Max Goldberg
Iowa State University rally showing solidarity with students protesting racism at University of Missouri, and calling for reform from the college administration.
An important chapter of America’s reckoning with its racist history is playing out on college campuses. Whether it is pressure from student protests or findings by internal research committees, university officials are having to decide how to acknowledge or distance themselves from racist pasts.
One of the latest institutions to unearth troubling history is the University of Wisconsin-Madison. On April 19, the university released a report by a research group formed in 2017 by Chancellor Rebecca Black after three people were killed at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The report notes that several campus spaces are named for alumni who were members of the campus chapter of the KKK in the 1920s. It describes a past that included such “routine” acts as white students participating in “blackface” and the yearbook featuring anti-semitic drawings.
Blank has said the school would consider renaming the campus spaces. She also announced that the university will create a $1 million history exhibit recognizing those who fought prejudice on campus, and hire four new faculty members in departments focused on minority groups.
Two students mentioned in the report—Porter Butts and Fredric March—would later go on to attack bigotry in their careers. Butts became president of the student union and prohibited segregated groups from using the space. March defended people targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s.
More troubling, Blank said, was the research committee’s inability to find evidence that university administrators, faculty, or student leaders did anything to resist the KKK’s presence on campus. “Exclusion does not seem to have been contrary to campus values in this era,” the committee concluded.
Other universities have had similar reckonings.
In 2006, Brown University released the findings of a three-year-long study of the school’s connection with the transatlantic slave trade. The research group—made up of faculty, students and administrators—found that about thirty of Brown’s first administrators owned slaves or had cargo ships involved in the trade, including the family who is the school’s namesake. Much of the money used to found the university came from the slave economy. In response, Brown commissioned a public sculpture and plaque detailing slavery’s role in its history.
Rutgers University did similar research in its Scarlet and Black project, which included discovering activist Sojourner Truth and her parents were owned by the university’s first president.
Georgetown University has taken steps to reconcile the history of its Jesuit priest administrators selling 272 slaves in 1838 to pay off debts. The university announced last year that descendants of the slaves would receive preferential treatment on applications and renamed a student residence Isaac Hawkins Hall, after one of the slaves owned by the school.
William Laurence Saunders, chief organizer of the North Carolina Klan.
At the College of William & Mary in Virginia, the Lemon Project researches the role of slavery in the school’s history. The project is named after Lemon, a slave owned by the college in the early 19th century. The project began in 2009 and engages the campus and surrounding communities on issues of race.
Further south, the University of North Carolina renamed an academic building in 2016 following protests going as far back as the 1970s. The renamed Carolina Hall replaced Saunders Hall, which was named after the state’s Ku Klux Klan leader Williams Saunders.
Many of the steps taken by institutions of higher learning to acknowledge past racism are modest in scale and scope.
In 2016, Harvard University announced that student dormitory leaders would be called “faculty deans” rather than “house masters,” a title loaded with connotations of slavery. The school already faced a troubled history of administrators and faculty promoting eugenics. Former Harvard presidents include Charles William Eliot, a eugenics advocate in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He believed “each nation should keep its stock pure” and that blending of races would lead to “moral degeneracy.” Today, students can still live on campus at Eliot House.
Princeton University decided to keep U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s name on its school of public and international affairs, despite protests over Wilson’s support for racial segregation. Wilson, who also served as Princeton’s president from 1902 to 1910, allowed Jim Crow laws to be passed, and segregated federal offices. The school did say it would expand efforts to diversify campus.
Many of the steps taken by institutions of higher learning to acknowledge past racism are modest in scale and scope.
The University of Mississippi placed a plaque to offer historical context near a stained glass memorial for students who fought in the Confederate Army. After public criticism about the move not going far enough, the university placed more plaques around campus and joined a group of universities studying slavery, which include Brown, William & Mary, Georgetown, and North Carolina.
Not all of the campus protests have focused solely on history. Students at the University of Missouri staged months of protests in 2015 about racism on campus, drawing examples from recent events. In the years leading up to the protests, cotton balls were placed outside the school’s Black Culture Center, and people yelled racial slurs at the student government president. The protests ended with the resignations of the university system president and chancellor of the Columbia campus.
While welcoming these efforts to reconcile and rectify racism, activists say schools can do more to promote racial equality. Black and Latinx students are less represented on elite campuses today than thirty-five years ago, according to The New York Times.
Meanwhile, universities continue to struggle with nonwhite students not feeling welcome on campus. Students have come forward again and again and again to say they feel targeted and disrespected at school. The white nationalist march at the University of Virginia in 2017 brought national attention to a problem long experienced on campuses. In a 2016 survey of black and African-American students at Northwestern University, more than half said they had seen or experienced harassment on campus. Nearly 40 percent reported having been threatened because of their race.
Universities will continue to reconcile their histories as more information comes to light about those who higher education has marginalized and profited from decades ago. Given recent history, it appears this is not a matter of whether long-standing institutions of education will need to face these tough questions, but when.
Wyatt Massey is a Wisconsin freelance journalist covering human rights and social justice.