But a hesitance to engage in activism did not translate into discrimination on campus.

Scanning the Freshman Union, one could easily spot the crew team and the football players, but the table that stood out the most to many was that filled with black students, Woodford says. But he adds that this group would also welcome other students and did not feel they were unwelcome elsewhere.

Most black students spent a significant amount of time with other black students, but they maintained close relationships with students of other races without concerns about racial differences.

Harvey Pressman, a white graduate student who graduated in 1964, says that race was on the backburner when he became close friends with an African-American student in his class.

“We thought of him more as a lousy second baseman than an African American,” Pressman says.

But the weekends led to more distinct racial separations as students spent time outside of the classroom.

“The only place that I was ever aware of difference—although it didn’t really affect me—but black students were not invited to the clubs, or at least barely any were,” Jourdain says.

His freshman year, Armstrong lived in Pennypacker 48, along with another black student Lowell S. Davidson ’63 and white students Philip A. Cromer ’63 and Franklin J. Bardacke ’63.

“It was an uptight place,” Bardacke says, referring to Harvard. “People weren’t really looking for change because they weren’t that unhappy with what it was.”

For Jourdain and Armstrong, their involvement in student groups gave them a strong sense of belonging, despite being in the extreme minority.

“Football was a team effort,” Armstrong says. “There was no discrimination that I could perceive.”

Similarly, Jourdain described his time on the Glee Club as the highlight of his Harvard experience.

“It connected me to the richest traditions and history of Harvard,” Jourdain says. “It was a deep and profound experience.”

Even without discriminatory practices or racial antagonism, events that seemed small to other students sometimes stood out in the minds of black students as they reinforced the continued existence of racial differences.

“One of our classmates was doing a paper on [African Americans],” Woodford says. “So if we didn’t think of ourselves as some kind of group or entity, it was kind of forced upon us once we saw that they were studying us.”