For some, ’95 GHS yearbook incident not relegated to past
As country grapples with race, a hurtful episode still resonates
GREENWICH — For most of the 1995 school year, the Greenwich football team had felt like a sports brotherhood.
In a long-held school tradition, on the night before games, players ate dinner together at a teammate’s house. They spent time with each other outside of school and were used to driving one another home after practice.
So, one afternoon in June of that year, when chatter began to bounce around the school’s cavernous student center about a message hidden in the senior yearbook, Black players couldn’t make sense of what they were hearing.
Justin Joseph, Garth Hamilton and Kenyatta Gilmore, three Black football players at the time, had often floated between the “Black section” and the “jock section” of the student center.
On that afternoon, they were circulating among other Black students, getting their yearbooks signed, when a classmate approached and asked if they had seen the message five white kids, including three of their teammates, had planted throughout the book.
The messenger flipped through several pages, as the three football players looked on.
“I’m sitting here trying to figure out what’s happening and then all of a sudden … it spelled out. And I remember, that’s when everything happened,” said Joseph, an HBO writer, producer and editor, now living in San Francisco.
Beneath the photo of one white classmate, Keith Dianis, was his senior quote, followed by the word, “kill.”
The quote of classmate Patrick Fox ended with with the word “ALL.”
The remaining passages, beneath the photos of students Ed Oberbeck, Robert Texiere and Aaron Valenti, followed suit, concluding with letters that when strung together, spelled out the word, “n - - - - - s.”
The three players walked over to where their classmates were sitting.
Fox, Oberbeck, Texiere and Valenti, mostly kept their heads down, they said, while Dianis — who the Black players had known the best — wore what they described as a smirk.
“We had our yearbooks open and we were like ‘You think this is funny? And (Dianis) was like, ‘What are you talking about?’” recalled Hamilton, a multi-unit restaurateur and business owner now living in West Laurel, Maryland.
Hundreds of students in the center caught on to what was transpiring and began shouting as school security guards swooped in and quickly shuffled the five students out of the area.
The confrontation occurred just minutes before final examinations, and some students missed their tests because they couldn’t make it through the commotion to get to their exam rooms on time. The shock felt by many would continue for the remainder of that school year, through graduation.
For many Black students, it would last a lot longer, alumni said.
“We just couldn’t let it go,” Joseph said. “None of us could let it go.”
For many residents in Greenwich, the yearbook incident is simply remembered as an episode of the past — if it’s remembered at all. But Black alumni who were there to witness it said that event and others like it aren’t so easy to brush off. For them, it was one more lesson that taught them to keep part of the world at arm’s length.
“I ask myself every day, ‘Why do they hate us so much?”’ Joseph said.
As they watch the country, again, confront its problems with issues of race in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the former Greenwich High students said they hope, again, for a better future.
“I love that this is happening,” Joseph said about the current protests and larger dialogue on race. “I think it’s way past 25 years too late.”
For Joseph, the yearbook incident was “one of those moments you deal with that you’ll never forget.” he said. “It’s indelible and it’s one of those things that left a lasting (impact) on me.”
Joseph and other Black alumni said they use their yearbooks as teaching tools for their own young children. The death message was not the only racist image in the book that year. On the third page, five unidentified students can be seen wearing blackface.
“To me, holding onto that and seeing what it actually meant is profound in itself . ... I’m holding on to history, if you will,” Joseph said.
Hamilton said the yearbook incident is one of the reasons why his children, ages 4, 11 and 14, have been directed to avoid social situations if they’ll be the only Black kids at the gathering. It’s one of the reasons why they must always say, “Sir,” “ma’am” and “thank you,” and why they’re not allowed to wear hoodies.
“It’s just one of those things that you just have to do, and we have to tell our kids, and we have to be honest with them,” he said. “Because if not, they could end up in a situation that could cost them their lives.”
For Hamilton, the yearbook incident was the “icing on the cake” that capped years of racist insults and affronts he endured as a Black student in town, he said — years of being called racist slurs, being accused of stealing snacks in class, a teacher who made him redo spelling tests after he had already scored a 100.
It contributed to a reluctance toward letting people get close to him.
“Especially white people,” he said. “I don’t trust many of them and that’s just honest.”
The school’s response
The five students responsible for the incident were suspended for 10 days, barred from taking final examinations in the high school building and were ineligible to walk at graduation. All five eventually received their diplomas, even amid widespread calls to exclude them from doing so. They were required to participate in a sensitivity training “boot camp” led by the Congress of Racial Equality, a civil rights organization birthed in Chicago.
Efforts to contact the five students for this story were made. A woman who answered the phone at Dianis’ residence said she was not interested in putting the reporter through to him. Calls, voicemails, text messages and efforts to contact Oberbeck, Fox, Texiere and Valenti through social media were unsuccessful or received no response.
Police at the time of the incident were notified and then state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal launched an investigation regarding possible bias crimes. Police said if they could find someone with direct knowledge of the scheme, detectives would apply for arrest warrants and charge the boys with a hate crime, according to 1995 Greenwich Time reporting published shortly after the incident.
“We need someone to say it was a conspiracy, not five individuals acting alone, and for that person to have proof of that,” an officer told the newspaper.
Each was questioned by school officials and admitted to writing parts of the quote, school officials told Greenwich Time. But they said the words and letters in question weren’t intended to form a racist message. The words did not stand for anything specific, the boys claimed, but rather, the initials stood for a club they had belonged to. Back then, school leaders told Greenwich Time they did not believe the students’ story.
But Black alumni from the time, interviewed for this story, said too much of the town’s and the school district’s response in 1995 was focused on the five offenders. Too little attention was placed on the larger student body that was significantly impacted, especially Black students.
Shortly after the incident, school administrators said they met with a small group of Black students. But alumni said they were never invited to any meeting.
At the request of a few students, school officials made an effort to collect roughly 1,400 copies of the yearbook. Students were encouraged to turn their book in if they wanted it reprinted.
“To be clear, I was one of those who did not want to replace it,” Joseph said. “For them to give people an option to erase it and fix it, that I guess, was a BandAid.”
Hamilton agreed.
“They definitely should have reached out to all the Black players on the team. They should have held some type of assembly,” Hamilton said. “God knows, they held assemblies and s - - - like that for everything else.”
Ralph Mayo, current headmaster at Greenwich High School, said he wasn’t a part of the disciplinary action against the five students at the time but said he remembers the community coming together to denounce their actions.
“The staff, the senior class and the students of Greenwich High School especially, wanted to make it clear that the actions of those five students did not and should not reflect the thoughts, feelings or perspectives of the rest of the school community,” he said.
News spreads
Clay Miles, a young Black man living in the area at the time, said he wasn’t surprised when he found out about the yearbook incident.
The former Greenwich High student said he remembers being called racist slurs by classmates on the way out of his apartment in the morning or on the bus to school on many days.
A few years before the yearbook incident, Miles decided to move out of his mother’s Greenwich apartment and into his father’s home in Norwalk, where he completed senior year at Brien McMahon High School.
“The education wasn’t as good as Greenwich was, but I had a way better senior year than I had in the three years prior,” he said.
But news about the Greenwich yearbook had soon traveled much farther than Norwalk.
The day after the yearbook message was deciphered, Joseph’s friend said her family had heard about the news all the way in Hawaii.
The New York and national news media descended on the town and the incident was the subject of a story in Newsweek. Television cameras formed an arc in the rear of the Board of Education meeting room in the Havemeyer Building on Greenwich Avenue.
Tara Kelly, an editor for the 1995 yearbook at Pelham Memorial High School, said she attended a national yearbook conference that summer in Gettysburg, P.A., where yearbook staffers from across the country had discussed changes to their editorial policies following the Greenwich incident, she said.
Senior quotes were no longer allowed in her Pelham, N.Y. yearbook.
“Everything was just basically combed over with a fine-toothed comb,” she said.
Then and now
Twenty-five years later, community members are still debating the yearbook incident’s significance, particularly in the midst of a national discussion on racial inequality, spurred by the death of a Black Minneapolis man at the hands of a white police officer.
Now, as then, the conversation is divided between those who feel the yearbook occurrence was part of a deeper problem that still needs to be addressed, and those who believe its importance is being overblown.
One man who graduated from GHS in 1997 posted about it on Facebook last month. The post received more than 160 reactions, more than 150 comments and some 320 shares.
When it was posted in the local Facebook group, “You Know You’re From Greenwich Ct If,” the divide in reactions became particularly apparent.
“Why is this necessary?” wrote one woman.
“Are you the same person you were in high school?” she wrote. “Focus on the present and make a difference today.”
In 1995 — and still today — many defended the five who wrote the message by saying they were just kids, they didn’t mean anything by it, or that they were just joking, said Hamilton — one of the football teammates.
Joseph said he heard much of the same conversation around town at the time.
“With the ‘kids will be kids’ argument, you’re giving the aggressor the excuse, the hateful one the excuse,” he said.
Administrators at GHS have made efforts in the years since to create a more inclusive atmosphere at the school, said Mayo.
As one example, students at Greenwich High School currently participate in “Names Day,” where they discuss issues of “ignorance” and racism while workshopping ideas about how to stop acts of injustice against any person, Mayo said.
“We need to continue to offer the programs we have in place, but this discussion on anti-racism can’t be an event that takes place two to three times a year, it needs to be ongoing and freely discussed in our classrooms,” he said.
Administrators are always looking for ways to include student voices and perspective at the table, he added. Greenwich High School has more than a dozen extracurricular clubs related to race, including the Asian Students Association and the Association for Hispanic Students, to name a couple. There currently is not a similar program specifically designated for Black students.
“We know that our work to build a more inclusive, more respectful and more equal community is never finished. We continue to find ways to do better,” Mayo said.
Black alumni said the town and its schools need to make substantive changes to create a more welcoming environment.
Joseph said the town should diversify the Board of Education. And the school district should hire more people of color, and those from other marginalized groups, as teachers to better reflect the student body.
During the 2019-20 school year, 33 percent of GHS students identified as Black, Asian or Latino, while 11 percent of their educators were from those same racial groups, according to Connecticut Department of Education data.
“The Greenwich school system is one of the most successful schools in the country. They can make it happen and they can make it better, period,” Joseph said.
Had there been more Black adults in positions of authority at the time, response to the yearbook incident would have been different, Black alumni said.
“There’s got to be open dialogue,” Hamilton said. “If someone is saying something is happening, you can’t say, ‘No, it’s not happening,’ because it is, and all of us that are minorities have experienced it.”
The turmoil making news headlines currently across the country is a result of problems too long unaddressed, he said.
“Don’t continually sweep this stuff under the rug because, once it explodes that’s it,” he said. “(It’ll) be like, ‘Why didn’t we deal with this when we had the chance?’”
“We just couldn’t let it go. None of us could let it go . ... I ask myself every day, ‘Why do they hate us so much?’ ”
Justin Joseph, on a racist code written by white students in the 1995 GHS yearbook