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A 1960s Trip to Switzerland Changed My Mother's Life—So We Went Back, Together

Condé Nast Traveler·Shayla Martin·about 2 months ago
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Writer Shayla Martin joins her mother to retrace a long-forgotten summer in Europe. Helen Cathcart/Shayla Martin In 2018, my mother and I were watching Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities while I curled her hair. I knew she had attended Southern University, an HBCU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. But as the memories bubbled up, she mentioned how she’d spent the summer after her freshman year in Switzerland . I paused with the curling iron in my hand. How in the world had my mother, a young Black woman and the eldest of four, raised by two parents who had never finished high school in a segregated town in southwestern Louisiana, spent a summer in Europe in the 1960s? In the 1960's, the writers' mother spent a formative summer in Switzerland. Getty “We traveled around Switzerland for two months and the trip changed the course of my life,” my mom said, nostalgia in her voice.…

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