The Lemon Project & Branch Out

We spent our second day at the Lemon Project meeting and interviewing the Legacy 3. This was an experience I’ll never forget. The women were genuine and hilarious, and the stories they told transported me in back in time while still remaining incredibly relevant to today. We learned about their struggles as freshman trying to figure out how to navigate academic and social lives, as well as their struggles with strict (and outdated– even at the time) regulations for female students. They spoke more about these than their struggles as African American students, but their self-awareness was apparent. They used this aspect of their life here as motivation and a source of strength to do well in their classes and graduate. I was blown away by the women’s strength and grace, and so excited to start on our part of the project.

My group  bonded today while working on the project, mostly over a long, cold walk over to Colonial Williamsburg to take photographs of the Bruton Parish graveyard where Karen spent time studying. Spending more time with my group as well as the entire Lemon Project group (grad students and all) inspired me and made me realize how lucky I was to meet and work with these women. My time spent with them and the Legacy 3’s emphasis on the prestige of their William & Mary degrees also renewed my gratitude for the ability to learn from the professors and other students here. As I said earlier, I will never forget my experience interviewing the Legacy 3, and I will be forever inspired by their strength and determination (no matter how much they insist they were just like us).

The last day of the Branch Out Alternative Break/Collaboration with the Lemon Project was a productive and yet another meaningful day. It began with our participation in Moral Mondays which was a rewarding and humbling experience as we got to help out as activists. Because it was Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday we honored Dr. King by participating in the Moral Monday surrounding establishing peace over cruelty from policemen, calling for positive race relations, being treated fairly based off socieconmic status and various other causes. Participating in moral monday helped launch our discussion into being an active citizen and we were able to reevaulate our citizenship continuum and how we can stimulate its growth in our busy lives. This conversation really opened up how we see ourselves as citizens doing active community service while evaluating our passions and how we can channel our passions into our actions and be more active citizens. Then as a team we collaborated on finishing the digital archive for this year’s Lemon Project project. The evening was finalized by the celebration of our accomplishment by reaffirming our thoughts about our team members in a genuinely sweet way. The trip overall was very impactful to me as it helped me realize my decreased active citizenship and reignited my passion to continue it in my daily life. Working with the lovely ladies who were in charge of running the Lemon Project as well as the participants who were willing to come back to campus early to work on the project was really great as I got to learn so much from all of them and about their passions and how they channle it into their everyday life. I realize that this blog may be somewhat rushed but I truly cherish my time on the Lemon Project this year and cannot wait until I have an opportunity to work with it again.

Getting to meet the Legacy 3 this past Sunday was an incredible experience that I was lucky to have. I found that being able to hear their stories about their time on campus was just so interesting and amazing because I could picture the setting of their stories. I thought it was just really cool to learn about what the College was like around 50 years ago and how it has changed, like when dorms became co-ed and when the campus expanded and departments changed buildings. I just found that their stories provided new meanings and layers to these places around campus that I’ve grown so familiar with in my time here. In my opinion, the best part of the stories was the way in which they were told by the women. They made sure to emphasize how much their college experience paralleled those of their peers as well as today’s students. Their freshman move in day was just like ours today where we’re incredibly nervous about having to leave our families and everything we’ve known, and then we’re thrust into this completely new community where we’ll meet people that have never been like other people we know. They just made their presence on campus seem so minimal, which is unlike the way we perceive it today. And I think having that shared experience helped me be able to relate to them more and see them for what they were: just a group of regular college students.

— Angela

A few days after working with the Lemon Project and Branch Out, I find myself reflecting on the things I want to take with me from this weekend. One thing I valued far more than I expected to was the emphasis on mindfulness and self-care throughout the alternative break. While mindfulness and self-reflection are skills that I have been working on the past year, this weekend really emphasized the restorative power they can have in my everyday life. I fully plan on applying some of the exercises we practiced this semester to try to keep myself collected and grounded. Aside from the meditation, this weekend has instilled in me a newfound sense of what it means to serve and to be an activist. The experiences we had this weekend (meeting the Legacy 3, participating in moral Mondays) renewed my enthusiasm for community involvement and left me with a sense of pride in my college that I have not felt before. I am truly thankful to Branch Out and the Lemon Project for providing me with this incredible opportunity to learn and to serve, and I hope to carry the lessons I learned with me to create more positive and meaningful change.

Personally, it’s been very difficult for me to be motivated to be an activist. Growing up Filipino Catholic, I had certain views pushed on me that are the complete opposite of how I feel today. Luckily, having my friends and other community members around me helped me stray away from the kind of opinions that have occupied my life for so long. I’ve been able to develop my own ideas about who I am as a person and what kind of values I have. However, expressing these ideas or values doesn’t really come all that easily to me at home simply because of my family. My family has different ideals than me and they’ve always just kind of told me to keep my head down and focus on myself. It’s this kind of thinking that has sort of forced me to push myself away from becoming an active citizen because I fear what my parents will think of me and how they’ll react to my current views that don’t align with theirs and what they’ve raised me to have.

Therefore, growing up and developing my own set of values but not acting on them has been something I’ve struggled with especially when I go to a school like William and Mary. Most of my activism has been centered around social media sites like Twitter where I feel like I can speak freely and really be able to share my opinions with people. However, participating in Branch Out, and specifically Moral Mondays today, has allowed me to experience a different kind of activism that I had never really felt comfortable with growing up and actually feel good about having done it. It was a different experience for me to be physically present there with my values and other values that I agree with and I think it has just changed that way I personally view activism. Because to me, activism doesn’t necessarily mean going out and protesting every day. It can be something simple like having a conversation with someone and trying to provide a new perspective and it is definitely not the same for everyone.

— Angela

For the third and final day of the Lemon Project Branch Out Alternative Break, I thought it was a  very fitting way to end by participating in Moral Mondays. Being able to actually go out in our own community in Williamsburg and be a part of Moral Mondays along with our Lemon Project group of students was incredibly rewarding. To be able to actually physically be there on the streets in Colonial Williamsburg and be present to represent our beliefs, values and represent those who need public awareness for their circumstances helped further my appreciation and understanding of the importance of the Lemon Project. One of the two founders of Moral Mondays talked about how in his youth when he lived in Florida, a state rife in prejudice and racism, he had stayed on the sidelines simply watching other people go out and participate in activism. He went on to explain how he had only recently learned the importance of having an active voice in society, in your community. Starting, or even just having, these types of conversations with people over “controversial” topics such as maybe racism, immigration, transgender rights etc. is a very difficult thing to do and the Lemon Project’s emphasis on self-care and learning to have an open-mind really helped me gain confidence to to start these conversations with my fellow peers.

After watching the funny and enlightening interview with Karen, Janet, and Lynn, the three first residential African-American students at W&M, my group started investigating the academic spaces these women used while students. Karen studied science at W&M, and hearing her negative experiences with the chemistry department struck a chord with me as a woman who is also studying science. Karen mentioned a couple of examples of negative encounters she had with chemistry professors and other staff in that building in which she endured racist and sexist comments. Those stories really resonated with me because I have also encountered sexism as a woman pursuing a career in science, so that made me even more motivated and excited to help share the stories of the Legacy 3.

Day 2 of the Project exceeded my expectations. It began early in the day with the meeting of the Legacy 3, which are the first African American women to attend the College of William and Mary, and I was mesmerized and star-struck. The three ladies told us their experiences as students while in attendance during a time of civil rights and overt racism. Though I expected it to be a tale of hardships and struggles they had to endure as studenrts during that time, they instead proved that it was a story of triumph and really normality. In other words when Karen, Lynn, and Janet attended the College, they didnt realize at the time the significance of their admittance, continued attendance, and graduation from the College especially in the launching of the growth of future generations of African American students. The Legacy 3 were humble in the depiction of their story, yet the courage and pererverance they had to stay at a difficult school, in more ways than one, is admirable and incredible to me. After that we continued to grow in work on the project that will be finalized tomorrow, which was done with the help of the details given by the Legacy 3. The work was productive and for the most part had a very strong foundation for what it will look like tomorrow upon completion. The rest of the evening turned into a girl bonding session, which made for a very relaxing and entertaining evening. I hope that this bonding will allow us to work stronger on our teams but also as a branch out team in the completion of the project through these new found relationships and strengthened passion for the subject at hand. I await the experiences of tomorrow and what it might bring, hopefully with a completed project, positively impacted lives, and overall successful Branch Out Trip witht the Lemon Project.

Today was day 3 of our collaboration with the Lemon Project, and I find myself filled with a newfound sense of pride in our institution and the people within it. Although I had few preconceptions of the Lemon Project as an organization before this weekend, I never expected it to be powered by such passionate, respectful, and compassionate people who truly believe in the College of William & Mary. Everything we have done on this trip works toward acknowledging the wrongs of the school and rectifying them, and we seek to do it with loving and respectful intentions. This was incredibly powerful for me to realize and witness, and has altered the way I look at our school’s relationship with race and gender.

After interviewing the Legacy 3, one thing became (paradoxically) clear: things have changed, and things are very much the same. At first, it was surprising to me that these women seemed hesitant to speak poorly of the school. I expected stories of racism, prejudice, and adversity to abound. The reality did in fact feature some racial and gender discrimination, but these were not the central narrative. These issues were background noise, the static of these women’s lives, much as they are in the lives of women and minorities on campus today. The words “those were the times” were said often, and without judgment. Those were the times. That was how things were. Today, these are the times. This is how things are. We work to change them, but in the meantime we live, work, and learn. The injustices we bear, some more than others, hang on the outskirts of our personal narratives. They are not the main event, but an unseen presence felt looming just offstage.

The Legacy 3 spoke with eloquence and honesty. They made their pride in William & Mary very clear, even as they spoke critically about issues on campus during their time here. They wore their heart and their burdens on their sleeve, and their commitment to telling their story with integrity and grace moved me like not much else has. Listening to the Legacy 5 speak today has instilled in me a gratitude and love for William & Mary that I have not felt before. Their words make me proud of this school, and drive me to change it for the better during my time here. After this weekend I resolve to appreciate the College critically. My pride in our school and the belief that it can be better are not exclusive ideas, but one in the same.