Yale and Civil Rights in the 1960s w/ alumni Joan Countryman and Bruce Payne: MAB, 1/22/24.

Joan Countryman M.U.S. ’66 and Bruce Payne ’65 M.A. were students at Yale in the early/mid 1960s and both were active in the national civil rights movement. In this Mondays at Beinecke a week after Martin Luther King Day, they will discuss campus life in those years, an era when Dr. King himself came to Yale to preach in Battell Chapel in 1961 and to receive an honorary degree in 1964. Each will also share about their involvement in the civil rights movement.
Joan Cannady Countryman is a Quaker, educator, and activist. She graduated from Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia in 1958, and was the school’s first black student and graduate. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1962, a master’s in urban studies from Yale in 1966, and a social administration degree from the London School of Economics in 1967, as a Fulbright Scholar. From 1970 to 1993, Countryman returned to Germantown Friends, serving as a teacher and administrative leader. In 1993, she became the head of Lincoln School in Providence. In 2006, Countryman served as the Interim Head of School of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy in South Africa. She was also the Interim Head of the Atlanta Girls’ School from 2007 to 2008.
A civil rights activist in Mississippi in the 1960’s and an early opponent of the US role in Vietnam, Bruce Payne is currently an independent scholar living in New Haven. He was Associate Provost for the Arts at Hunter College (CUNY) in 2017-21 and previously was Director of an MA Program in Arts Administration at Baruch College (CUNY) and President and Executive Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation. He was on the faculty of Duke University from 1971-2006. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley and a master’s in political science from Yale.
Mondays at Beinecke online talks include an opening presentation at 4pm followed by conversation and question/ answer beginning about 4:30pm until 5pm.