Wesleyan College addressing decades of racism on campus

Wesleyan College has no sororities on campus, but each class receives one of four sisterhood names: the Green Knights, Purple Knights, Golden Hearts or Red Pirates.

At one time the Pirates were known as the Tri-K Pirates, but the group got its start in the early 1900s under another name that students chose: the Ku Klux Klan.

The Macon women’s college is formally acknowledging the dark chapters of its past and revising its history to reflect the racism that happened. The school posted a statement on its website Thursday in response to an article by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that detailed the school’s past.

“Wesleyan College’s history includes parts that are deeply troubling, and we are not proud of them,” the statement reads. “When Wesleyan was founded in 1836, the economy of the South was based on the sin of slavery. We are sorry for the pain that parts of our past have caused and continue to cause. We also celebrate how far our college has come and how we are striving to become the inclusive community we are called to be.”

The school has been working on updating its history for several years, and in 2016 it commissioned Wesleyan history professor Karen Huber to research and rewrite it, said Provost Vivia Fowler, who will become the school’s new president July 1. Huber is going through artifacts, yearbooks, student newspapers, documents from meetings and memorabilia from early graduates.

The school has begun to digitize its yearbooks and magazines, making them accessible to the public online. A more complete history of the school will be available by fall. The project is a way to learn about the past and further the school’s efforts toward racial reconciliation, Fowler said.

Wesleyan’s statement details some of the racist acts committed on campus in the early years, including students treating some black workers like mascots and partaking in initiation rituals for new students reminiscent of KKK activities, sometimes incorporating robes and nooses.

Like many other Southern institutions, the school also has connections to slavery, Fowler said. Wesleyan’s early leaders owned slaves, and the 1840 census lists the president and his family, more than 100 students and four slaves as living on campus, Huber said.

The 1909, 1913 and 1917 classes named themselves after the Ku Klux Klan. The 1913 yearbook was even named “Ku Klux” and contains sketches of a masked night rider and a skull and crossbones.

“I think everyone responds with horror and disgust when looking at some of the images that we see in our old yearbooks,” Fowler said. “We recognized that there are parts of our history that are connected to racial injustice, things that need to be reconciled. Over the last few years, we have begun to speak very honestly about our history, about what we have found in our archives.”

Fowler said there’s no evidence that there was ever a Ku Klux Klan chapter on the Wesleyan campus, but there is no denying that some students chose to incorporate the themes of that group into their life and activities.

Today, Wesleyan’s diversity is among its strengths. Among the undergraduate population, about a quarter are international students and a third are minorities, according to the college.

“We are not the same institution as Wesleyan was in the early 20th century,” Huber said in an email. “We are a minority serving institution, we have large numbers of first-generation students and students receiving financial aid, and our entire community rejects the ideas and value that led those young women to adopt the Ku Klux Klan name for their class name. We aren’t proud that this is part of Wesleyan’s history, but we do no good by ignoring it; in fact, we do harm by seeming complicit or accepting of it. “​

In January, classes were canceled for a day after someone wrote racial slurs on dorm room walls. Fowler said it was a troubling incident that is not representative of today’s Wesleyan.

“It deeply troubled all of us,” she said. “It’s always disappointing when we feel like we’re making progress and something causes us to step backward, but we’ll move forward.”

This story was originally published June 22, 2017 at 6:52 PM with the headline "Wesleyan College addressing decades of racism on campus."