Growing up on a farm in Carbon County's rural Towamensing Township in the 1950s, Roy Christman never met a Black person. He thinks that at the time there was only one Black, then referred to as Negro, family in all of Carbon County.

"If you were a kid in high school in the late 1950s, you had to be aware of the Civil Rights movement-everybody was," Christman said. "In 1956, when I was a freshman at Palmerton High School, that was the year that the Little Rock Nine were integrating Central High School. You saw these kids being spit on by mobs.""That had to have an effect," he noted, touched by what he saw. "I guess some were affected more than others." His mother had taught him "to treat people on the basis of what they are, not on the basis of their skin color."As a senior in high school, Christman was interested in studying history in college. "There was a myth that a small college is better. You learn your professor's names; they learn your name. At a big school like Penn State you could get lost."He only applied to small liberal arts colleges in the area, and was encouraged by a cousin, a history professor at Ursinus College, to go there. He started as a history major, later switching to political science.Christman was an awkward fit at Ursinus. The students were largely drawn to this United Church of Christ-affiliated college from wealthy suburban Philadelphia families. "I did not fit in. I felt out of place. I was a farm kid. When you feel out of place, you feed on that even more. I used to wear my 4-H jacket with the big clover in the back to class and big black engineer boots like James Dean wore."To help cover his college expenses, Christman worked summers planting and cutting trees at Bethlehem Water Authority's Wild Creek Reservoir in Towamensing Township. Workers for the Authority in Bethlehem belonged to the Municipal Worker's Union. Christman and his seven coworkers wanted the better benefits, higher wages, and protection from arbitrary firing that being unionized offered.While working to join the union, Christman learned about the Bethlehem branch of the NAACP and joined in early 1963. That summer, the chapter chartered a bus to join Martin Luther King's March On Washington."My parents would not let me go," Christman said. "They were afraid of violence.""I was so angry," he continued. "I listened to the reports of the hundreds of thousands of people, and King's 'I Have A Dream' speech, and I couldn't go."In 1964, his senior year, Christman learned that a professor organized a student exchange with Lincoln University in nearby Chester County. Founded in 1854 as Ashmun Institute, it was the "first institution found anywhere in the world to provide a higher education in the arts and sciences for male youth of African descent." It was renamed Lincoln University in 1866."The idea to exchange students between Ursinus and Lincoln now seems just bizarre to me," Christman said. "Here's two colleges, 30 miles apart. One is lily-white; one is 95 percent black; and we are going to have an exchange program like you do with a foreign country."Continued in Part 2A Towamensing farm boy spends a week at a Black college in 1964.Two students volunteered from each school. "The idea was we would live in their dorm rooms, go to their classes, take notes from their classes, and mingle with the students," Christman explained. "They were all guys-so, a Lincoln student was living in my dorm room with my room mate, Larry Coon.""Larry was a great guy but I remember, because guys used to yell, 'Hey Coon, come on down.' People called each other by their last names then. I remember before I left, going up and down my dorm telling everybody, we got a black guy-I probably said Negro at that time-a Negro guy's going to live in my room for a week. Don't anybody yell, 'Hey Coon' because he's going to think it's some kind of insult."The Lincoln visitor got along with Coon, and with Christman when they met to exchange notes. Christman never met the second Lincoln student, assuming that he left early, as did the Ursinus student that had accompanied Christman to Lincoln.One of Christman's classes at Lincoln University was about Black History. "It wasn't called Black History at the time. Maybe it was called History of the American Negro," Christman pondered. "That was an eye-opening experience.""I learned all kinds of stuff that I hadn't heard about. When I went to high school, I didn't learn that Black soldiers were in the Civil War. That one of the men at the Boston Massacre was a Black guy. They didn't talk about the fact that the United States in World War II fought with a segregated army."They never discussed lynching. Thousands and thousands of blacks were lynched after Reconstruction, and continued into the 1950s. It was never discussed. Getting just a week's worth of Black History opened my eyes that they was a whole other narrative out there that we weren't getting."Asked if Christman felt any tension during the week, he cited two instances. "The tensest moment was the second night I was there," Christman remembered. Seven or eight guys came into our dorm room and asked, 'Just what are you doing here?'"I knew instinctively that if I started to talk about brotherhood and civil rights it would be condescending-it was not going to go over. I knew it. I sensed it. So I said, 'I needed a break from studying. This looked like fun. I thought this would be a neat way to get away from school for a while and have some fun.' They said, 'O.K.'"The second tense moment was the night the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. "At that time, college students didn't have a TV in their room, so, they gathered in the common room to watch TV."Just about everyone from the dorm came down to watch the Beatles. They made nasty and sarcastic comments about the Beatles. They did not think much of the Beatles," said Christman, a huge Beatles' fan. "I sat there and kept my mouth shut.""It made me aware that there is a different culture in certain areas like music. Today there's much more intermingling of music."After the exchange week, Christman returned to Ursinus College, wrote an article about his experience, and spoke about it at chapel.That was the first, last and only time that the schools had a student exchange."It made me aware, and I can see the need for a Black History Month," Christman said. "I still think we underplay this."