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Interview: Barbara Jacobs Haber
Like many white activist students across the country, Barbara Jacobs Haber began her civil rights activism through the sit-in movement. After dropping out of graduate school at Brandeis, she returned to Baltimore and lived with her parents, working as a social worker, and being involved in Baltimore Congress of Racial Equality. She recalls going to desegregated bars or restaurants in mixed groups: I was a very macho sort of young woman-and in some ways-stupid. I just liked to go into these restaurants and bars and to be at the front, you know, in their face. Well, there were some good reasons for me not to be in the front and in their face, especially in a mixed group, because the idea of a white woman with Black men could be quite enraging and would endanger the Black men. Barbara Haber, then a student at Brandeis, attended the founding convention of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Shaw University, April 15-17, 1960. It was "an absolutely mindblowing experience… being surrounded by people my own age, including Black students, and talking, talking, talking and singing, singing, singing." Barbara and her classmates were put up in Black homes where the "people treated us so wonderfully." She was thrilled by the courage of the elders and the students and "the whole enterprise. I just wanted to be a part of it."
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