Interview with Joan Frances Crowley, 1998

Interview with Joan Frances Crowley, 1998

Transcription: "I had always assigned African American kids with white kids. I just took it for granted; and they had friendship, etc. When Martin Luther King was shot the black students from Coffey Hall disappeared over into Northland with black kids who had apartment living over there. We didn’t see them for 24 hours. When they came out, they had stopped speaking to anybody white. I was in the enviable position of living in the dorm, trying to handle this. White kids coming in, crying ‘Sister…’ One night a black kid came in, closed the door and just threw herself in my arms and wept, and said, ‘I’m leaving, I’m transferring, I’m going to Morehouse.’ I said ‘Why Diane?’ and she said, ‘because my friends’ (many of them were white, she was an English major), ‘we’re not speaking to them. I can’t live like that.’ I had kids come into me privately and talk."

Mundelein College Oral History Collection