. . . Summer 2002
By Linda
Robinson Walker
In the budget-conscious world of the co-ops and in an era when students weren't allowed cars, Marj Joslyn and Will Smith spent a lot of their time on the phone—she at Osterweil and he at South Quad where he roomed with Jim Pace. Will majored in physical education, as all athletes were encouraged to do; Marj had not declared a major. Throughout their sophomore year, 1956-57, when they did go out, Marj says it was mostly to "hang out in places like the Union coffee shop, Drakes, taking walks, going to the library, studying at Osterweil—there was no prejudice at Osterweil-mostly we were by ourselves." Unlike many interracial couples at the University they dated openly. "I didn't notice being noticed or given the evil eye," Marj says. "I think that's because Will is loving, warm, outgoing, with no chip on his shoulder. Will never betrayed a concern about encountering opposition to our relationship, and I cued off him. I had some close white girl friends from Osterweil, a little older, my very best friends. I was so smitten with him, I felt we were the luckiest people in the world. I entered his world." The parties they did attend were mostly in the Black community. "We listened to jazz-Miles Davis's 'Round Midnight' was popular. We'd go to after-hours places in Detroit-Yusef Lateef, The Flame Show Bar and the West End." They may not have noticed being noticed, but the University had its
eye on them and other couples like them. Students Under Surveillance Assistant Dean of Women Elizabeth Leslie received in 1954 a complaint from Mrs. Freeman that some of her tenants were "dating colored boys" and that she had protested to the young women and her husband to the young men. Describing the attitudes of Freeman and other League House owners, Leslie wrote in an interoffice memo, "I would say at this time that the League House picture stands pat against the dating of whites and colored."
The University Regulations handbook of 1954 asserted, "There is no elaborate procedure for searching out people or groups who deviate from the rules." But Leslie's memo suggests that the University had an unacknowledged procedure in place, "elaborate" or not, to monitor students who did not follow the norms on dating. In fact, anybody in the whole community, from passing motorists to dormitory maids, might take note of women's behavior and report to Dean Bacon's office. In one case, the dean responded to complaints by sending out a letter reprimanding the "small clusters of girls standing on the corner of Washtenaw and Cambridge, thumbing rides towards campus in the morning." Susan Lowy Lubow '61 remembers, "I was wearing a kilt, selling tickets on the steps of the Union for Michigras, in the spring of 1958. The kilt came to the top of my knees. I got a note delivered there, from the dean [Bacon], for 'inappropriate dress.'" Lubow adds, "It was like Big Brother sometimes. Nobody ever knew how she knew." The dean's office instructed the housemothers to complete evaluation forms on the women in their units, forms that became part of their permanent records available to potential employers and other universities. Privy to a student's grade point average and information about any academic difficulties, the housemothers wrote their assessments of everything from a woman's manners and personal grooming to her morals and social adjustment. The Health Service seemed to Susan Lowy Lubow a place that filtered the female population for pregnancy. "If you didn't feel well," she remembered, "the first thing you'd be asked was, 'Are you pregnant?'" And if a girl was pregnant, she certainly didn't go to the Health Service, Patricia Golden Steinhoff '63 remembers, because the information would be passed on, and the dean "would get in there and throw you out." So the moment a Black man knocked on a white woman's door, an entire regiment of witnesses was in place, primed to interfere, whether the two were merely friends or starry-eyed sweethearts. Lulu (Harriet) Eaton Collins Smith '57, '62 MA, of Fowlerville, Michigan, met her husband Durward Collins of Houston (winner of a 1959 Hopwood prize for poetry) in the fall of her senior year. "I knew a number of interracial couples but they began cracking down on us," she recalls. "People would just disappear. My housemother at Fletcher Hall told me I had been seen with a Negro male and asked if I was going out with him. I said yes. She said it was her duty to get in touch with my mother. I told her my mother had already met him. I went to see Dean Bacon about a grant I was receiving and she noted that I was dating a Negro. But she gave me the grant and no trouble, probably because my mother knew." Lulu and Durward were married during spring break and returned to their separate residences, she to Fletcher and he to a local church's rooming house on Brown St. for African American men. Ann Tarnower Baum '64 was called into the dean's office after the housemother of Alice Lloyd relayed the fact that she and a Black male friend had gone to Detroit together. "I liked jazz," she says, "and was friends with a mixed group, not that particular guy." She recalls Dean Bacon telling her that her behavior would "follow me around and 'the world will judge you.' I wasn't scared of her and I didn't fear being expelled or suspended because I knew my parents would be one hundred percent supportive." It wasn't just interracial dating that brought pressure on women not to deviate from unwritten rules, but also interracial friendships. Two Black women, including Eugenia C. Foree '55, '60 BS, in Public Health, became friends with Sandra Gaines Delson '54, '55 MA, and a second white woman. Near the end of the 1953 academic year, Bacon called Sandra into her office and said, according to transcripts Bacon made, "After three years in the dormitory system, we are glad to get rid of you" and further told her she was an "unconstructive citizen" because of "the group you associate with." Both Eugenia Foree and Sandra Gaines Delson remember their college friendship with fondness and were thankful for the chance to form bonds across racial lines. Foree says, "These friendships are what the University should have encouraged." The spy system extended beyond the dean of women's office. "Among Michigan coaches, some football coaches were the least tolerant of interracial dating," wrote John Behee in Hail to the Victors!, "and felt completely justified in making decisions for athletes in the social realm. They would dismiss them from the team if they insisted on dating interracially." In addition to the dean of women's office and the athletic department, Behee said that the Ann Arbor police in the 1940s and 50s "often felt compelled to stop and harass interracial couples." It is ironic that interracial dating was a natural result of University policies, since many more Black men were enrolled than Black women. The numbers were so lopsided, Roger Wilkins—the president of his LSA senior class—says that he and fellow Black male students had strategies to "check out" the Black freshmen women before potential rivals. "I figured out the way to do it was to work at registration. Eve Tyler [his first wife] was coming through the line and she was pretty good-looking. I was a dashing young man who knew everything. I said to her, 'May I help you?'" The World Against Them At the end of their sophomore years, having dated since the preceding November, Will Smith returned to Little Rock while Marj Joslyn stayed in Ann Arbor working in the Law Library. In the fall of 1957, her roommate, also from Fenton, returned to relay a devastating ultimatum from Marj's parents: Choose us or Will. "My father had these liberal principles," Marj says today, "but had never had to deal with a real Black or a Jewish person, and they hadn't even met Will." She chose. Although she had registered for her junior year, her loss of family support forced Marj to drop out of school and work at the Graduate Library. Will completed his junior year, continuing the hard work that had been necessary for him "to fill in the gaps of his education in poor, segregated Arkansas schools," Marj recalls. "When I met him, he studied at his desk with a dictionary at his elbow and he looked up the definition of every word he ran across that he did not know." Will kept wearing football jersey No. 75 as a right tackle for the Wolverines. He recalls that Head Coach Bennie Oosterbaan '28 and Athletic Director Fritz Crisler "talked to" other Black players who were dating interracially "but not to me." But Will was punished in a way that Behee said coaches traditionally used in those days. After he began dating Marj, he never started another game: He was put in after the first play. "I played like a starter," Will notes. And Marj points out, "He was the only person drafted into professional football from that team, but he got the honor [of starting] taken away." Years later, after her mother died, Marj found a letter from her faculty counselor, Eric W. Stockton, an assistant professor of English, to her mother. He wrote Mrs. Joslyn on December 16, 1957, in Marj's sophomore year, when she still wrote her name as "Marge": "Both Professor [Arthur] Van Duren [chief academic counselor of LSA and | ||||||
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