Rice reckons with segregationist history
University task force to dig into ties with ‘terrible part’ of American past
It’s no secret that Rice University has a complicated history. The founder, William Marsh Rice, a Massachusetts businessman and a slave owner who spent time in Texas,
chartered the university, formerly known as the Rice Institute, with a hefty endowment in 1891 strictly for “the white inhabitants of the City of Houston, and State of Texas.” The school, intended to be tuition-free, didn’t admit black undergraduates until 1965, and a recent dive into university yearbooks showed that the university had, albeit briefly, a student chapter of the Ku Klux Klan and had social gatherings with blackface at least until the 1980s.
The university has since evolved, but that doesn’t excuse its history, and Rice isn’t shying away from it. This fall, the university will look to address its controversial history head on with the community’s help.
A “Task Force on Slavery, Segre
gation and Racial Injustice” will launch in the fall and explore the private university’s controversial history in relation to slavery and racial injustice with the hope of sparking dialogue on campus and offering a better understanding of its past.
“Although Rice University was founded nearly 50 years after the abolition of slavery, Rice has some historical connections to that terrible part of American history and the segregation and racial disparities that resulted directly from it,” Rice President David W. Leebron said announcing the initiative in a memo addressed to the university community June 4. “As a university, it is part of our obligation to understand our history, and its connection to our present, as best we can.”
In the letter, Leebron wrote that the initiative will help develop and implement a plan for further exploring, documenting and disseminating Rice’s past in relation to slave history and racial injustice and how that affects the community in the present day. The university has also called on the task force to “identify suggestions for Rice’s future” that will help the college “more fully realize our aspirations for a diverse and inclusive university.” In addition, the task force will help create campuswide programming that will create honest dialogue, with the help of academics and appointed speakers, according to a letter.
“Given our aspirations as a university, which is to be the best engine of opportunity to all segments of society, it’s critical that we understand our history and the history of our country and the obstacles people still face to achieving full equality,” Leebron told the Houston Chronicle.
“That’s what a university should do,” Leebron said.
Officials have already asked the Rice community for input via email, but explained that more active work will be done starting in the fall semester, which will include assembling task force members, predominantly faculty but also representatives of student, staff and alumni, Leebron said.
Experts in history and other disciplines who can contribute to an understanding of race, both in the past and present, will also be considered, Leebron said.
The catalyst
Talks of a task force at Rice came after several universities around the country, including the University of Virginia and the Eastern Virginia Medical School, were faced with the racist images in their own yearbooks that went viral on the internet.
Similar images surfaced in Rice’s yearbooks and in issues of its student newspaper, the Rice Thresher, Leebron said.
Perusing past yearbooks, Rice student Charlie Paul found photos of students performing in blackface, a photo of an African American student captioned as the N-word and a photo from 1922 of “The Ku Klux Klan of Rice Institute” that showed about 20 people, faces hidden, in white robes and hoods. Most of the offensive images were published prior to Rice’s admission of the first black students , and the university’s KKK chapter was gone the next year, according to Rice historian Melissa Kean.
Still, it was a reminder of aspects of Rice’s history, and “that sparked a desire for more honest conversation and engagements on race,” Leebron said.
But Kean, author of “Desegregating Private Higher Education in the South: Duke, Emory, Rice, Tulane, and Vanderbilt,” said context for these images is important — which is where the task force will come in.
“It’s not good enough to just point your finger and say, ‘That was terrible.’ Let’s grant that: It was terrible,” Kean said, adding that it’s important to understand the time period Rice was in.
“We can’t just condemn it,” she said. “We must condemn it, but we must strive to make sense of it.”
Most Southern private universities such as Rice were aiming to become nationally renowned institutions and had similar stances on segregation, Kean said. But Rice’s charter, specific in its stance on segregation, was unique, she said, in that it was enforced after the Civil War, when most other institutions, with pre-war roots, were grappling with a new climate .
Houston’s stance on race was also very “black or white,” according to Kean. Those who weren’t black — including Asian and Hispanic people, especially children of diplomats or the elite — were classified as white and allowed to attend Rice in its early years, Kean said.
And despite civil rights becoming a national issue, Rice officials seemed to drag their feet in desegregating the campus, sticking steadfastly to the charter, and falling behind other state universities, including the University of Texas.
Many Rice faculty and students weren’t in agreement. Rice’s student newspaper, the Thresher, often vocalized students’ thoughts on the need for segregation, which would draw more local and national publicity and attention to the university than officials would have liked, according to Kean’s book.
In a 1953 poll of almost half the Rice student body, nearly 52 supported the admission of “properly qualified Negroes,” Kean wrote. In a 1957 poll of 522 students conducted by the Thresher, more than 61 percent favored desegregation at Rice. The editorial board had little faith in Rice’s administration, stating that though the university should have been the first to integrate, it’d likely be among the last.
“Rice has made no efforts toward desegregation and probably will not for some time,” the editorial board wrote that year, according Kean. “Yet we can not help but hope that the force of student opinion will soon influence the Rice Institute, and that steps will be taken to admit Negroes.”
Debates on segregation waxed and waned on campus from 1948 through the 1950s, but more pressure was put on by grant-making institutions, Rice’s partners, including NASA, and scholars, who adapted nondiscrimination rules and desegregation policies. Had Rice continued with the charter, “we would have been cut off from everyone,” Kean said.
In February 1964, the case came to trial in the Texas state district court, where presidents of Southern Methodist University, UT, Texas Christian University, Trinity University, the University of St. Thomas and the American Council on Education testified “that foundations would no longer contribute to the few segregated institutions that remained,” and that federal funding for research, training and facilities would be cut off, Kean wrote. The jury voted unanimously that William Marsh Rice’s intentions were to create an “outstanding university through his gift” and segregation would make such a goal impossible, Kean wrote.
The legal battle continued until 1967, but Rice began to admit its first black students. Raymond L. Johnson became a research associate in 1963 and was later admitted into Rice’s graduate program in mathematics. The school accepted its first black undergraduates in 1965.
“Times changed,” Kean said. “And they continue to change.”
Following suit
Leebron said Rice has been looking to other universities for examples as to how they have been similarly reconciling with their past, such as Georgetown University, where students recently voted for a tuition increase to pay reparations to the descendants of slaves who were sold to pay off the school’s debts, and Cambridge University in England, which announced earlier this year that it would conduct an “in-depth academic study into ways in which it contributed to, benefited from or challenged the Atlantic slave trade and other forms of coerced labor during the Colonial era.”
“Certainly we thought that was an appropriate thing for Rice to do as well,” Leebron said. “Universities have a special responsibility to understand their own history.”
The creation of such a task force also seemed particularly relevant because race still remains an important issue for most Americans, Leebron added.
A 2019 Pew Research Center report revealed that more than half of the 6,637 U.S. adults surveyed said that race relations are bad in the country. Few of those people see them improving, and black people were particularly dismayed, according to the survey. More than 8 in 10 said the legacy of slavery still affects their position within the United States, and more than 70 percent said the country hasn’t done enough to give black people equal rights.
‘Important beginning’
Despite the sobering statistics of people’s thoughts on race in America, Leebron said that the community has seemed hopeful about Rice’s task force. The university has already received a number of positive responses.
U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Houston Democrat who filed a bill proposing reparations for African Americans earlier this year, said Rice’s decision to confront its segregationist history is a “sign of courage and a commitment to building a community that values the rainbow of individuals who make up 21st century America.”
“Sanctioning discriminatory conduct is not a trend. It is the legal responsibility of any university,” Jackson Lee said in a written statement, adding that “without reflection on the university’s history, and a serious effort at atonement, one can never be completely sure that an institution — or nation — has fully recovered from the sins of its past.”
“It is never too late to pursue restorative justice,” Jackson Lee said. “The task force is an important beginning and I hope that concrete objectives emerge from the process.”
The university community has been just as supportive.
“From a graduate student perspective, we are optimistic about the task force and believe in its cause,” Dani Perdue, president of the Rice Black Graduate Student Association, said in a statement. “We look forward to standing behind an actionable plan that will reduce discrimination and unite our community.”
Donald Bowers, a 1991 graduate of Rice and an active alumnus, said his experience as a black student at Rice in the late 1980s was different than that of the first black students who were admitted in the mid-1960s. The university and the country’s climate has progressed, but the task force offers an opportunity to make sure certain histories are not repeated and “we can set our students up for a better tomorrow,” he said.
Bowers, who hopes to be on the task force, has sought to make the university experience for all students more enjoyable by engaging in initiatives for students of color, including Rice’s minority scholarships fund, and helping organize the 50th anniversary for Rice’s black students in 2016 — the university’s second celebration that invited the community to reflect on how far it had come with events and on-campus discussions with community leaders and black alumni.
The task force, Bowers said, will likely deepen the existing initiatives at Rice and open up a dialogue that he’s not confident would have happened on campus 30 years ago.
“I think it’s coming at a time that we as a university have digested quite a bit already, and we’re recognizing who we’ve been, who we are and who we want to be,” Bowers said.
Kean, who has worked at Rice for the past three decades, agreed that the time is now.
“We don’t have another 30 years to get this squared away,” Kean said. “It’s going to take a lot of effort, and I think the institutional commitment is there, which is extremely heartening to me.”
It’s a step in the right direction, Bowers said, but he and Leebron both agree — “there’s always more work to be done.”