Read two contemporary accounts of the Bates student exchange at historically black Florida Memorial College in St. Augustine, Fla., 1965. (Now named Florida Memorial University, the college is now located in Miami Gardens.)

The stories, published in The Bates Student of  March 17, 1965, hint at life for black students in a mid-1960s Jim Crow–era Florida town.

One 1965 account was written by Bates Magazine letter-writer Susan H. Smith Copley ’65 and the other was written by Paul Hardy ’67, who describes male students sleeping with “shotguns at their bedsides and forty-fives in their dresser drawers.”