The two things that are said perhaps most often about Janet Hill—that she is a lawyer and that she was Hillary Clinton’s roommate at Wellesley College, in the late sixties—are not true. “That legend was started by the sportscaster Dick Vitale, in 1991,” she said recently, of the Clinton story. Hill’s son Grant was then a star at Duke; he would become a star in the N.B.A. as well, and is now a basketball analyst for Turner Sports. “He focussed all the time on Calvin,” Hill continued, referring to her husband, a retired N.F.L. star. “Then, one day, his cameraman widened the shot—and there I was. Dick said, ‘Oh, my God, there’s Grant’s mother! She went to Wellesley with her roommate Hillary Clinton! She’s a lawyer in Washington, in the Bush Administration!’ The only correct part is: I’m Grant’s mom and I went to Wellesley. Hillary and I were just good friends there.”

Janet Hill has known Hillary Rodham Clinton since 1965, when they were freshmen at Wellesley. “She played a big role in encouraging me not to leave that first week of college,” Hill, who serves on the boards of Dean Foods, the Carlyle Group, and Duke University, said. “It was culture shock: being in an all-female, predominantly white environment. I grew up in segregated New Orleans, and suddenly I’m at Wellesley, with only five blacks in my class. But my mother told me I couldn’t come home, and Hillary told me I couldn’t leave school.”

Hill and the other four African-American women who graduated from Wellesley’s four-hundred-and-twenty-person class of 1969 remember Clinton, with whom many of them still communicate, fondly. (A sixth African-American student in the class transferred after her sophomore year, and has since passed away. There were also two black students from outside the United States.) “What I liked about her was that we did not seem to be novelties to her,” Nancy Gist, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., said recently. “There were a lot of white women at Wellesley who hadn’t really had much contact with black people, especially people like us. They didn’t quite know what to make of us. Hillary did not communicate any of that. I don’t know that she had spent time around black people, but for whatever reason she did not seem to be so mystified.”

“I remember us correcting each other’s art-history essays in her room,” Alvia Wardlaw, a leading expert on African-American art, who lives in Houston, recalled. “It was me, Hillary, and Lillian Miller. I remember I had used a phrase that Lillian tried to correct, and Hillary said, ‘No, that sounds good.’ She was a very approachable and positive classmate. That’s what I appreciated about her. She was very open. And you could hear that big laugh of hers all through the dining hall.” Freshmen were required to carry heavy trays of milk, water, and food to tables where students ate together, family-style. “It was some heavy lifting,” Wardlaw added. “But Hillary would joke about it being good exercise.”

In her memoir “Living History,” from 2003, Clinton acknowledges that, before Wellesley, “the only African-Americans I knew were the people my parents employed in my father’s business and in our home.” She went on, “I had not had a black friend, neighbor or classmate until I went to college. Karen Williamson, a lively, independent-minded student, became one of my first friends there.” Now a health-care consultant and, until last summer, the president of the Wellesley College Alumnae Association, Williamson remembers “clowning around in the dorm” and once attending a white church with Clinton. “She was somebody who was clearly smart,” Williamson said. “And, over the course of her years at Wellesley, she became more exceptional. But during our freshmen year she was just somebody who was a friendly, fun person.” Gist agreed: “She was and is warm, empathetic, and funny. The disconnect between that person and how she appears and is portrayed has always puzzled me.”

As has been widely reported, Clinton arrived at Wellesley College as a Republican “Goldwater girl,” influenced by her father’s conservative politics. She joined—and soon led—the school’s Young Republican chapter her freshman year. “I didn’t see her as a Goldwater girl, per se,” Francille Rusan Wilson, a professor in the departments of history and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, said. “She was a moderate person. As time went on, she wasn’t one of the more vociferous women’s-lib or anti-war women. She was not the leader of most campus protests, or the forward edge of radical change. But she was part of the consensus that helped bring things to a conclusion.”

At Wellesley, Clinton grappled with the many inequities she hadn’t particularly noticed during her suburban, middle-class upbringing in Park Ridge, Illinois—especially those faced by African-Americans. According to Hill, Gist, Wardlaw, Williamson, and Wilson, being black at Wellesley in the mid-sixties meant enduring both the awkward and even insulting obligations faced by other women—the mandatory wearing of skirts to dinner; tea on Wednesday afternoons; a class called Fundamentals of Movement, which taught, among other things, how to exit a car with your knees together—as well as a number of uniquely racial indignities.

“I remember a dean insulted us at a meeting by saying we were from underprivileged homes and we didn’t have any reading materials except comic books,” Wilson said. “In fact, almost all of us had at least one parent with an advanced degree. My father was a physician and my mother had a master’s degree in social work from Columbia. We had books.” She continued, “If a black student got sick, they were always asking you if you were pregnant. And the students could be very naïve, especially in the beginning—like, asking if you knew their maid. There was a certain kind of a heavy weight to being a black student then.”

Still, a scholastic and social atmosphere of “mostly mutual respect” reigned. Wardlaw called Wellesley “a kind of oasis” from the racial conflict and violence going on in the South. Ultimately, however, housing policy provided an impetus to organize in an effort to change the college’s status quo. Four of the African-Americans in Clinton’s class—including the woman who eventually transferred—roomed together as freshmen. A fifth, Gist, was given a single (which she had requested), while the sixth, Wilson, was placed with a Jewish student, whose parents had been briefed by phone beforehand to approve “the experiment.” Wilson’s parents were not given the same opportunity to O.K. the arrangement.

**“**We thought, Isn’t this unique that we happen to be roomed together? How could that be!” Williamson recalled. “And then we went to talk to Mrs. Tenney, the head of housing, and she said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll never do that again.’ So the following year, our sophomore year, there were eleven African-American students admitted, and every one of them was given a single, no matter if they wanted a roommate or not. Her solution to not rooming us together was to put us by ourselves! That issue was what really brought us together.” Wardlaw agreed: “We came here to be treated like any other student, and this felt like segregation.”

“I had white roommates the entire time that I was protesting, and it wasn’t really a big deal,” Wilson said. “We got along. We had just been fighting to not have assumptions made about where we wanted to be.”