Up Front: Drew Gilpin Faust
Drew Gilpin Faust was an acclaimed historian before she became the 28th president of Harvard in 2007, and history has always been a part of her life.
She grew up in rural Virginia in the 1950s and ’60s, surrounded by Civil War monuments to the Lost Cause and by unreconstructed Southerners. Her grandmother used to sing to her: “I’m a good old rebel / That’s just what I am / For this fair land of freedom / I do not give a damn.” Faust attended an all-white school and an all-white church; Senator Harry Byrd, one of the leaders of the resistance to Brown v. Board of Education, came from her county. Yet even as a young girl, she knew something was wrong with the adults’ way of life, and in 1957, when she was 9, she wrote a letter to the president expressing her feelings: “Please, Mr. Eisenhower,” she said, “please try and have schools and other things accept coloredpeople.” ...
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She grew up in rural Virginia in the 1950s and ’60s, surrounded by Civil War monuments to the Lost Cause and by unreconstructed Southerners. Her grandmother used to sing to her: “I’m a good old rebel / That’s just what I am / For this fair land of freedom / I do not give a damn.” Faust attended an all-white school and an all-white church; Senator Harry Byrd, one of the leaders of the resistance to Brown v. Board of Education, came from her county. Yet even as a young girl, she knew something was wrong with the adults’ way of life, and in 1957, when she was 9, she wrote a letter to the president expressing her feelings: “Please, Mr. Eisenhower,” she said, “please try and have schools and other things accept coloredpeople.” ...