“I do enjoy it,” she says of her job, which she says “is essentially editing” the videotape of the show and fitting it into the one-hour time slot.

“It requires an enormous amount of organizational skills which I’ve fortunately been able to develop over the years,” she says. “I guess I like it because a lot of it is like putting the pieces of a puzzle together.”

COLOR LINE

Though by the late 1970s the Civil Rights movement had won its legislative battles, Banks-Johnson recalls that race played a visible and important part of her life at Harvard.

“My sense is that there were two different worlds,” Banks-Johnson says of blacks and whites at Harvard. “There was some [separation of the races]. I certainly knew other African-American students who really didn’t fraternize with anybody who wasn’t black.”

Indeed, both Gore and Porter-Lipscomb are African American, meaning Banks-Johnson was placed into an all-black first-year dorm room. Porter-Lipscomb says same-race dorm rooms were the norm on campus and that certain Houses—including Leverett—were known to have larger populations of minority students while others—such as Eliot and Winthop—housed hardly any minorities.

But Banks-Johnson says she was able to bridge both worlds.

“I had friends who were white; I had friends who were black. I sat at the black tables [during meals], but I had friends who were white who I ate with too,” she recalls. “I was pretty comfortable walking in both worlds.”

Banks-Johnson says her childhood prepared her for her Harvard experience more than most of her peers.

“It wasn’t a big shock for me,” says Banks-Johnson, who says she attended a high school where she was one of only two African-American students in a class of 630 students.

Banks-Johnson says that although her academic experience has not contributed much to her career, it has help shaped her perspective of the world.

“I was [at Harvard] between the ages of 18 and 22. I’d like to think that it was a place where I was encouraged to think and examine issues,” she says.

She remembers learning from the drastic changes that the University underwent while she was enrolled.

“By the time I started college in 1975 the war in [Vietnam] had ended and we’d missed the sit-ins of the war years, but there was still a substantial amount of political activism on campus,” she writes in an e-mail. “I remember many rallies in the Yard protesting apartheid and urging Harvard to divest its holdings in South Africa.”

Banks-Johnson’s class was also the first to see the implementation of the Core Curriculum and was the last class of women admitted to Radcliffe College. After that, all students were admitted to Harvard College.