Uncovering the past to press forward to the future

“Like almost any longstanding American, and especially southern, institution, our history includes parts that are deeply troubling, and we are not proud of them. When Wesleyan was founded in 1836, the economy of the South was based on the sin of slavery.

Wesleyan’s people were products of a society steeped in racism, classism, and sexism. They did appalling things — like students treating some African Americans who worked on campus like mascots, or deciding to name one of their classes after the hate-espousing Ku Klux Klan, or developing rituals for initiating new students that today remind us of the Klan’s terrorism.”

It’s easy to let ghosts of the past remain buried. The actions of ancestors cloaked in the era in which they lived is convenient justification for allowing those long since outmoded ideas, actions and rituals to remain covered by time. Wesleyan College, the oldest chartered college for women has decided to take a different course and reveal that painful history for all to see.

That uncovered history tells us that Wesleyan’s founding president was a slave owner and supporter of the institution of slavery. The school and its students, now known for its diversity, was aligned with the Ku Klux Klan. Along with the class names Green Knights, Purple Knights and Golden Hearts, in 1909, 1913 and 1917 it included the class name Ku Klux Klan. The 1913 yearbook was named the “Ku Klux.”

According to the history being compiled by the college, the class name was changed in the early 1920s from the Ku Klux Klan to the Tri-Ks, and later to the Tri-K Pirates and in the early 1990s changed again to the Red Pirates.

Wesleyan is but the latest institution to come face to face with its racist past. Georgetown University, founded by the Jesuits in 1789, sold 272 slaves in 1838 (two years after Wesleyan was founded) in order to keep the school afloat. A bit of historical irony. In 1874, Patrick Healy, the son of an Irish settler and a slave from Jones County, became Georgetown’s 29th president.

The University of Virginia is also acknowledging its role during this tumultuous period and the decades that followed. Not only did slaves build the university there is now an effort underway to memorialize their contribution to the life of the university.

The author of our Declaration of Independence and founder of the university, Thomas Jefferson, was very detail oriented. Bricks made by slaves were used for student quarters while faculty housing was constructed using bricks made by whites.

Brown University commissioned a Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice in 2003. The report it issued in 2007 reflects some of the thoughts that may surround Wesleyan’s efforts to clear the air of its past.

“Some readers responded less enthusiastically to the Report, portraying it as an example of politics cloaked in academic respectability. Many of them considered it an untimely look backward that constrains forward progress. Still others suggested that the effort unduly emphasizes societal responsibility for the legacy of slavery over the personal responsibility of descendants of slaves to overcome the effects of discrimination on their own.

Such reactions are an important dimension of the dialogue about the aftermath of slavery, but the Report reveals and documents well that racism, stereotyping, and discrimination continue to have significant consequences in American society.

Some would urge that these ills be ‘forgotten,’ but, as the Report points out, it is the acknowledgment rather than the forgetting of these factors that can impel us to improve society.”

Wesleyan’s efforts may lead us to greater dialogue about that era in which it was deemed not unnatural for college students — women no less — to pattern themselves after a group of marauding terrorists.

And in the words of the Brown study: “By agreeing to enter an area long-acknowledged as a zone of national discomfort and disagreement, the Committee modeled for the campus the benefit of intellectual honesty and fitness in enabling civil discourse under the most difficult circumstances.”

Some will ask, “what took Wesleyan so long?” Ruth Knox, outgoing president recognizes that as valid criticism, but the point that should not disappear from sight is that as an institution they have embarked upon an honest journey. In the end they will be better for it, and as a community, so will we.

This story was originally published June 24, 2017 at 9:00 PM with the headline "Uncovering the past to press forward to the future."