'And we are all better for it': A former Girard student recalls the fear and the courage

Forty years ago last month, following a decade-long desegregation battle that rocked the city, four African-American boys walked through the gates of Girard College for the first time as students.

I was almost 12 that fall, an eighth-grader at Girard. The memories of that tumultuous year helped shape my attitudes about race and the courage it takes to bring about change.

My first thought that September day, seeing those young boys arriving on campus, was entirely about survival.

It had been only three years since my own rocky "initiation" at Girard - leaving home, learning the Girard routine and navigating playground confrontations with some of the scariest kids I'd ever seen. One quick example: In my first month at Girard, I was pummeled twice by the same kid on the same night - first because I was a "newbie," and then again 15 minutes later for being fool enough to cry about the first beating.

Girard was no place for the meek. My friends and I gradually learned the routine, and Girard had in some ways come to feel like home to us. But we were white, and we hadn't had to confront the explosive issue of race, which was sure to make life infinitely tougher for these new arrivals.

Those four kids were being dropped into a steaming cauldron of trouble, and everyone knew it. I shuddered at what awaited them, and I remember thinking, "I wouldn't want to be those guys."

Race mattered, inside and outside the walls. It had dominated the public discussion about Girard for nearly a decade. We had argued about desegregation, had witnessed the marches around the campus and had regularly engaged in confrontations with our neighbors outside the walls. Racial tension - usually cast as us against them - was a fact of life at Girard in that fall of 1968, always there, bubbling at a low boil.

Sometimes it boiled over. Less than a month after the color barrier was broken, a small riot occurred just outside the campus as students were leaving for the Columbus Day weekend. It started when my older brother, David, one of his friends and I were attacked by a gang of local black teenagers as we walked to the SEPTA bus stop at 20th and Girard. One carried a two-by-four which he used to knock my brother down, and another brandished a car aerial that he swung at me. I can still hear that whistling sound as it whipped over my head (missed me!), and I remember David screaming, "Run!"

We barely escaped, and our attackers moved up Girard Avenue towards the school - only to run smack into about 50 Girard students who came streaming out of the gate to "take care of business." It was ugly; two of the attackers were hospitalized, and the melee served to harden many student attitudes about race.

Gradually, however, things began to settle down. Looking back, I now know that the five African-American students (the original four were joined in January 1969 by Charles Hicks, who would go on to become the first African-American to graduate from Girard in 1974) continued to face threats, taunts and other difficulties every day in those first years. I also know that I could not have survived the same treatment.

And then came the murder that changed everything. In April 1969, a Girard senior named John Daubarus was gunned down just outside the wall, at 25th and Poplar streets. John was one of the most beloved guys on campus, and a real hero among the younger students. He always seemed to be enjoying himself, and he made us laugh all the time. His death - shot in the back by a 15-year-old gangbanger who targeted Daubarus at random to avenge the beating of his own friend earlier that day - traumatized the campus.

And in the depths of that profound grief - even now, I point to that awful day as the moment we all stopped being kids - some students reacted in anger.

To them, the murder was a hate crime: The shooter was black, Daubarus was white, and there was no need for further discussion. The emotion of the tragedy overwhelmed reason. I remember one good friend, a genuinely decent kid, confronting me about an earlier discussion in which I had argued (as my mother continually preached) that integration was a good thing, and that equal opportunity was long overdue at Girard.

That night, tears streaming down his face, he confronted me and said, "What do you think of your niggers now?" I had no answer for him.

But the lessons of those difficult years helped me find one. It came down to this: I cannot imagine how much courage it took for those children to survive during their first months and years at Girard.

And because they did, because they survived and even thrived, we are all better for it. Today, Girard serves a remarkably diverse student community, one that for the last 24 years has included girls as well as boys. Girard emphasizes tolerance along with the textbooks, and its graduates enter the world as confident and productive adults.

They are terrific young women and men, living proof of how far Girard has come in these last 40 years. I admit that I am both very proud and a little envious of these youngsters, especially when I think about the world of possibilities that await them thanks to Girard.

Sometimes I even catch myself thinking, "I wish I could be one of those guys." *

Kevin Feeley, Girard Class of 1973, a journalist and lawyer, was press secretary to Ed Rendell when he was mayor. He is president of the Bellevue Communications Group.