people. It's not always said that way flat out. Often, it's kind of implicit, like in Essay Topic B.

Today on our program, we have a story of a program from back in the 1960s that ran all across the South. It was started for a bunch of reasons, but the primary one was this one-- to change the thinking of white people. Today on our show, we hear how that played out over decades in real life.

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act 1, How to Win Friends and Influence White People.

OK. So 35 years before Mariya had that experience in her high school, some Black kids were drafted into a project created by a small group called The Stouffer Foundation. They would be the children whose presence in the lives of white kids would impart valuable lessons to the white kids. And before they got to do that, they had to go through an admissions interview.

Ira Glass

Some of these were recorded. This is a 14-year-old named Doug. And the person that he's being interviewed by was kind of a random semi-celebrity back then, a British stage actress named Rosemary Harris. She's in film sometimes, too. You may have seen her decades later playing Aunt May in Spider-Man. Anyway, in this interview, Rosemary and Doug talk about his grades. He's mostly getting As and Bs, one C. They talk about his science fair project, what he thinks makes a good teacher.

Ira Glass

The fact that this nice lady is complimenting a teenager on his terrible accent, that's just her personal style. That is not part of the educational program. Mosi Secret has been looking into this program, and he explains what it was all about.

Mosi Secret

This interview was part of an experiment started by a white heiress from the South named Anne Forsyth. She was the granddaughter of a tobacco magnate, RJ Reynolds, and she saw that integration was happening all around the country except at prep schools in the South, and she wanted to do something about it. The students in these schools grow up to be the leaders of the South, she told Ebony magazine. Teach them to be less bigoted and they'd carry that attitude into the institutions they'd run someday. A small investment in an individual change could have a big effect. Meanwhile, the Black student she'd send into these boarding schools would get a top-notch education.

So her little foundation set out to find the best of the best Black students, pluck them from their neighborhoods, convince previously all-white boarding schools to take them, and then send the students in as ambassadors.

Forsyth hired a man named John Ehle to lead the effort. John was a novelist from North Carolina who, in his 40s, turned his imagination to solving social problems with rich people's money. Rosemary Harris, the actress, was his wife. They went all over the South looking for applicants, interviewing them in their schools. John could be kind of gruff, even when he first sat down with someone. He talked to one boy who told John that his hobbies were chemistry and eating. "That's a hobby?" John asked.

Mosi Secret

Another boy told John he was worried about the effects of studying too hard.

Mosi Secret

All these kids you're hearing, they were all chosen. They went on to prep schools. And later in life, they became entrepreneurs and lawyers and engineers. But here, they were at a moment of great transition, about to become transplants who might or might not take.

John and Rosemary don't tell the kids that this is an effort to change the minds of white students. The white students weren't told it, either. In fact, they wait until the end of these interviews to even bring up the fact that the candidates will be integrating white schools. They mention race, but they kind of back into it.

Mosi Secret

John Ehle wanted this integration effort to happen quietly. No fuss, no big moments for the news cameras. "Stay out of the damn papers," he said. The first Stouffer recipients entered schools in the fall of 1967, 13 years after Brown versus Board of Education. There were 20 Black teenagers placed in seven private prep schools that year in small-town Virginia, in the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, on the affluent side of Atlanta, all schools that had historically only accepted white kids.

Mosi Secret

"Not that you're going to have any difficulty," Rosemary says, "but." Then her voice trails off.

So did this experiment work? Did it make white students less bigoted? And how'd it turn out for the Black students?

In order to answer those questions, I focused in on one school that took part in the Stouffer experiment, Virginia Episcopal School in Lynchburg, Virginia. People call it VES. When the Supreme Court mandated the desegregation of public schools, lawmakers in Virginia actually closed public schools rather than integrate in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and elsewhere, displacing more than 10,000 students. And white families enrolled their children in private schools in droves. VES was one of those schools. It was a haven for white families fleeing integration. That's what two Black Stouffer scholars were walking into when they arrived in 1967.

Bill Alexander was one of them. He was 14, from a middle-class family in segregated Nashville, the son of a prominent pastor, and a boy who John Ehle thought was perfect for Stouffer. After interviewing Bill, he wrote, "William Alexander, Jr. looks like a prep school student, dresses like one, and talks like one." In the fall of 1967, Bill flew to Lynchburg, walked outside the airport, and hailed a cab.

Mosi Secret

Not VES.

Mosi Secret

Eventually, Bill made his way to VES, where he got a warm welcome.

Mosi Secret

Bill's new roommate, Marvin Barnard, arrived in Lynchburg by bus. He'd come by himself, 100 miles from the Black side of Richmond. He had one suitcase. He was wearing a sports jacket, a little blue cap. He'd never seen a place like VES before.

Mosi Secret

Marvin was smiley, 5" 2', 100 pounds. During his interview with John Ehle, he told John, "I get along with everyone," which was true. He did.

Unfortunately, there aren't recordings of Bill and Marvin's interviews. In many ways, Marvin was Bill's opposite, warm-blooded to Bill's cool, short to Bill's tall. Marvin grew up in a three-room shack with an outside toilet, not a middle-class home like Bill. A teacher would come to call the duo of Marvin and Bill Fire and Ice.

Both Bill and Marvin had a vague sense, a 14-year-old sense, that integrating VES was a small way they could participate in the civil rights movement they saw happening all around them. 1967 was the year that riots broke out in more than 100 cities across the country. The Supreme Court decided Loving versus the State of Virginia, which ended laws against interracial marriage. John Ehle told Marvin that this was a chance to prove that Black students could perform as well as any white students if the playing field were level.

VES was a vestige of a Jim Crow South on land that had once been a plantation. A decade or so before Bill and Marvin arrived, VES had decided to tear down the remaining slave cabin on campus. But they had a new headmaster, a guy from the north who had opened the door when The Stouffer Foundation came knocking.

Resistance came from parents and some of the board. "Why, why, why have you done this cruel thing to our beloved school?" one parent wrote. "A private boarding school like VES is an extension, a part of the family. We have no intention whatsoever of integrating those of another race into our family." Stouffer wasn't blind to the immense challenges Marvin and Bill would face. So as a way to prep them, all 20 Stouffer scholars did a summer program at Duke. They learned both academics and manners, how to read classic books, do advanced math, hold a tennis racket, swim. Here's Marvin.

Mosi Secret

Instead, they were told if someone pranks you, don't assume that it's about race. They left it up to the kids to figure out.

Mosi Secret

Freshmen at VES were known as newboys or rats. And once they were at VES, Marvin and Bill experienced some of the same mild hazing that happened to white freshmen. Seniors would tell them to get in the back of the line in the cafeteria. They'd make them do their laundry. They rolled with it, but it never escaped their minds that they were the only two Black students on campus. They became a team, friends and roommates who were going to shine. Here's Marvin.

Mosi Secret

Right out of the gate, Bill and Marvin did more than anyone thought they could ever do. After a month into the first semester, the school's headmaster, Austin Montgomery, wrote a letter to the Foundation with an update on the boy's progress. It started, "As I write, the two are playing touch with a dozen others out on the lovely front campus. I thought you might be interested that Friday, unbeknownst to me, the freshmen held class elections." Austin explained that the white kids had chosen Bill to be freshman class president, and that was after losing the Black vote. Marvin had voted for someone else.

After the end of the first semester, when everyone gathered around the bulletin board in Jett Hall to look at their grades and see where they stood, Bill and Marvin were out ahead, tied for number one, more than 40 white boys in their class in line behind them.

Mosi Secret

Things continued like this into the next semester. Mostly great, but not entirely.

Mosi Secret

Marvin said he'd been told by the uncle who raised him not to worry about words. "As long as they don't get physical with you. Don't let them hit my son, now." Marvin says when these things would happen, he'd think to himself, is that the best you got?

Then a Thursday night, April 4, 1968, and Bill and Marvin were in their dorm room.

Mosi Secret

At least, that's what it sounded like to Marvin.

Mosi Secret

This is Bill. He doesn't remember exactly what was said.

Mosi Secret

The night of Martin Luther King's assassination, there was one person who stood up for Bill and Marvin, someone who stepped up in a way that, even now, when they look back on it, feels significant, their headmaster, Austin Montgomery. Austin died in 1995. But that night, he called all the students into the chapel. Again, here's Bill.

Mosi Secret

That night had a profound effect on Bill and Marvin. Here's Marvin.

Mosi Secret

Marvin's roommate, Bill, was angry, too. But true to form, Ice kept it to himself. And he had this additional reaction to it. He found the incident clarifying.

Mosi Secret

That summer, Marvin returned home, back to his old life, back to the shotgun house he grew up in in Fulton, a neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia. Some people called it Fulton Bottom because it was at the bottom of a hill on the banks of the James River. White people seldom came down the hill. One night, Marvin was in his house where he lived with his uncle. His aunt had died a few years before. Marvin was laying on the couch, watching his uncle, the man who had raised him, the man he called dad, smoke a cigarette on the front porch.

Mosi Secret

Marvin usually slept on the cot in the middle room. It was the man of the house who slept in the big bed.

Mosi Secret

Marvin was now all alone, no close family to turn to, grieving. Then he got a letter from Headmaster Austin Montgomery, offering his sympathy and urging Marvin to return to school in the fall. "I hope you know, Marvin, what deep respect and affection and what high hopes I have for you. I think you took hold of what could have been a difficult situation this past year and handled it manfully in the very best sense of that word. You did yourself great credit. I hope that you had a happy year, and one that you think was profitable. Probably you did at least as much for VES as it did for you. Let me say that, whether it matters to you or not, the school needs you, and you at your very best, working and playing hard and speaking up with humor and wisdom for what you think is right and important."

The fall of 1968, Marvin returned for his sophomore year. Bill, too. But Headmaster Austin Montgomery was gone. The details aren't totally clear, but it seems like there was pressure on him to leave. Austin was a Northerner with a bristly temperament, and he'd pushed the school to integrate. His replacement was a Southerner, an institutional guy who played by the rules.

But before Austin left, he made sure the Stouffer experiment continued with two new Black students joining Marvin and Bill that fall, two boys they looked after and checked in on. And the experiment started to shape who Marvin was. He became a little more fire. He grew more militant.

Mosi Secret

Partly in response to white students who decorated their rooms with the Confederate flag, Marvin started wearing dashikis, and--

Mosi Secret

Meanwhile, they doubled down on proving they were the best. They were defiant.

Mosi Secret

It worked. Bill and Marvin were popular, good athletes, exceptional students, guys everyone at VES looked up to. Bill lettered early, showed up his sophomore year with his varsity jacket. They were football champions one year, dorm leaders another year, friends with the white guys. Bill and Marvin held the number one and number two academic rankings all four years they were at VES, the pinnacle of Anne Forsyth's hopes. They chipped away at white supremacy by being supreme.

I got to feel the real impact of all of this about a year ago when I went to VES for the school's 100-year reunion. Walking around campus with Bill and Marvin was like being with celebrities. Every few paces, a former classmate would stop them and offer kind words, give them a slap on the back.

Mosi Secret

In the main building on campus, there's a display that commemorates Marvin and Bill. There's photos of them from their freshman and senior years, like a before and after.

Mosi Secret

The reunion was the first time that most of the Stouffer students had been together again since Bill and Marvin's senior year. By the time they were seniors, there were seven Black students at VES. They took to calling themselves The Magnificent Seven. That weekend, those who were there were honored and got a standing ovation.

Mosi Secret

But something else happened that weekend at the reunion, something that reveals a different side of this social experiment. Some of the guys in The Magnificent Seven were hoping they could take a photograph of all seven of them together, and they kept asking me about one person, a guy who was missing, Johnny Halloway. Johnny was one of the two Black students who came to VES the year after Bill and Marvin.

Mosi Secret

That's Terry Sherrill, one of The Magnificent Seven, asking me about Johnny.

I'd gotten in touch with Johnny while reporting this story. I told Terry that Johnny was now a pastor at a church in Durham, North Carolina.

Mosi Secret

Maybe you can hear in my voice, I didn't think Johnny would like that surprise because Johnny, he was not Bill and Marvin. He did not celebrate VES the way they did.

Ira Glass

Coming up, what exactly happened to Johnny? That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, Essay B. What happens when you create a project whose main goal is to integrate schools for the benefit of the white students there? How does that work out for everybody? If you're just tuning in, we're in the middle of a story by reporter Mosi Secret. He also did a version of this story this week for The New York Times Magazine. That's at nytimes.com/integration.

Right before the break, Mosi was explaining that a guy named Johnny Halloway decided not to return to VES for their reunion for reasons of his own. Mosi picks up the story from there.

Mosi Secret

A month before, I'd gotten on the phone with Johnny, and pretty quickly, he told me this.

Mosi Secret

No, they hadn't. Johnny told me he was beaten several times, always by the same guys, and he was certain it was racially motivated. He said he never told the other Black students about it. He said there was no point. So I went to visit Johnny at his church to talk more about this.

Johnny's church is called Cup of Salvation. It's a storefront church in Durham, North Carolina off a state highway in a complex with a bingo hall, daycare center, and a beauty salon. At first, Johnny didn't want to go into details about what happened. But eventually, he told me what those beatings were like.

Mosi Secret

After his freshman year, things got better for Johnny. The upperclassmen who beat him graduated. He settled in, sang in the glee club, made new friends. He learned that he could perform as well or better than white people. The beatings, that was just one part of his experience at VES.

Mosi Secret

I explained to him that one of the goals of the program was to teach white kids about Black people-- to benefit the white guys, like the bullies who came into his room at night. The fact that he was beat up is part of that experiment, The Foundation never knew about that.

Mosi Secret

Johnny reluctantly told me two names of people who had beaten him. One of the guys is dead. I tried the other multiple times, but he didn't respond. I talked to Johnny's roommate from the time, and he confirmed that this happened. He said it happened to him, too. He told me there was one guy who was so racist, so hostile towards him, that he had fantasies of pushing the kid off the dorm roof.

Anne Forsyth and The Stouffer Foundation eventually ran out of money in 1976. In the '70s, there were just a few more Black students. Eventually, more Black students started going to VES in the '80s. Not through any formal effort-- more people just started applying. And today, a little less than 9% of the student population is Black. There are other students of color, as well. Two of the Stouffer scholars have been on the board at VES. Bill has a scholarship for Black students in his name. So one of the goals of Stouffer-- integrating these schools-- that's happened in 20 schools. Another-- providing opportunity for Black students-- that's the clearest victory in this effort.

Marvin and Bill are both doctors now. Bill went to Harvard. Marvin decided to go to the best historically Black college in the country, Howard University. He was tired of representing all Black people. Among the other 140 Stouffer scholars, there are doctors, lawyers, a political operative, a judge, teachers, corporate leaders. But what about the goal that made Anne Forsyth want to do this in the first place-- the idea that this would change the hearts and minds of white students? Someone did try to measure this.

In 1973, John Ehle commissioned a survey of students' attitudes about race in the prep schools they integrated, but it wasn't scientifically done. And a few students wrote letters asking things like, why the questionnaire on Black students when there are only three in the whole school?

We conducted our own unscientific survey and called around to a bunch of white VES alums. Most didn't want to engage the question at all. They didn't want to talk about race head-on. We heard a lot of polite dodges about how color didn't mean anything or we didn't see them as Black. We saw them as classmates. Or I don't remember it being an issue.

But I was able to find one guy who seemed changed and who was game to talk about it. John Harman, class of '72, the same class as Johnny Halloway, the guy who didn't show up at reunion. John Harman came to VES from Tazewell, Virginia, a town of about 4,000. Growing up, the legacy of Jim Crow was all around him. His family used to go to the theater on Main Street, where Blacks had to sit in the balcony. His father was a lawyer who used the town's Confederate soldier statue as a landmark.

Mosi Secret

Jerrauld was another Stouffer scholar. John says that he and Jerrauld really got to know each other junior year. They were on the yearbook staff together, John working as a photographer, and Jerrauld as an editor. And they used to joke around about how different they were. John was a white country boy who was seldom without his .22 rifle, and Jerrauld was a Black kid from Norfolk, the big city, in John's eyes.

John went on to work as an engineer for the railroad. He had a lot of Black coworkers, and he says, outside of VES, it was his first daily close contact with Black people. And his experience at VES prepped him for that. He says he understood they were the same as him. He didn't interact much with his Black coworkers socially, but he says he became less racist over time.

Mosi Secret

It's a really lovely thought, I just kind of wish he'd used a sunrise metaphor instead.

At the reunion, John heard that Jerrauld and the other Black students were put into his school partly for his benefit, to change his thinking. I told him how a couple got beat up. They faced racial slurs. Was it fair to put that on them?

Mosi Secret

He said he thought about Jerrauld for years when they weren't in touch. He'd see things on the news, especially things going on in the country, like Charlottesville, and think about Jerrauld and wonder what he thought. He wanted to hear his opinion.

I ran that by Jerrauld. It was a surprise to him. I believe John when he tells me his experience with Jerrauld changed him. By the time he had two high school-aged daughters, he could point to what that change meant.

Mosi Secret

When Anne Forsyth started this experiment in the '60s, her vision was way grander than this. She was picturing future titans of industry, governors and senators whose prejudice would be melted away. And she launched this idealistic project not really knowing what she was doing, but taking her best shot. I think she never would have pictured this as one of the results-- a middle-aged white man stumbling onto a pizza party and thinking everything was all right, and in a sense, looking back over years that he wasn't all right before. It's so modest, but it's something.

Ira Glass

Mosi Secret. He's an Eric and Wendy Schmidt fellow at New America. He's working on a book about the Stouffer experiment. At our website this week, you can see pictures of Bill and Marvin as freshmen and seniors and read part of their applications. That's thisamericanlife.org.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Susan Burton. Our staff includes Elise Bergerson, Ben Calhoun, Zoe Chace, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Neil Drumming, Stephanie Foo, Chana Joffe-Walt, Mariya Karimjee, Jonathan Menjivar, BA Parker, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, Lily Sullivan, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Diane Wu. Our senior producer is Brian Reed.

Research help from Michelle Harris. Music help from Damien Graef.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he went to a concert years ago and it really influenced his style of singing in the shower.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.