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Jackson, increasingly concerned over the quality of Juanita's education, first
attempted to enroll her at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she was
rebuffed. Finally, Lillie Jackson arranged a transfer for Juanita to the University of
Pennsylvania. Like her sister Virginia, Juanita boarded with relatives.14
Philadelphia provided eye-opening experiences to both sisters. Juanita
Jackson Mitchell recently referred to their years there as "our years abroad," then
caught herself and explained, "well, it almost was like abroad from Maryland."
Although she recalled that she got a superior education at the University of
Pennsylvania, her basic values were consolidated at Morgan. Particularly valuable
to her at Morgan was chapel held every Thursday. Everybody was required to
attend chapel, where religious leaders from all over the world told of their faith,
their works, and the world beyond Baltimore. However, attending the University of
Pennsylvania decisively changed Juanita Jackson's life. As she put it in an
interview:
But the most important thing was when I went up there, I was afraid of white
people. I mean, I felt uncomfortable until I went to the University of
Pennsylvania in the day to day contact-
Interviewer: Because you hadn't had very much contact?
Mitchell: No, not here [in Baltimore]. Everything I had been in interracially
was formal. You didn't make friends. But there I began to make friends
among white students and began to be treated like— In Baltimore, you
know, there was always- you waited for a rebuff: "Niggers can't.." "We
don't take niggers here," or "Are you colored?" and "You know our policy is
so forth and so on." Oh, that's all you got here. But up there it was
different. The main thing is I made friends among white students and
learned and competed with the best. And I was a high ranking scholar up
there. I could compete. They might say I was inferior, but I knew I was
equal. And that developed a confidence which was to last me all my life,
from the inside.
In Philadelphia, she could go to restaurants, stores, concerts, plays, and museums
without care; she couldn't remember a similar institution or facility that wasn't
either segregated or discriminatory toward Blacks in Baltimore.
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