Text from the 2002 Arabella Carter Award Presentation by Elizabeth Probasco Kutchai '66:

The query which has been longest in continuous use by the Society of Friends is this: Are love and unity maintained amongst you? It dates from 1982 [Friends for 300 Years, Howard H. Brinton, p. 130]

Each year as we gather on Alumni Weekend, I am struck by the love and unity among us-- love for our college and unity of purpose. Though we attended Swarthmore during different decades and while here pursued different disciplines, we all emerged with a commitment to community, equality, and social justice; a sense that we have an obligation to try to make our world, or our small part of it, a better place.

It is this commitment that we recognize with the Arabella Carter Award. The award is named for a woman who attended Swarthmore in the 1880s and who then spent the rest of her life working quietly, as a volunteer, for peace and for racial and social justice. As the college website says, "She never sought publicity or recognition for her work."

Today we honor just such an alum, Paul M. Gaston, Class of 1952. Paul grew up in Fairhope, Alabama, in a utopian community founded by his grandfather. He graduated fifty years ago this week with High Honors in history. He was also Phi Beta Kappa, so it's no surprise that he became an academic historian, teaching at the University of Virginia from 1957 to 1997, when he retired.

In 1957 Charlottesville was a typical southern town, with an all-white university and segregation in its public schools and restaurants. Paul was not content merely to teach about social justice and hope for eventual change. He was one of a few brave white souls who joined with leaders of the black community to expose the injustice of segregation. Led by a group of black ministers, they engaged in Charlottesville's first sit-ins. On Memorial Day in 1963 Paul just happened to be in the right place at the right time--or the wrong place at the wrong time. He was "standing in" outside a restaurant when violence broke out and Paul took four punches to the face, from a 300-pound ex-prize-fighter. He and two black leaders who were also assaulted pressed charges against their assailants and won. It was the spectacle of two black ministers and a white college professor getting beaten up that helped to initiate real change in Charlottesville.

Since that time, Paul has continued to play an active role in the struggle for social justice, serving as an officer in the Virginia Council on Human Relations and in the NAACP in Charlottesville. In 1974, he was elected to the Southern Regional Council, the South's oldest civil rights information and advocacy group, serving as its president from 1984 to 1988.

Occasionally Paul gets recognition for his efforts; for example, he received the SRC's Life Fellow Award in 1998 for "over thirty years of service to the Southern Regional Council's mission of promoting racial justice, protecting democratic rights, and broadening civic participation in the southern United States." Most of the time, however, he just keeps plugging away, continuing to remind us that there are still things we need to do to make our society more humane. Just last February he injected social justice into the election for City Council in Charlottesville by bringing up the issue of a living wage for restaurant and hotel workers. Here is what he wrote:

"The Living Wage Movement has the potential to become the civil rights movement of the early 21st century. It raises fundamental questions of how we value not just work, but how we value human beings. Properly understood and advanced, it could bring us to a better understanding of our society and a more fulfilling life for all of our citizens. It could go a long way toward providing the material base to make possible the realization of the goals of a democratic society."

In short, Paul just never lets up. Like Arabella Carter, he has never sought recognition for his efforts to make his community a better place. I hope all of you will join me today in saying, on the occasion of his fiftieth reunion, "Thank you, Paul, for steadfastly acting on the beliefs and values that we all hold dear."

Alumni Council Arabella Carter Award:

In 1995, the Swarthmore Alumni Council began considering how to reinforce the Quaker ethic of community service that Swarthmore has always implicitly encouraged in its students and alumni. After two years of discussions, the Council decided to put greater emphasis on continuing community service as a value of Swarthmore alumni and decided to create an annual alumni award for community service.

The Council asked a committee to work with the Friends Historical Library to find a suitable alumnus or alumna whose life displayed a deep seated commitment to community service, especially quiet and unpaid service, in the hope that this alumnus/alumna's life of service might characterize this Swarthmore value and serve as an inspiration for our alumni.

The Arabella Carter Award, established in 1997, honors alumni who have made significant contributions as volunteers in their own community or on a regional or national level. The Alumni Council intends that this award be given annually to one (or more) alumni/alumnae whose lives exemplify the value of community service, with the expectation that the service would be voluntary, rather than paid.

When the award was established, the Council hoped to find alumni whose lifetime of service was unsung and relatively unknown, hunting for the quiet, dedicated soul much like Arabella Carter. Such alumni will be hard to find; however the Council was confident that many such alumni live such lives of dedicated service.

The Arabella Carter Award is named for one of the great unsung workers for peace and social justice in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Arabella was a member of Byberry Meeting in Bucks County and was active until her death at Friends' Home in Norristown on March 12, 1932. She never married. Arabella Carter attended the preparatory division of Swarthmore College from 1884 to 1886. (The preparatory division closed when George School opened in 1893.)

She became the first Peace Superintendent of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Hicksite) when the Peace Section was formed in 1892, and remained its secretary until shortly before her death. (Another Swarthmorean, Jesse Holmes, was the first chairman of the Peace Section.) Arabella Carter was Secretary of the Committee on Social Service of the Friends' General Conference as well. She was also secretary of the Pennsylvania Peace Society for over thirty years, and she was active is distributing peace literature to the graduates of Pennsylvania State Normal Schools.

She was also involved in African American rights, following the tradition of may activist Quaker women of the mid and late-19th century. She was a member of the Total Abolition Society and secretary of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society from 1915 to 1932. Arabella was a member of the Committee for the Laing School in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, and other committees promoting African American welfare.

She never sought publicity or recognition for her work and is now forgotten by all but our archivists, who see her hand in Quaker peace and social justice work over three decades. All this service appears to have been unpaid, and she lived simply on family money.