he authors of Seven Sisters and a Brother: Friendship, Resistance, and Untold Truths Behind Black Student Activism in the 1960s are working together with royalties from their book to strengthen a fund that supports Swarthmore’s Black Studies Program, student work and research in Black Studies, and the Swarthmore Black Alumni Network Endowed Internship Fund.

They’ve named it the Seven Sisters and a Brother Black Studies Fund. For co-authors Marilyn Allman Maye ’69, Harold S. Buchanan ’69, Jannette O. Domingo ’70, Joyce Frisby Baynes ’68, Marilyn Holifield ’69, Myra E. Rose ’70, Bridget van Gronigen Warren ’70, and Aundrea White Kelley ’72, the creation of the fund is the next step in a story that began with their student activism, which helped lead to the creation of Swarthmore’s Black Studies Program. Holifield ’69, co-author and member of the College’s Board of Managers, explains that “the fund is so timely in light of our national reckoning on race and reopening of history to include a fuller story of how slavery, Jim Crow, and its legacies created unresolved inequities as well as amazing contributions.”

“It’s also an intriguing story of student activism that evolved to philanthropy as an extension of the quest for a robust Black Studies Program and maybe one day a department,” she adds. “There may be more support for the fund beyond the co-authors than we might have imagined.”

movie buff’s movie buff, Ian Bricke ’98 relishes every step of the filmmaking journey. But the real thrills lie in late-stage editing.

“When you really figure out the shape of the movie and get to the point of tweaking a line here or trimming a scene there, you can see and feel the transformation,” says Bricke, vice president, original independent film, at Netflix, who leads a team through every stage of a film’s production, from pitch to publicity.

It’s a fitting role for Bricke. He grew up watching (if not quite grasping) Truffaut and Antonioni at the behest of his parents and frequenting Blockbuster Video.

But it wasn’t until Swarthmore that a film career came into focus.

Bricke seized the opportunity to experiment, writing movie reviews for the Phoenix, DJing for WSRN-FM, assisting productions in LPAC, and running a film society “for a general audience of three,” he says.

Or so says the lawyer and music industry veteran, who won a Grammy in 2005 for producing the Ray Charles album Genius Loves Company, and later donated the award to the Black Cultural Center.

But for Mizell, a microphone is as much about amplifying other voices as his own. Throughout his career, he has merged his two passions, entertainment and activism, to raise political awareness. The guiding light has been the memory of his uncle Von Mizell, a doctor and civil rights leader in South Florida who founded the Broward County NAACP.

“It’s kind of in my family DNA,” says Mizell, a sociology & anthropology major at Swarthmore, the first Black Thomas J. Watson Fellow from the College, and a graduate of Harvard Law. His beloved uncle once told him that he fights for those who can’t fight for themselves.

“That really stuck with me,” says Mizell.

A fan of music with a message, Mizell moved to Los Angeles after law school to carve out a career in entertainment. After landing a job as a publicity writer, Mizell became connected with Stevie Wonder at the height of his stardom. Mizell helped Wonder launch a radio station and spearhead a campaign to create a holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. ­— the first holiday to honor an African American in the nation’s history.

Mim, who never shed her deeply-felt identity as a Marylander, died Feb. 2, 2022.

A history major who was Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with high honors, she served for many years on the Maryland State Board for Community Colleges, appointed by the governor, along with being chair and a member of Allegany College’s Board of Trustees. Mim was a member of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Cumberland, Md., and had a love of good food, a zest for travel, and a gift for friendship.

IN 1957, the 16-page comic book Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story brought then-recent history to life in its vibrant retelling of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s role in the Montgomery bus boycott.

The 13-month boycott began in 1955 with Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. It culminated in a 1956 victory for the civil rights movement: the Supreme Court ruled that segregated busing was unconstitutional.

The pacifist group Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) created Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story to spread Dr. King’s story and his message.

You’re very prominent in queer and feminist film theory. How did you find your interest there?

I usually say it’s because I love movies and women! The movies have always been about gender and sexuality. They have emphasized women on camera, and historically, most industries have realized that women were eager consumers of mass culture. Images of women may contrast with inequality off-screen, of course, and those images were often very glamorous or objectified. But there was almost an elevation of women’s power and role in the world of movies — and to a certain extent, television — more than in other parts of the public sphere, like government, places where there is “true power.”

What inspired your latest book, Rebecca?

Rebecca is part of a series of books from the British Film Institute called BFI Classics, and I had always wanted to write one on Rebecca (1940). It was a film I had written about in my first book. I’ve loved the movie since I was a teenager and watched it on TV with my mom, and read Daphne Du Maurier’s novel and saw various television versions.

So [the book] came from something that I really enjoyed and something that was intellectually interesting, because the film had attracted a lot of really interesting criticism, as Hitchcock’s preeminent “women’s picture,” which was the category that Hollywood used to talk about films made for female audiences. So Rebecca historically had popularity and influence, and already a reputation in film studies for being a place that could test out arguments about who is really responsible for the meaning in film. Is it the director, the original novelist, the audience?