She Was Battling Virginia Segregation at the Age of 9

Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover. That’s certainly the case with former Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust’s new memoir, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury. The last thing Faust wants her readers to care about is what she is best known for—being the first woman to lead Harvard.

The front cover of Necessary Trouble is a close-up of Faust at 19, lying on the lawn at Bryn Mawr College looking intently through oversize glasses at whoever is photographing her. The picture is from the period in Faust’s life when she was shedding her identity as a young woman from a wealthy Virginia family and becoming a political activist who in the 1960s would define herself by her participation in the decade’s civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.

Becoming Harvard’s 28th president and presiding over the university’s dramatic expansion during an administration that went from 2007 to 2018 may be a story Faust tells in a future book, but what matters to her in Necessary Trouble is explaining why her privileged background and her education at Concord Academy and Bryn Mawr College did not lead her to the conventional life she was expected to embrace.

Faust takes pride in being a traitor to her class—an epithet applied to President Franklin Roosevelt during the New Deal era. The title for her book comes from a speech that civil-rights leader John Lewis, later a friend of Faust’s, gave in 2020 on the 55th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery Voting Rights March.

At an early age Faust became aware of the genteel racism that prevailed at her home in Virginia. The Black servants who made her parents’ day-to-day life easier (her mother never learned to cook) were expected to use a separate bathroom behind the kitchen and were addressed by the younger Faust by their first names.

When the Montgomery Bus Boycott took place in 1955-56, it prodded Faust into thinking about how widespread racism in America was. In the fifth grade she sent a letter to President Eisenhower letting him know she believed segregation was unchristian. “I am nine years old and I am white, but I have many feelings about segregation,” she wrote.

Four years later, when Faust left home to enter Concord Academy in Massachusetts, she faced the same contrast between the comfortable world she enjoyed and the racism around her. Concord was, as Faust saw it, a “bubble for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants,” but it was also a bubble she did her best to reach beyond. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the nearby Groton School, Faust was one of 20 Concord girls who took the school bus to hear him.

By the time Faust entered Bryn Mawr College in 1964, she was even more skeptical about the moral values of the world in which she was being educated. Rightly so. While Bryn Mawr was a highly intellectual women’s college, it embraced an unspoken racism similar to that which Faust grew up with. Bryn Mawr students were waited on at dinner by maids in uniform, and the heavy work at the school was done by porters, who, like the maids, were Black. The maids lived on the top floor of the residence halls, the porters in the basement.

It was a system that Faust was unable to change, despite the efforts she and a classmate made to expose the “plantation atmosphere.” Faust responded to her disappointment with Bryn Mawr’s administration by joining the college’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

In March 1965, when the voting rights protests in Selma, Alabama, began, Faust was at a point in her life when she felt capable of turning her words into actions. Seeing television clips of “Bloody Sunday,” the day on which John Lewis and other protesters were beaten as they marched in Selma, was a turning point for Faust. “From that moment, I knew I had to do something. If I did not stand up, if I did not act after witnessing this, I would be ashamed forever,” she writes.

With her Haverford boyfriend and a car borrowed from his roommate, Faust drove the 1,000 miles from Bryn Mawr to Selma and became part of the Selma protests. The march accelerated the changes she was already going through. Staying in Selma with a Black family who housed her and her boyfriend was eye-opening. The family’s goodness and the risks they were taking in a town in which whites controlled most of the jobs touched Faust profoundly.

The problem for Faust was she could not stay in Selma until the end of the march. “Soon I was back at Bryn Mawr, which had not changed a bit during the four momentous days I had been gone. Its quiet seemed surreal after the intensity I had experienced,” Faust writes. A professor, aware that Faust had missed his class in order to go to Selma, made sure she felt his wrath for the hastily done paper she turned in. “I cannot help deploring the effect on the paper that decision all too evidently had,” he wrote in his comments.

After Selma, Faust turned her attention to the protests over the Vietnam War. In 1967 she traveled to Washington to participate in the October antiwar demonstrations at the Pentagon that Norman Mailer so memorably captured in The Armies of the Night.

Finally, at the end of her senior year, at a time when she was president of Bryn Mawr’s Self-Government Association, Faust was instrumental in getting the college to abandon its rules forbidding Bryn Mawr students from signing out for overnight, off-campus stays. For a college that prided itself on educating independent woman, the change in rules governing students’ sexual freedom that Faust helped engineer was a breakthrough event at a time when the women’s movement was in its early stages.

Necessary Trouble concludes with Faust pointing out that in the 1968 presidential election, she voted for the Black comedian and activist Dick Gregory because she could not bear to support either Hubert Humphrey or Richard Nixon, the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. She is delighted to report that 40 years later her home state of Virginia broke from its past by casting its electoral ballots for Barack Obama.

The result is a bittersweet ending to a memoir in which Faust does not tell us that after leaving Bryn Mawr she earned a Ph.D. in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania and embarked on a distinguished academic career. Her modesty is admirable, but there is an important connection between the first decades of Faust’s life and her last half century. As her books, particularly The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War and Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War, make clear, Faust the historian has been fueled by the same awareness of racial injustice that moved her in boarding school and college. She has not mellowed with age.

In contrast to such civil rights memoirs of the 1960s as Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi and Paul Cowan’s Making of an UnAmerican—both published when their authors were young—Necessary Trouble has significant distance from the period it describes. In Faust’s case that distance is a plus. Her memory is sharp, and she has been able to put the successes and failures of the era in which she grew up in perspective. By coincidence Necessary Trouble was published just a month after Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, took office.

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American literature at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964—The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America.