Editor’s note: In celebration of Joseph Vaughn Day at Furman University, we are recognizing the experiences of other Black alumni who enrolled soon after the university integrated in 1965.

 

Someone had called security.

The reason for the concern? A teenage girl had shown up with her mother, her voice teacher, high school principal, and a member of the Black fraternity Omega Psi Phi. The group had come to support the girl in her crucial moment – her voice audition before Furman’s music faculty.

The teen’s name was Sarah Reese, and she had an appointment to be there. But no one was expecting a Black student.

“Furman had no idea who was coming to dinner,” said Reese, who grew up in rural Pelzer, South Carolina, and graduated from Furman in 1971.

“Here was this little brown girl who had no idea of the magnitude of this. It means even more to me now than it did then that people had fought for me to have an audition.”

Reese would become a world-famous opera singer, making her New York debut in 1981, and performing with some of the world’s most famous orchestras and conductors, becoming the principal artist with the New York Metropolitan Opera and artist-in-residence at the Opera Company of Boston.

But first, Reese, in the course of earning her music degree, would do the solitary, heavy work of forging racial progress in Greenville, South Carolina.

‘Some kind of lonely’

Reese was one of Furman’s first Black students, her time