Student Profiles

One of the most rewarding periods of my life was my Junior Year in Paris with the Smith group. I found that the knowledge of a foreign language, acquired by any student who is fortunate enough to study abroad, has an immeasurable and lasting effect on his life (Letter, JYA, November, 1961).

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, about whom Alice Kaplan provides interesting information, was a student in the Smith Junior Year Program, headed by Jeanne Saleil. She traveled to France on August 29, 1949 on the ocean liner SS De Grasse with Hedda Hopper and other students from Smith College and signed the Reid Hall student register on September 3, 1949. Bouvier returned to the U.S. on September 1950 on the ship SS Liberté, together with Hubert Beuve-Mery (who founded Le Monde), Jacques Fath (fashion designer), and Sadruddin Aga Khan. Her year in Paris  "[...] cemented her passion [for France], allowing her to absorb the country’s language and culture — and she would seek inspiration and intellectual refuge in these outlets for the rest of her life" (Mah).

During her stay in Paris, she resided with the De Renty family on Avenue Mozart (16th arrdt) and became good friends with their daughter Claude, who later went to study in the U.S.

Mme de Renty, who was part of the resistance Réseau Alliance, was sent to Ravensbruck and survived. However, the father, M. de Renty, was sent to and died in Dora. Jackie visited the camps near Munich, Germany, notably Dachau.

During her stay in Paris, she studied at Sciences Po. (with André Siegfried, Raymond Aaron, and J.J. Chevalier). She also studied at the Sorbonne and the Ecole du Louvre. She participated in several field trips organized by the program to, for example: The Gorges du Tarnes, the Pays Basque, Azay le Rideau, and other relevant sites in France. She also attended numerous theatre productions and lectures held at Reid Hall, and came to know the young Giscard D'Estaing, who attended a ball held at Reid Hall.

Sources

• Kaplan, Alice. "French Lessons: How Paris Changed Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis." The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 1, 2012. chronicle.com/article/french-lessons-how-paris-changed-jacqueline-bouvier-kennedy-susan-sontag-and-angela-davis/
• Mah, Ann. "A Year in Paris That Transformed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis." The New York Times," June 23, 2019. nytimes.com/2019/06/23/travel/paris-jacqueline-bouvier-kennedy-onassis-college.html A print version appeared in the The New York Time, June 30, 2919, section TR, p. 1 with the headline: "After She Had Seen Paris."

The following text was researched and written by: Megan Ruppel, student in the Master in History and Literature program (MaHili) at Reid Hall (2024 – 2025).

Angela Davis attended the Hamilton College Program at Reid Hall in 1963 – 1964, shortly before the property was donated by Helen Rogers Reid to Columbia University. As a French major from Brandeis University, she spent the junior year abroad expanding her intellectual and political horizons.

Born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama, she grew up attending segregated schools, and taught herself French out of a grammar book. She moved north on her own for high school at the Little Red School House, where she took French formally only in her last year, and encountered socialist thought for the first time. During those years, fanning out from her hometown, the sit-ins and Freedom Rides of the Civil Rights Movement were gaining steam. 

When she got to Brandeis University as a freshman in 1961, she was one of just three black students in her entering class, and it took time to find her place in the community, among the international students and older black graduate students. Outside lecturers like James Baldwin and Malcolm X, coming to campus, were also formative influences on her early college years. Brandeis was then a young institution, founded by and largely for the American Jewish community as an intellectual safe haven after the second World War, with the support of Jewish intellectuals like Albert Einstein and progressive leaders like Eleanor Roosevelt. After Davis’s time it became something of a countercultural epicenter, especially during the Vietnam War. Speaking in 2019, she also reflected that: 

I first learned about Palestine when I was a student here at Brandeis, since I came to this university in ‘61. And that was not very long after the founding of the state of Israel. I learned about what was happening and in the region when I was here, and I also learned about Palestine solidarity. I simultaneously learned about how important it was to challenge anti-semitism and to speak courageously against the continued perpetuation of anti-semitic ideas and practices, and at the same time to speak out for justice for Palestine (Brandeis University).

Inspired by the movement for global justice, the summer after her first year at Brandeis, Davis decided to travel with two college friends to Europe for an international Communist youth conference in Helsinki. It was her first time leaving the United States and, on the way, she stopped in Paris. That was in June 1962, just months after Algerian Independence, and racial tensions were at an all-time high. Davis noted strong parallels between the violent resistance to North Africans in Paris and that of the backlash to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The youth conference in Helsinki helped her deepen her thinking by analogy: with two weeks of cultural programs, political rallies, and seminars on decolonial movements around the world, it was an opportunity to mingle and make friends. There, Davis was exposed to information that was being censored in the United States, for example from Cubans, about Cuba. She began to see how her country was perceived from the outside.

She came back to Brandeis with clearer convictions and a sense of direction: “Meeting people from all over the world had taught me how important it was to be able to tear down the superficial barriers that separated us. Language was one of those barriers that could be removed easily. I decided to major in French” (Davis 107). With professors like Milton Hindus and Yves Bonnefoy, she took courses on Balzac, Flaubert, Rimbaud and Baudelaire; in her free time, she read everything Sartre had ever written. Ten years later during her trial defense in California, she would read citations from Proust and Camus (Kaplan 158); these writers and philosophers would continue to matter to her for decades to come. 

In the early 1960s, existentialism was a cutting edge, and Angela Davis was on it. With this momentum, she applied for the Hamilton-in-France program, and in September 1963 she arrived at Reid Hall (Davis 109). Here, she took a course on theatre, with weekly outings around the city, which still runs in the Hamilton program today. Then, at the Sorbonne, she took “one course on contemporary French novels, [...] one on poetry, and one on ideas” (Davis 114). Davis arrived ready to grasp the subtleties of avant-garde French writing because she arrived basically already fluent in French. Everyone who remembers her time at Reid Hall comments on her proficiency with the language, and it is a testament to her focus as a student considering she had only started studying it formally three years before. 

When she returned to Brandeis, she wrote a senior thesis on the experimental novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, who had not yet been translated into English; another of her classmates did the same, which suggests he was a hot-button topic at the time. But even though she was clearly engaged by her literature classes, as Davis recalls, writing the thesis was not much more than fulfilling a graduation requirement, because by then she had already turned her interest almost completely to philosophy. At the start of her senior year, she walked straight into the office of a prominent philosopher who was teaching at Brandeis, a man named Herbert Marcuse, and she asked if he could help her build a formal foundation in the discipline. Marcuse was a member of the Frankfurt School, a group of left-leaning philosophers that formed in Frankfurt between the world wars and scattered during the rise of the Third Reich. Marcuse had immigrated to America, and by the early 1960s was becoming a leading voice for the student countercultural movement. Davis first heard him speak on campus when she was a sophomore, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but only when she came back from Paris did she approach him to try to become his student. They designed an independent study together, a crash course in Western philosophy, beginning with the pre-Socratics and moving up to Emmanuel Kant. He also insisted she take his senior seminar on Kant, even though she wasn’t a philosophy major, and she describes this as the heaviest lift of her academic life. But she also forever describes that year as the most influential period of her education, and Marcuse as the most influential teacher by far:

He was able to put history and philosophy together in a context that allowed us to think about the future as history. He was an incredible reader of texts and the way he engaged with those texts made a connection between possibilities in the real social world. Watching him made it apparent to me that there didn’t have to be a contradiction between academic research and social activism (University of Virginia). 

Marcuse, in turn, called her “the best student I ever had” (qtd. in Aronson 101).

After graduating from Brandeis in 1965, on Marcuse’s advice, Davis decided to go back to Europe to study directly with the re-formed Frankfurt School, and its leading figure Theodor Adorno. While there, she also got involved with the SDS, or Socialist German Students Union, led by Rudi Dutschke in Berlin, and Hans-Jürgen Krahl in Frankfurt. Despite these connections, at each stage of her academic life it is clear Davis struggled with the loneliness of cultural and racial isolation. Upon arriving at Reid Hall, for example, where she was the only black student abroad that year, she describes experiencing strong “feelings of disorientation” right away, during what were meant to be the orientation weeks of the program (Davis 110). The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, which occurred on September 15, 1963 – just days after her arrival, and in her hometown of Birmingham – was a devastating event (Kaplan 172). Of the four girls killed in that church, Davis personally knew three. Few of the other Americans in the Reid Hall program could connect to her overwhelming grief and anger. Likewise, her move to Frankfurt coincided with the 1965 summer of race riots in Watts, Los Angeles, against which the Johnson administration deployed 14,000 members of the National Guard (Davis 119). Black Americans were essentially fighting back, just like the West German students, against what they saw as an enemy occupation. 

As the Black Power movement began to take off, Davis decided to leave behind her graduate studies in Frankfurt and return to the United States in 1967. She followed her old teacher, Marcuse, to southern California, where he had taken a teaching position at the University of California, San Diego. On the way there, during a stopover in London, he introduced her to Stokely Carmichael (Davis 129). From there she was off. By the end of the 1960s she had gotten heavily involved with the Black Panther Party, the Communist Party USA, and the anti-prison organizing around the cause of the Soledad brothers – three black California prisoners who were accused of killing a prison guard after that guard had shot another unarmed prisoner. Later, her involvement with the Soledad brothers would land her in jail in 1970 and make her name a worldwide metonym for wrongful imprisonment.

The French connection held throughout. Just before her imprisonment, Jean Genet, the French poet, playwright, and former prisoner, whose plays Davis would have read in her theatre class at Reid Hall, came to California, and she served as his translator as he toured (Kaplan 174-175). Later, when she was in jail, he would go on French television to call for her release. He had been invited to California by the Black Panther Party, and he took back to Paris what he had seen of their organizing, especially around prison abolitionism. A year later, he would help his friend Michel Foucault to form the influential Groupe d’information sur les prisons, or GIP, which gave French prisoners a platform to speak for themselves to the public. The findings of that group formed the basis of Foucault’s groundbreaking 1975 book Surveiller et punir (Discipline and Punish).

Everywhere Davis studied, including at Reid Hall, she was driven by her “feelings of disorientation,” that sense of distance from her American peers, to orient herself elsewhere, around other priorities, other communities (Davis 110). In all the narratives of her life, international friendships are of the clearest importance. In Helsinki, in Frankfurt, and in Paris, she was able to observe strategies for collective action that were developing around the world and could be brought home to the United States. During the winter of her year in Paris in 1963, for example, she attended what she describes as a stadium-sized celebration of the Têt holiday for the North Vietnamese community (Davis 114). Her feelings of solidarity with the North Vietnamese, with Algerians, and her recognition of the parallels between their decolonial struggle and that of black Americans, drove forward her thinking. A profile of her in Ebony magazine, released while she was in jail in 1971, argues that “It was [in Paris], at 20, seeing, thinking, that she began achieving psychological distance from the kind of ‘educated Negro middle-class’ identity for which so much had fitted her” (114). From that psychological distance, from Paris, Davis re-found her identity as a member of the global movement for decolonization. “The struggle was a life-nerve,” she writes; it was “our only hope for survival” (Davis 125).

In the years since her release from jail, Davis has taught and traveled internationally for more than half a century. She has maintained her French throughout, drawing upon it whenever needed, and still reads in the language in her free time (Kaplan 184). It may be she has more of it today, at eighty-one years old, in semi-retirement and living in California with her partner Gina Dent. But as community members at Reid Hall can attest, she is still active in the prison abolition movement, mentoring the next generation of its leaders, including Paris-based activist Assa Traoré, who runs the Génération Leader initiative here at Reid Hall. Through connections like these, Davis’s relationship to Reid Hall finds new meaning more than sixty years later. But of course, it is in the nature of study abroad programs that one never knows exactly where they will lead in the future, and so the meaning of one’s time spent abroad is never closed or complete. Each new cohort of Reid Hall students has the opportunity to inherit Angela Davis’s legacy, and carry it on.

Works Cited

• Aronson, Ronald. “A Radical in Academe.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 9, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 93-124.

• “Explorations in Black Leadership.” University of Virginia, 2014. blackleadership.virginia.edu/transcript/davis-angela.

• Davis, Angela. Angela Davis: An Autobiography (Penguin, 2023).

• Kaplan, Alice. Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

• “Keynote by Angela Davis ‘65 with Julieanne Richardson ‘76.” Brandeis University, 2019. brandeis.edu/now/2019/february/video-transcripts/angela-davis.html.

• “The Radicalization of Angela Davis.” Ebony, July 1971.

In September 1953, two of Reid Hall's Board members offered a music scholarship for a year-long study stay at Reid Hall. Recipients were:

1953: Joan Webster, Mount Holyoke and Judith Yaeger, Radcliffe. Yaeger, who was active with the college music club and appeared as soloist in the Harvard-Radcliffe concert tour in Spring 1953, studied with Walter Gieseking. Webster studied with Marguerite Long, co-director of the Marguerite Long – Jacques Thibaud School. In her junior year, she had already studied piano in Florence, Italy. She played with the MIT-Mount Holyoke orchestra and a member of the choir and glee club. Concert with Nicole Haviland.

1954: Scholarship given to Gilda Hoffman, Radcliffe. She had attended Julliard’s preparatory division. Gave a piano recital on April 21, 1955. She had done numerous concerts and won many competitions, and was heard on music stations (WQXR, WNYC).

1956 – 1957: Anne Brainerd, Oberlin School of Music. She gave a piano recital at the end  of the year.

Ann Louise Brainerd was born July 2, 1934 in Holyoke, Massachusetts to Robert and Marian (Britton) Brainerd and raised in South Hadley where she showed early prowess as a pianist. Ann attended the prestigious Oberlin School of Music, after which she traveled to Paris on a one year scholarship. She spent a year there performing and studying, and worked as rehearsal pianist for the famous flutist, Jean-Pierre Rampal. When she returned to the United States she received her Master's Degree from the University of Illinois - Champaign, where she met a handsome fellow pianist named Robert Nadeau. The two married and ultimately headed the piano department in the school of music at Mankato State University. Ann also taught piano at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, MN. Ann went on to receive her Doctorate from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Ann was a gifted teacher and performer, often bringing her audiences to tears with her soulful performances of Bach, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, and especially Chopin (mankatomortuary.com/obituary).

1957 – 1958: Elizabeth Kalkhurst, Radcliffe, mezzo-soprano. She presented a program of songs in May. Elizabeth was a Magna cum laude graduate from Harvard in 1956. She sang in New York, Paris, and London, and was the producer of educational films and advertisements, and copy review chief at Time Warner in the 1980s and 1990s.

1958 – 1959: Frances, "Tanny" McDonald, Vassar College.

Irene was born March 10, 1934, in Princeton, Ind. From Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., she received both a bachelor of music degree with highest distinction and a master of music degree in piano performance. She was a Marston Fellow in Musicology at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. At the American School of Music and Fine Arts in Fonainbleau, France, she earned certificates in piano (Jean Casadesus) and in conducting (Nadia Boulanger). She performed in master classes for Rudolph Ganz, Artur Rubenstain, Robert Casadesus, Vronski and Babin. [errors in text]

She has taught choral music at several independent schools, including Fort Worth Country Day for 10 years. She served as pianist for the St. Francis Presbyterian Church in Fort Worth for eight years. Most of her professional life, however, has been devoted to private piano teaching. She has been president of the Fort Worth Piano Teachers Forum (1996-1998), Pre-College Music Teacher of the Year in 1995 and 2003, and president of the Fort Worth Music Teachers Association from 2001 to 2003. She was also the musical arranger for "Little Red Riding Hood," which was published by Pioneer Drama Service (legacy.com/us/obituaries)

1959 – 1960: Judith Kenigson, Vassar College '58, piano.

1960 – 1961: Judith Basch, violinist, Barnard  College '59; Karla Nelson, Oberlin School of Music, soprano. She gave a recital at Reid Hall.

1961 – 1962: Carol Garrett, Smith College. Admitted to the Conservatoire as a viola player. She gave a recital in May and stayed at Reid Hall a second year.

1962 – 1963: Susan Martula, Smith College, clarinet. She was part of the Smith-Amherst orchestra. Gave a concert at Reid Hall, May 14, 1963, clarinet, with piano and string instruments. She was an artist associate in clarinet at Williams College and also led the Williams Clarinet Choir. Earning her B.A. in Music from Smith College in 1962, she also took Paris classes with Delecluse and Boulanger. She received an M.A. Music from the  Manhattan School of Music 1964, and was the principal clarinetist of the Berkshire Symphony and the Albany Symphony, as well as a member of the Williams Chamber Players. She had extensive experience in performance and teaching of clarinet literature. Barbara Blanchard, soprano. Gave recitals at Reid Hall and continued their studies at the Fontainebleau school in the summer.

1963 – 1964: Joan Panetti, Smith College, pianist and composer and planning to study with Messiaen. She became professor of music at the Yale school of music and was an award-winning composer; she also founded the Yale summer music festival of chamber music and won the Nadia Boulanger award (NYT article 1987).