Jeannine Osayande was born in Swarthmore in 1960 to Betty Ann (née Coleman) and Donald Lee. Her mother taught at Nether Providence Elementary School, and her father was Swarthmore’s first Black policeman. In time, he would become the town’s chief of police. Little Jeannine and her two older sisters, Annette and Donna, lived with their parents in the Historically Black Neighborhood of Swarthmore, in the same house Osayande lives in now. Growing up, she was surrounded by family, and by neighbors who were family, too. Osayande likes to tell the story of how African dance found her on a street corner in Harvard Square. “The drums were playing, and a dancer suddenly pushed me into the circle,” she recalls. “And I knew what I wanted to do with my life.”