History of Racism at William & Mary

Dr. C. C. Little and the History of Eugenics at William & Mary

On October 13, 1944 Doyle stated that “For invitation making I dressed Aunt Jemima style and blacked my face to illustrate a potential rushing idea.”

Blackface as we know it was born during the Antebellum (aka: Pre-Civil War) era. Performers such as Thomas Dartmouth Rice, the “Father of Minstrelsy,” would blacken their faces and perform for white audiences as extreme caricatures of African Americans, often mimicking slaves. In the case of Rice, he developed the stage character “Jim Crow” in 1830 after observing slaves in the South. His performances would include “quick dance moves, an exaggerated African American vernacular and buffoonish behavior,” and he essentially created the genre of blackface minstrel shows [1].

The characters portrayed by white performers in blackface served to perpetuate and reinforce negative stereotypes about African Americans, including the notion that they are “lazy, ignorant, superstitious, hypersexual, criminal or cowardly” [1]. Out of these performances emerged minstrel show archetypes, including “Rice’s ‘Jim Crow,’ a rural dancing fool in tattered clothing; the ‘Mammy,’ an overweight and loud mother figure; and ‘Zip Coon,’ a flamboyant-dressed man who used sophisticated words incorrectly” [1].

The aforementioned “Mammy” is a caricature of African American women, meant to portray an obese, maternal slave who was extremely loyal and happy to be serving her white “family” [2]. The “Mammy” was, and is, an especially enduring racial caricature, and like with other minstrel archetypes, portraying one was the only way African Americans could be in the entertainment industry. Notable fictional Mammys can be seen in movies such as Gone with the Wind (1939), The Birth of a Nation (1915), and Imitation of Life (1934, 1959) [2]. Mammys were also used commercially as a way to advertise almost any household item, the most recognizable being “Aunt Jemima.” She was created by Charles Rutt, a newspaper editor, and Charles G. Underwood, a mill owner, as a way to market a self-rising flour that only needed to have water added to it. The name and design was based off a minstrel show Rutt had attended, in which a song about Aunt Jemima was performed [2].

The recipe and branding for Aunt Jemima’s pancakes were later sold to R.T. Davis Company, who decided to use a real person to portray the Aunt Jemima character. The woman was Nancy Green, a black woman born into slavery in Kentucky in 1834, and who played Aunt Jemima until her death in 1923. During promotional exhibitions she sang, cooked pancakes, and told stories about the “Old South,” portraying it as a happy place marked by unity between Black and white people. After Green, there were two more iterations of Aunt Jemima, Anna Robinson who began her portrayal in 1933, and Edith Wilson who performed on TV and radio between 1948 and 1966 [2].

Doyle’s inclusion of the fact that she dressed “Aunt Jemima style” points towards the fact that she intended to dress as a “Mammy” figure. This appears to be the only time she mentions donning blackface, but Doyle is far from the only student in William & Mary’s history to portray a Mammy, or any other minstrel archetype. A Flat Hat article on William & Mary and blackface noted that references to minstrelsy can be found within Colonial Echo yearbooks well into the 1930s [3]. Along with this, the article includes an image taken from the 1958 Colonial Echo of the Chi Omega sorority, in which four of the twelve white sorority members photographed are shown in full minstrel blackface [3].

Here is a link to the Flat Hat article on William & Mary and blackface:

https://flathatnews.com/2019/02/12/professors-weigh-in-on-colleges-own-history-of-blackface-minstrelsy/

The History of Anti-Black Racism at William & Mary Goes Far Beyond Blackface

William &Mary is a very old institution with a long history that reflects the problematic past of the entire United States. The Lemon Project at William & Mary was created in order to investigate the role of enslaved people in the history of the university. On the Lemon Project website, the organization is described as a “multifaceted and dynamic attempt to rectify wrongs perpetrated against African Americans by William & Mary through action or inaction”[1]. The Lemon Project has created an extensive timeline of the history of African Americans at William & Mary and in the surrounding area that stretches from the early eighteenth century to the present. Some of the events on this timeline include the purchase of enslaved people in 1718, certain professors and university faculty speaking in favor of the institution of slavery, and the effect of Jim Crow Laws on the ability for African American students to study at the university in the early twentieth century.

While Doyle was a student at William & Mary, there was a controversy surrounding an opinion piece published in the Flat Hat on Wednesday, February 7th, 1945. Editor Marilyn Kaemmerle's article titled “Lincoln’s Job, Half-Done..” describes how the discrimination of people based on racial characteristics is wrong and is similar to the “Nazi Strategy” [2]. In this article, Kaemmerle advocates for interracial marriage, as well as more equal treatment for all races, but especially African Americans. As a result, Kaemmerle lost her position as editor and the Flat Hat as a whole was temporarily suspended. When Doyle donated her diary as well as many other mementos from her college years, a photocopy of a newspaper article was included from December 6th, 1986, that describes this incident and the results of it more than 40 years later. This article describes the Board of Visitors’ stance that it was the president’s decision to remove Kaemmerle as an editor, therefore an apology from the Board would be inappropriate. The resolution passed was an acknowledgement of what happened rather than an apology, but Kaemmerle said that she would feel welcome at William & Mary again, if she were to visit.

When Doyle was on campus, the only African Americans she would have interacted with were those who were employed at the school and were not paid fair wages. Ten years after Doyle moved to Williamsburg, Hulon Willis, William &Mary’s first African American student, enrolled at the college as part of the summer graduate program [3]. It took an additional twelve years after that for William & Mary to accept its first black undergraduate, Oscar Houser Blayton, in 1963, and it wasn’t until 1967 that William & Mary welcomed its first black female -along with first black residential- students [3]. William & Mary continues to attempt to address previous injustices against African Americans on campus and in the greater Williamsburg community.

After the events at Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941, there was a growing distrust of Japanese-Americans by the American public. Due to their relation with the “enemy,” many Americans whose ancestry could be tied to nations within the Axis Powers faced descrimination, with Japanese-Americans facing the most extreme form through the creation of internment camps. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which claimed the intention of preventing espionage, however, there was nothing similar created for people of German or Italian descent [1]. The treatment of Japanese people in the internment camps, many of whom were American citizens, highlighted the cruelty of the United States government along with the racism within it.

While there are many examples of racism against Japanese Americans during World War II, it was difficult to find specific examples from William & Mary. Doyle uses “Japs'' as a derogatory term for the Japanese occasionally in her diary, and there are a few instances where the same term was used in editions of the Flat Hat. Notably, in an article about the start of the baseball season in 1942, the “Japs'' are described as “Hitler’s oriental stooges” [2]. In another article advertising an informal “scrap dance,” an event meant to encourage students to bring things they can donate to help the war effort, the phrase “Save your scrap to slap a Jap” is used [3]. Beyond the flippant usage of a racial slur, there don’t appear to be many instances of blatant anti-Japanese sentiment in the Flat Hat. In fact, there are a few articles in the paper which are quite sympathetic and vocal against American imperialism and discrimination.

Looking specifically at issues pertaining to Japanese-Americans, there is an article in the March 15, 1944 issue titled, “Japanese-American Girl Relates Group’s Problems.” The article talks about Kay Kaneda, a Japanese-American girl who visited the campus and spoke about her time in the internment camps. The article made a point to note that a lot of the people imprisoned were regular American children who knew no life outside of America, and that

“One interesting point was mentioned which is often forgotten - there have been over 15,000 Japanese-American boys fighting in our armed services in the present war … it certainly does not help their morale to know that the country which they are dying for is holding their families virtual prisoners” [4]

Beyond talking about the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans, there are other articles that talk about post-war imperialism and discrimination. In the edition of the Flat Hat with the Kaemmerle article, which argued against the “Nazi Strategy” of racial discrimination [5], there are two more articles that reflect similar ideas. One talks about a speaker who discussed the things that were necessary to ensure global peace, including opposition to imperialism [6]. The other article argues against the imperial strategies of the Allied Powers, noting that how America chooses to act post-war will have a dramatic impact on future peace [7]. In regards to reallocating German and Japanese territories to England, the article states “That’s like robbing Peter to pay Paul … Imperialism and power politics, regardless who plays it, breed only distrust, broken treaties, conflict. It leads to one inevitable end - war!”. When talking about raising tariffs, the author writes, “Freedom means that all people have an equal chance to gain the same benefits from world production. Trade is that opportunity. If we set up walls too high to surmount, we are killing freedom … we must show we are willing to work for peace by actions, for they speak far louder and words” [7].

These articles are surprising based on the sentiments that many Americans held during the time, including the views that seem to have been held by Margetta Hirsch Doyle. Both the words of Doyle and the words of these various Flat Hat editors shows the complex views that existed within William & Mary’s campus.