UW-Madison confronts its racist past
If you happened to be walking down State Street in Madison in May of 1920, you may have been confused about what you were witnessing. You may have seen more than a dozen young men wearing their finest suits and top hats while pushing baby carriages up and down the street.
You would have been witness to an initiation ceremony to a mischievous new men’s organization on the University of WisconsinMadison campus. But this fraternity wasn’t represented by Greek letters, it was known by its more recognizable name: The Ku Klux Klan. The recent debates over removing Confederate monuments in the South conjures a certain imagery: Southerners loyal to their heritage trying to save a statue of a mustached guy wearing a big hat and riding a horse.
But even well after the Civil War ended, northern states weren’t immune to the presence of racist groups. While there’s little evidence that the campus KKK was associated with the national organization, the Madison group’s dedication to white supremacy was the same.
This week, UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank announced the creation of a study group to look at the influence of white supremacist groups on campus over the years. Blank also proposed setting aside a place inside the campus’ famous Memorial Union “to document the history of these student organizations on campus.”
It’s admirable of Blank to recognize the fact that racism played a part in building the UW-Madison campus. In fact, the KKK was “instrumental” in raising money to build the Memorial Union, which now houses displays in honor of former KKK members Fredric March and Porter Butts. Instead of pretending the state’s most progressive campus was untouched by white supremacy, Blank is confronting the issue head-on.
But if Blank’s study group looks hard enough, it will find more than just a few random racist kids running around campus with baby strollers. Take, for example, former progressive UW president Charles Van Hise, for whom the building that now houses the UW System Administration is named. Van Hise was a committed eugenicist who declared, “He who thinks not of himself primarily, but of his race, and of its future, is the new patriot.”
Van Hise wasn’t alone. In the early 20th century, influential sociology professor E.A. Ross shared Woodrow Wilson’s belief that Africans and South Americans were still savages of “low mentality,” and offered eugenics as a cure. Economist John R. Commons, the author of many foundational texts on labor relations, was also an unapologetic racist. In 1907, Commons wrote an entire book dedicated to explaining why blacks are mentally inferior to whites.
In the wake of the recent Charlottesville, Va., protests that saw an anti-racism protester killed by a car driven into a crowd, some far right-wingers oddly began to change the subject by invoking the Democrats’ history of racism — as if the fact that Republicans freed the slaves more than 150 years ago absolved them from complicity in the recent violence America has suffered. That’s “whataboutism” at its worst.
But if the reaction to these violent events is to start removing monuments to individuals with problematic racial pasts, then we should have a full accounting of who those people were.
It doesn’t mean their accomplishments can’t be recognized or honored, or that their monuments automatically have to be revoked — but we should be trusted to have an open, honest debate about what they really stood for. Fortunately, Rebecca Blank thinks Wisconsin residents can handle the debate like grown-ups.