By Elle Thompson, Staff Editor
In discussing the Bryn Mawr strike, a common criticism has revolved around the lack of clear “proximate cause.” While the catalyst for Haverford’s strike was prompted by an October 28 email from President Wendy Raymond, it is commonly thought that the Bryn Mawr strike began simply in solidarity with Haverford. To suggest as much, however, would be to ignore legacies of protest at Bryn Mawr. More importantly, it would be to ignore the context in which these strikes began.
The Haverford and Bryn Mawr strikes are interesting because, in reality, they were years in the making, and inevitable as a feature of this year. Social movements are outpourings of a long-term lack of change. At Bryn Mawr, the available political opportunities and resources for the strike were manyfold, but came primarily back to three factors: The COVID-19 pandemic, the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, and a growing awareness of both the racist histories of Bryn Mawr and the long legacy of activism at the college.
The summer’s discussion of Black Lives Matter, spurred by the death of George Floyd on May 25, was by far the biggest precursor to the Haverford and Bryn Mawr strikes. The July Open Letter to the Bi-College Community, issued by a group of Black students from both schools, contained a list of demands that would overlap heavily with the strike demands in October. The letter concluded with this sentence, “Should our colleges openly refuse or fail to meet these demands within the given time period (two weeks time), we are prepared to be uncooperative with standard college procedures and expectations until expeditious, recognizable, and vigorous efforts are made.”
Bryn Mawr would fail to meet these demands within the allotted two weeks. In response to the open letter, the college hosted a series of “virtual community conversations” later in the summer under the label of “Moving Forward Together.” These sessions were billed as a chance for students and faculty to come together and discuss issues of race and racism on campus. According to emails from Bryn Mawr’s assistant to the president Elizabeth Roan, the first session reached 170 attendees, and the second session at least 150. Reports were promised of ongoing progress, but when students returned to campus in September, changes had yet to be announced. The same was true for Haverford. The general feeling on campus was that not enough had been done to care for Black student concerns.
This same climate would also forge the Bi-Co Mutual Aid fund, a network which would be crucial in supporting strikers in the fall semester. The existence of this group also served another purpose: it demonstrated explicitly to the campus community that Bi-Co students needed more support than their institutions were giving them. This fueled simmering resentment toward the colleges and a growing feeling of discontent: Students were struggling, and the schools were doing little to stop it.
The rest of that summer would see another important boom, this time caused by the pandemic: an increasing amount of social media mobilization. With college canceled and little to do outside, Bryn Mawr students increasingly turned to social media for communication. Over summer 2020, many Bi-College students, especially within the new class of 2024, communicated via Instagram. The app had increasingly become a space for protest activism, as pointed out by NBC News and Vox, but the phenomenon was especially strong with Bi-Co students. Towards the end of the summer, Bryn Mawr students would also form an increasingly popular Twitter community, memetically referred to as “Bryn Mawr Twitter”; now, in April 2021, at least 150 students are a part of the unofficial network, including some from Haverford.
In the fall, even as students returned to campus, social media mobilization would prove a fundamental resource for the strike. The Haverford Black Students’ League and the former Bryn Mawr Strike Collective, now renamed the Black Student Liberatory Coalition, each utilized their Instagram accounts for announcements that much of the student body could receive faster than by word-of-mouth. Students often found initial information about events this way, including the first strike announcement on October 30.
The Equity and Anti-Racism Draft Framework for Action, originally drafted as a response to summer plans, would not be issued until November 3rd, just minutes before Bryn Mawr’s BSLC issued their own strike demands. To strike organizers, this felt like an insult. After waiting for four months, their college had chosen to release a final appeasement only when they needed to. During one of the first sit-ins during the October strike, a student told the crowd that “Committee after committee, town hall after town hall, told us what we needed. […] We were ignored. […] We have the power now, and that is what a strike is: to take back that negotiating power.” Once the Strike Collective had gained power, there was little impetus to give it up.
The pandemic was a good opportunity for another reason. People are an important resource for strike organization, and the amount of people participating—at least 900 in total—placed more pressure on the school. How did we get so many students? The strike was so effective in part because it played off their exhaustion. With the pandemic removing fall break and instilling additional tension in the community, students were unusually burnt out by the middle of the semester. Strikers encouraged student teach-in attendance, sit-in attendance and participation, and I genuinely feel I did as much work during the strike as I had in previous times. But teach-in attendance was consistently lower than striking numbers. The strike was a convenient tactic because, for many exhausted student participants, it meant finally getting a breather.
Bryn Mawr’s strike was also based strongly on an ideological study of the history of the college. Strike organizers repeatedly emphasized that this strike was years in the making, the culmination of previous activism. Some of this had taken place on campus in the years preceding the strike, including after a 2014 incident in which two students displayed a Confederate flag and masking-tape Mason-Dixon line on the floor of their dorm. The Strike Collective also repeatedly brought attention to 2018 on-campus action surrounding M. Carey Thomas. Colleges are good at forgetting their histories, but this time, the Bryn Mawr community would not let them.
The climate of the summer had also prompted many departments to be receptive to the goals of the strike. Several Bryn Mawr departments, including English and Creative Writing, issued supportive statements, and various Black professors were directly involved with organizing efforts. Haverford and Bryn Mawr each benefitted from a somewhat more supportive faculty environment than Swarthmore, who began their own strike on November 11; in response, almost 130 members of the faculty signed onto a letter asking the organizers to end the strike.
The community also offered widespread support. Speaker Series member Fred Moten was supportive of strikers, and campus extracurriculars generally were as well, with most clubs canceling activities in light of the strike. The Bi-College News and the Haverford Clerk did each publish opinion pieces critical of the strike, but covered the movement in depth to provide exposure and historical documentation, and offered statements of support to strikers. A small student body size allowed for a comparatively unified front of students, which would not be possible in a larger community.
This is not to erase the very real fear that strikers felt about retaliation, especially in light of parent threats to sue. It is also not to erase the deep divisions the strike exposed and created within various friend groups when some students refused to participate. It is, however, important to acknowledge the perfect storm of conditions under which the Bryn Mawr and Haverford strikes came about. President Raymond’s email sent the two campuses into frenzy, and was certainly a catalyst of further action, but it was a match being thrown onto an already-smoldering woodpile. The strike was the culmination of years and years of festering resentment, none of which could ever have taken place without the storm of the pandemic and the summer Black Lives Matter protests. And it further reminded students of the power they had as a collective. As Haverford strike organizers stated in a November 10 email, “BIPOC students will always be ready to mobilize and fight for change when you fail us. Does a tsunami only have one wave?”
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
