RACE, ACTIVISM, AND HILLARY CLINTON AT WELLESLEY

[DemocratSinceBirth]

The two things that are said perhaps most often about Janet Hill—that she is a lawyer and that she was Hillary Clinton’s roommate at Wellesley College, in the late sixties—are not true. “That legend was started by the sportscaster Dick Vitale, in 1991,” she said recently, of the Clinton story. Hill’s son Grant was then a star at Duke; he would become a star in the N.B.A. as well, and is now a basketball analyst for Turner Sports. “He focussed all the time on Calvin,” Hill continued, referring to her husband, a retired N.F.L. star. “Then, one day, his cameraman widened the shot—and there I was. Dick said, ‘Oh, my God, there’s Grant’s mother! She went to Wellesley with her roommate Hillary Clinton! She’s a lawyer in Washington, in the Bush Administration!’ The only correct part is: I’m Grant’s mom and I went to Wellesley. Hillary and I were just good friends there.”

...

Hill and the other four African-American women who graduated from Wellesley’s four-hundred-and-twenty-person class of 1969 remember Clinton, with whom many of them still communicate, fondly. (A sixth African-American student in the class transferred after her sophomore year, and has since passed away. There were also two black students from outside the United States.) “What I liked about her was that we did not seem to be novelties to her,” Nancy Gist, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., said recently. “There were a lot of white women at Wellesley who hadn’t really had much contact with black people, especially people like us. They didn’t quite know what to make of us. Hillary did not communicate any of that. I don’t know that she had spent time around black people, but for whatever reason she did not seem to be so mystified.”[/div


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Her former classmates are not surprised, in any case, that Clinton is on the verge of the nomination—they could see that coming a long time ago. “There was a sheet of paper in our elevator at Freeman Hall, during senior week,” Hill said. “People wrote the name of a senior and predicted what would happen to her. Several said that I’d marry a football player; that wasn’t a stretch. But we predicted Hillary would be the first female President of the United States.”

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/race-activism-and-hillary-clinton-at-wellesley

[mcar]

1. SO was reading excerpts of this to me today

I'll have to read the whole thing. Thanks!