Diane entered Muhlenberg’s EOP better prepared academically than some other EOP participants. The only Black New York Catholic school, which her mother had struggled to send her to, prepared Diane to be a tutor and a leader for her fellow Black students.
This yearning to teach others, to help fellow Black students succeed, became part of her legacy. Like other Blacks students, she understood how white students would judge a Black student for lacking knowledge around a certain topic, and assume that’s how all Black people were. She knew there would be much generalization of the Black community amongst the white students, so she felt it was her duty to prepare her classmates for what was to come. According to one of her long-time classmates and friends, Sally Barbour, “[S]he was a teacher, a teacher at heart, I would say, and a writer.”