Aging 'freedom fighters' celebrate integration of Girard College

Now-aging firebrands who endured fear and pain to desegregate Girard College 50 years ago walked smiling past its imposing stone walls Friday.

They were greeted on the steps of Founder's Hall by red-blazered students - mostly minorities - who applauded, then sang for the 10 so-called freedom fighters, whose efforts opened the school for the very kids who were honoring them.

"We are your legacy," senior Brandon Dixon, a national scholarship winner bound for Harvard, told the one-time demonstrators, one of whom cried openly.

The greeting was part of a remembrance of the desegregation demonstration, which lasted for seven months and 17 days in 1965. People who were there recall being harassed by police - a memory, they said, that's sadly been revived by alleged police brutality in Baltimore and elsewhere.

Led by then-Philadelphia NAACP president Cecil B. Moore, the demonstration was regarded as such a vital event that even the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. showed up to speak during the seemingly endless protest.

Three years later, after the courts ordered Girard's desegregation, four African American boys enrolled in the school, which is a boarding school for low-income students in grades 1 through 12.

"I'm just humbled by what transpired," said one of the original four, Owen Gowans III, 54, now a Baptist pastor and a training supervisor at SEPTA. "I'm appreciative to the people who put up with beatings and bad words so people like me could go to school here."

The days of protest were "intense," remembered Kenneth "Freedom Smitty" Salaam, one of the original demonstrators, now called the Cecil B. Moore Philadelphia Freedom Fighters.

Taught by his father to get involved in the civil rights movement, Salaam was 16 when he dedicated himself to the Girard demonstration.

He missed school, dances, and many of the normal experiences of adolescence to picket at "the wall," as people called it. It was a rough time.

"Police rode motorcycles up on people," said Salaam, now 66 and a contractor. "Some of us were snatched off the street by police, then taken somewhere and hit."

Others spoke of attacks by police dogs and, in an echo of present-day Baltimore, demonstrators were punched, then thrown into police vans "like pieces of meat," said Karen Asper-Jordan, president of the freedom fighters group.

Earlier in the day, a few of the original group walked the 1.3 miles around the walled campus in Fairmount. They sang old protest songs and recited 1960s chants, joking that they couldn't remember all the words.

The demonstrators took obvious pleasure in being back at Girard, which is embroiled in a new kind of fight these days, as officials contemplate suspending its high school and boarding programs to save money.

Mayor Nutter said at the school that he was a beneficiary of the civil rights movement.

"We owe so much to so many," Nutter said. Referencing Baltimore, he said, the nation is entering a "second season of civil rights struggle." He added, "It's left to us to take the relay-race baton, and let us keep marching as they marched for us."

Asper-Jordan said she liked hearing that. "You can make a difference," she said. "Desegregation was won in the courts, but our picketing kept the eyes of the world on Girard College."

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