Rice University reckoning with own history of racism
Student tweets about finding slurs, blackface, KKK in past yearbooks
In the wake of the blackface scandals now roiling Virginia, Rice University student Charlie Paul wondered what he might find if he looked at his own university’s yearbooks. Last Wednesday, as he made his way through yearbooks starting in 1919, he began tweeting his finds: racist cartoons, photos of students performing in blackface, an otherwise flattering photo of an AfricanAmerican captioned with the n-word.
Maybe most shocking to modern eyes was a photo from 1922: “The Ku Klux Klan of Rice Institute” showed about 20 people, faces hidden, in white robes and hoods.
Paul’s tweet-stream took off, sparking conversations across the internet — and,
most particularly, at Rice. On Sunday, Rice President David Leebron emailed a letter to the “Rice community.”
“It is appropriate,” Leebron wrote, “for institutions to take a renewed look at their own histories. For Rice, this history has been clear and painful. … It is unsurprising but nonetheless deeply disturbing that racist imagery, including students in blackface and KKK outfits, appeared at Rice with some frequency during the years prior to the admission of black students.”
Notably, not all the racist images in Rice’s yearbook are limited to the days before integration. On Tuesday, Rice alumni alerted the Chronicle to a blackface photo on page 135 of Rice’s 1988 yearbook. At the “college night” party for Rice’s Baker College, three male students with darkened faces wear tie-dyed T-shirts and wave plastic baggies that look as though they contain marijuana.
‘You’re noticing this now?’
Rice is hardly the only college now reckoning with its racist past.
In Virginia, scandals related to blackface in college have proliferated so fast they’re hard to keep track of. A blackface photo appeared on a yearbook personal page for Gov. Ralph Northam, and the state’s top Republican, Senate Majority Leader Tommy Norment, was in charge of a college yearbook that included not just blackface photos but other racial slurs. A third official, Attorney General Mark Herring, recently admitted that he wore blackface in college — but he appears not to have left a yearbook record of it.
Nor are blackface scandals a thing of the distant past. Last month, the University of Oklahoma announced that students involved in a social-media video showing a woman in blackface would “not return to campus.”
There are also reports of a 1992 “jungle party” at Texas A&M. At UT in 2006, first-year law students threw a “ghetto fabulous” costume party.
Blackface is even embedded in UT-Austin’s fight song: “The Eyes of Texas,” which made its debut at a 1903 minstrel show. Last year, student government debated whether to stop singing the song at its weekly meetings.
For professionals who work with student media, blackface photos and racist images in old yearbooks come as no surprise. Kelley Lash, director of Rice’s student media, is active in the College Media Association. On the group’s yearbook pros listserv and Twitter, she said, discussion of the blackface scandals in Virginia takes a bemused tone: “Our conversations are more like, ‘Oh, you’re noticing this now?’ ” she said.
Archivists reacted similarly. “I get kind of irritated,” Lee Pecht, Rice’s director of special collections, said of people’s surprise at the images. “In the ’20s and ’30s, of course you’re going to have these things. It’s unfair to single out any single institution.”
Rice, founded in 1891, was not markedly more or less racist than other universities of its era. Founder William Marsh Rice owned slaves, and the school’s charter specified that the university would be for white students — a provision that stayed in place until the 1960s, when Rice went to court to have it removed. The university’s first black student was admitted in 1964.
“As members of the Rice community, we ought to learn about our own history and acknowledge aspects of that history that are distasteful and painful,” Leebron wrote in his public letter.
‘Old institution in the South’
Disturbing photos from the past, he wrote, “do not live solely in the past; they are reminders of the persistence of racial discrimination and as such fall with sharp impact on those members of our community — faculty, staff, students and alumni — directly affected.”
Paul, a white senior majoring in computer science, hadn’t thought that his Twitter thread would resonate outside Rice’s hedges: “I expected one of my poli-sci friends to ‘like’ it, and then it’d die.”
But to Rice students, he said, the images have special power. “We’ve all seen enough photos of blackface,” he said. “But when something like that is framed next to the Rice Sallyport or Sammy the Owl, it feels different. This ties it all to things that I walk by every day.”
He seemed surprised, though, by other people’s shock that Rice, in the first part of the 20th century, was as racist as any other place in the segregated South. “We’re an old institution in the South,” he said. “Not that this sort of thing is limited to the South.”
Over the weekend, Paul deleted all the yearbook tweets from his feed. “A Twitter thread isn’t the best for putting things in a proper historical context,” he said.
Instead, Paul hopes to move his yearbook revelations to the Rice Thresher, the student newspaper, where he’s the web editor. “There are people there who know a lot more than I do about Rice’s history,” he said.
He’s been working in chronological order, and when he stopped posting to Twitter, he’d just reached the 1960s. That’s both the decade when Rice integrated and also the threshold of what he calls “living memory” at Rice.
Paul’s oldest professor — Gilbert Cuthbertson, a political science professor who still uses a manual typewriter — started teaching at Rice in 1963. “I’m about to get to things that happened while Doc C was here, on campus,” Paul said. “That makes it realer.”