After all, the Quakers, the Religious Society of Friends, played a prominent role in anti-slavery efforts and the education of blacks in the 18th and early 19th century.

So I met with Philip A. Bean, Haverford’s associate dean and dean of academic affairs, and viewed an exhibit on Haverford’s struggle to diversify that he made available.

Philip Bean

While I view Quakers’ footdragging on diversity at Haverford and in their residential neighborhoods as a bothersome blind spot, Dean Bean takes a more philosophical view: “However much we have a responsibility to strive for change, a failure to recognize the limits inherent in the human condition is, it seems to me, at the root of the despair that is itself often the enemy of constructive change.”

Through the 1930s the student body consisted of, as the exhibit said, “almost exclusively whites from well-established higher economic status American Protestant families.”

Some students of color from abroad, in part due to Quaker missionary efforts, gained admission: Man Hoe Tang ’15 from China and Osmond Pitter ’26 and Cuthbert Pitter ’34 from Jamaica. And a few Jews and Italian-Americans completed Haverford, though not without notice. Victor Lamberti ’26 of the Bronx, perhaps the college’s first Italian-American graduate, was known as “Wop.”

Even before the civil rights era, students pushed for change at Haverford. After black sociologist Ira Reid addressed the college, students petitioned Gilbert White to lure him to Haverford. Reid joined the faculty in 1947, the year that the college admitted its first African-American student, Paul Moses, and its first African student, Nigerian S. Nwanneka Adimore, and graduated its first Asian American, Augustus Tanaka of Ontario, Oregon.

The 1960s brought more student pressure. To those of us picketing a local Woolworth’s for not allowing blacks to eat at their lunch counters in the South it was more than ironic that Haverford remained almost exclusively white. My greatest exposure to black students came in my senior year as an exchange student at historically black Livingstone College in Salisbury, N.C.

In the late 1960s alumni were asked to recruit students of color. I pitched students at heavily African-American high schools in Washington, D.C. In 1968 Haverford more than doubled the number of black students it admitted. By 1971, under President Jack Coleman, students of color made up 10 percent of the Haverford student body.

A 1972 protest by students of color, including a boycott of non-academic campus activities, helped lead to institutional change, including greater faculty and staff diversity. And students played a role in making Haverford coed.

A 1971 speech by Coleman called for coeducation, but the college’s board chose a compromise in 1976: Women could enter Haverford only as transfer students. Coleman resigned in protest. In 1978 a student plenary passed a resolution, supported by the faculty, urging the admission of women. By the class of 1984 women were being admitted on an equal basis.

In my era as a student, gays were deeply closeted. I do not remember sexual orientation ever being discussed. Dean Bean, who is openly gay, says individual students today may silently struggle with real or perceived hostility from their families.  But, he says, the climate at Haverford for gay and lesbian students has long been “virtually a non-issue.”

Today, Bean estimates, students of color make up 35 percent of Haverford’s entering class. Fifty-five percent of the once all-male student body is female and the college’s acting president is a woman.

But Bean said challenges remain. He stressed the importance of making elite colleges like Haverford accessible to students who are from the first generation of their families to attend college—students who may face serious financial challenges. “There is no more powerful engine of socio-economic mobility,” Bean said, “than higher education.”

Loren Ghiglione

Chang and Eng Bunker, Siamese twins on display in Philadelphia's Mütter Museum

Twinship—dual identity, two selves inhabiting the same body—intrigued Mark Twain and flooded his fiction. He was fascinated by an exhibition of Giacomo and Giovanni Tocci, Italian brothers conjoined at the rib cage with one set of legs and two sets of arms.

But Chang and Eng Bunker, the original “Siamese twins” who starred in United States exhibitions, were the first conjoined twins to attract Twain. He wrote about them in a humorous 1868 essay and drew in part on them for his novel The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson.

So when we arrived in Philadelphia, we had to visit the Mütter Museum, home not only to collections of abnormal human tumors, skeletons and other body parts, but also to plaster casts of Chang and Eng Bunker, made after their autopsy in 1874.

What better person to tell the story of the conjoined Bunkers than J Nathan Bazzel, communications director of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, home to the Mütter Museum. Bazzel is, in one sense, a living exhibit in the museum.

Bazzell has sought to educate people about the HIV/AIDS-related complication, Avascular Necrosis (AVN). As a result of AVN, he had to have his hips replaced with titanium ones. He donated his original hips to the museum, which plans to display them. He refers to humans on exhibit as roommates: “They are me, and I am them.”

Dan Tham’s video captures Bazzel’s account of the amazing life and death of Chang and Eng Bunker.

Loren Ghiglione

After leaving New York City in a huff in October 1853, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) worked as a printer in Philadelphia for five months. He visited the “old cracked ‘Independence Bell’” and sat on the same pine bench where George Washington and Ben Franklin had sat. “I would have whittled off a chip if I had got a chance,” Twain said.

So we went in search of the “Independence Bell,” now called the Liberty Bell, and the bench Twain deemed worthy of whittling. Alas, we found no bench. But the Liberty Bell, which was moved in 1854, the year of Twain’s visit, from the steeple to a pedestal in Independence Hall, now resides at the far end of a modern, glass-walled building.

After passing inspection by one of a half-dozen security guards we entered an exhibit area that focused on the history of the crack in the oft-repaired Liberty Bell, first cast in 1752, and on the bell’s role as symbol. A poem by H. R. Moore declared: “Ring Loud that Hallowed BELL!…Ring it till the slave be free….”

Later exhibit panels show how the bell inspired patriotism (Liberty Loans), women’s suffrage (a Women’s Liberty Bell commissioned in 1915), the civil rights movement (“Let freedom ring,” shouted Dr. Martin Luther King), and global freedom. South Africa’s Nelson Mandela called the bell “a very significant symbol for the entire democratic world.”

Finally, the bell, thus far hidden from view, became visible. The stark, modern setting disappointed me, but not so the bell. Its very shape, from tiny crown to wide lip, suggests the vision of freedom’s expansion in Americans’ lives.

I was even more moved, however, by a Philadelphia symbol of freedom’s absence, crumbling Eastern State Penitentiary, closed in 1971. Isolated on a hill two miles from Philadelphia proper when built in 1829, the penitentiary looks ominous. The original seven cellblocks spread like the spokes of a breaking wheel used for torture in the Middle Ages.

Eastern State Penitentiary

Thirty-foot stone walls with exterior slit windows and towers topped by battlements suggest that the neo-Gothic, 12-acre prison houses dungeons and torture cells. No dungeons and torture cells exist. But the cathedral-like, barrel-vaulted ceilings—intended to inspire regret or penitence in inmates (thus the term, penitentiary)—inspire dread.

So does the prison’s philosophy. To isolate inmates from bad influences they were kept in total solitude in their cells. Entering inmates were hooded to prevent other prisoners from identifying them and discouraging easy reentry into society. But the practice reminds me of death-row prisoners being brought to the gallows.

A few parts of the penitentiary—some cellblocks, Al Capone’s recreated cell on “Park Avenue” in cell block eight, the prison synagogue and the ball field, for example—have been restored.

Fortunately total restoration is not the goal. The preservation of Eastern State Penitentiary as a stabilized ruin of peeling plaster and crumbling cellblocks strengthen its power as a symbol of freedom denied.

Loren Ghiglione