The "Belles" are Back: The “Bennett Belle.” The words conjure an image that is genteel, old-fashioned — hats and gloves, brown-skinned women in flowing white dresses beaming as they take that final walk to graduation. The Bennett College for Women campus certainly reinforces the image, with its broad, tree-shaded lawns and quadrangle and its historic buildings — fully 15 of the 29 total have National Register status, from the majestic Annie Merner Pfeiffer Chapel to the Carnegie Negro Library facing busy East Washington Street.But the pleasant paradox of Bennett College is the way in which old and new are meeting there in such intriguing ways – in, for example, the poised personage of Mesha White, student government president and campus ambassador. “We say at Bennett that you come here to meet the woman you’re going to become,” White says, as she guides a visitor across the Greensboro, N.C., campus on a brisk, sunny late winter morning.
White has all the grace and poise one would expect of a “Belle,” but she’s also a global citizen, speaking with passion about her semester in Ghana, her interests in business and communications, her hopes of getting into Columbia University’s international studies program — or perhaps a job in Washington, D.C. — next year.
