Article: Ideal role close to home

Ruth Ellen Fitch has traveled worlds beyond the Harrishof Street house in Roxbury where she grew up during the fifties and sixties.

Back then, being black could sting. On summer trips to visit her grandmother in Virginia, her family carefully planned stops at friends' houses along the route: They knew they wouldn't be welcome in the motels.

Fitch got used to being among the first, and the few: One of a handful of black students at Boston Girls' Latin School; One of just three black freshmen at Barnard College, where she was assigned to a rare single room.

"It got around the issue of who would be my roommate," she recalls, matter-of-factly.

None of this got in her way. Fitch graduated with a ...

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