BY KAREN BOSSICK

Drew Gilpin Faust was 9 when Sen. Harry Byrd’s resistance to school desegregation in Virginia lit an activist’s fire within her.

“I had an epiphany in the aftermath of Brown v. Brown as I saw the effort by the white power structure in Virginia to resist integrating schools,” she said. “I realized then that my school was all white on purpose—not by accident. And that was shocking to me as it seemed very unjust and against the principles taught in Sunday School in our local Episcopal Church. And it seemed at odds with what I’d been taught in school about the Declaration of Independence and how everyone’s created equal and so on and so forth.”

Faust wrote a passionate letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower on her lined, three-holed notebook paper, urging that schools be integrated.

“If I painted my face black, I wouldn’t be let in any public schools, etc.,” she wrote emphatically in block letters to make sure Eisenhower could read them. Segregation was not Christian, she added, stating that Jesus Christ was born to save not only white people but black, yellow, red and brown. “Colored people aren’t given a chance…”

That foray into social activism would not be Faust’s last. She fought for civil rights in 1960s and ‘70s and championed diversity in college admissions as president of Harvard University. She is currently speaking out against the recent Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action, noting that there are far fewer African-American students in the universities where affirmative action has been prohibited.

And she wrote the New York Times bestselling memoir “Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Mid-Century”  to educate younger generations about an age that she says we don’t want to return to.

“I want people to know what the ‘50s were like and what that world was like. There’s a tremendous amount of nostalgia for it, but it was so restrictive and so unequal and so constrained for women and others. Things have changed, but they haven’t changed enough. Things changed because people struggled to build a fairer and better world. And that’s what we have to do now--not lose hope but reinforce our commitment to not going back to that era.”

Faust will discuss her book at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, which runs Saturday through Monday, July 20-22 at Sun Valley Resort. She is among a myriad of notable speakers, including Judy Blume, Evan Osnos and Justice Stephen Breyer.

“I was thinking how memories of the 1950s and ‘60s are disappearing as people of my generation pass from the scene and how younger people don’t understand what that that time was like,” said Faust, who was Harvard University’s first female president from 2007 to 2018. “I wanted to give a portrait of how really repressive the ‘50s were and also a portrait of some of the important changes that the 1960s were able to bring about. Having been a historian all my life and listening to other people’s voices, I decided I wanted to be one of those voices telling the story, not just simply the transmitter of it or the recorder of it.”

Faust’s book paints a picture of a day when the women at her college were required to wear skirts not only in the classroom but when they left campus. Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown and Columbia universities did not enroll women. And her mother urged her not to attach too much significance to scholarships because of the glass ceiling.

Faust describes her upbringing as a Southern Belle in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in the 1950s where her grandmother sang confederate rebel songs and Confederate battlefields were considered holy ground.

“My mother told me it was a man’s world and I needed to get used to that and that included things like wearing little lacy clothing that I detested and refused to wear. It also included never expecting to have a professional life, imagining my future as a wife and mother and nothing else,” she said.

Faust’s rebellion against lacy underwear led to a crusade for women’s rights and racial justice. She authored seven books, including “The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Recognized by the New York Times as one of the Ten Best Books of 2008, it provided the foundation for a 2012 Emmy-nominated episode of PBS “American Experience” titled “Death and the Civil War.”

Faust says she worries a great deal about the reversal of important rights achieved during the 1960s that she thought were permanent.

“Overturning Roe v. Wade was a blow to women’s autonomy and women’s power. And then there’s the reversal of the Voting Rights Act that have come in a number of decisions of the Supreme Court, eviscerating essential parts of voting rights. You can see the organized effort in the judicial area to push back against the changes I thought were so important in the 1960s, to push back against enormous diversity of American society and return to an earlier time

“It’s been very effective partly because we haven’t been rigorous enough in confronting and preventing what’s unfolded,” she added. “There’s also a kind of new permission to say racist things and to hate in the United States today, and I worry about that. And there is a lot of evidence that schools have resegregated because there’s not ongoing effort to support integration in schools.”

Reminding people of what has come before, as her book tries to do, is one way to combat a step backwards into uncomfortable things of the past, said Faust. She cringes when she hears of efforts by states to revise black history education that teach everything has been great for four centuries.

“Slavery was not great—it was oppressive and cruel. We need to combat the efforts forcing teaching only history that makes people comfortable. As a historian, I find that most disturbing because history is how we understand the present and it’s how we understand our obligations to the future. And it needs to be taught in a rigorous and honest way--not as a series of obfuscations and misrepresentations.”

The United States needs learning that makes students uncomfortable as they expand their understanding of the world around them, Faust said.

“Have the courage to be disturbed, to really ask yourself questions,” she said. “That’s what education should do.”