Timeline
1920 to 1930
By OTTO DO and AMY LUM
Staff Writers
Content Warning: Articles in this series depict specific instances of racial violence and aggression against Black and other non-white people. Racial epithets, though censored, are included.
This article is part of the multi-part series Since 1878, a project undertaken by the 142nd Board of The Exonian. The principal objective of this series is to examine the paper’s coverage of racism at the Academy and, by extension, in the country as a whole. This series will not provide a complete overview of racist events over the years in question. Additionally, research draws heavily from The Exonian’s archives, which present a biased depiction of racial dynamics at the Academy. Instead, the articles will offer a portrait of The Exonian, the Academy and the nation, decade by decade, by highlighting pieces published in the paper.
In Since 1878, The Exonian will follow the National Association for Black Journalists’ recommendations, referring to the n-word as [n-word], censoring n-gro in most contexts and capitalizing Black, in line with our updated style guide.
Regarding privacy, there are individuals named in these articles who are still alive today. Their statements represent their views as minors in the middle of their education. Most high schoolers do not write for publications like The Exonian, which archives every issue. The editors of the paper understand this unique situation and that views often change over time, particularly those held during high school. Additionally, every article represents more than its writer. Pieces in The Exonian go through editors and advisers, reflecting an institutional history.
However, Since 1878 uses their names to ground itself in the tangible and proximate. In Since 1878, the editors choose full transparency over perpetuating ambiguity and obscuring our history of racism.
Phillips Exeter Gymnasium, 1921. Three singers of color performed for the school on a Saturday night. Some students found the performance “very entertaining.” Others “began to pay no attention” to the recital and “indulged in laughter [and] inappropriate horseplay.” Before the end of the performance, a significant portion of the stadium left the room. Even to the editors of The Exonian, this reception was “a flagrant display of discourtesy.”
During the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan exploded into a national movement, irrevocably shaping American history and permeating the town of Exeter. The nation also dealt with the aftermath of World War I.
Pulished Nov. 12, 1921.
Coverage
Ku Klux Klan
White supremacist behavior reached a peak in New Hampshire, and in America, during the 1920s. The revived Ku Klux Klan arrived in New Hampshire and Maine to build a northern stronghold. Many Seacoast communities had “klaverns,” local chapters of the Klan, and held Klan-sponsored parades and field days. At least two of these events were led by the town police chief and police department. During the summer of 1924, the Klan held a gathering of 10,000 people in Rochester, New Hampshire.
A debate held at the Academy, titled in The Exonian as the “Ku Klux Klan Question,” represented the surging racial tensions of the decade. The question for debate was: “Resolved: That the activities of the Ku Klux Klan are of such a nature as to warrant the further existence of the order in this country.” Students T. R. F. Sater and T. L. Womack argued the affirmative, while D. LeB. Sweeney and W. D. Ford argued the negative. The following quotes come from their speeches, which The Exonian covered in its Nov. 12, 1921 issue.
“The Ku Klux Klan is the successor to the order that is admitted to have been justified,” Sater said. “It was then formed to abolish the carpet-bag and n-gro government. It is admitted that there was a general need for it at that time… The n-gro has again assumed a defiant and war-like attitude.”
“The authorities are doing nothing to stop them and this present Klan is but a rising of the men of the South as after the Civil [W]ar… The purposes of the organization are excellent,” Sater continued. “The Ku Klux Klan is a strictly law abiding organization and every new member has to swear that he will obey the law.”
“Could [there] be any worthier beginning of a fraternal order or any higher ideals of Americanism than those embodied in the Ku Klux Klan?” Sater asked.
“The n-gro has changed in the last fifty years,” Sweeney responded. “He cannot be frightened by sheets and lanterns. He has fought in France for America and is not going to come back here to have those rights taken from him that he once fought for.” Sweeney claimed that, in the Chicago race riots, one Black citizen was killed for every eight white men.
“The n-gro is out for blood, and will fight for his rights as he fought for his country’s rights in France,” Sweeney said. “The n-gro has been a cowering creature for three centuries, but he is now beginning to change.” The negative won on the merits of the question, but the affirmative won on the “merits of the debate.”
Published Nov. 2, 1921.
Guest Lecturers and Imperialism
Guest speakers continued their imperialistic rhetoric amid the 1920s. On Feb. 5, 1921, Merrill Lecture speaker “Mrs. Kenneth Brown” argued for the merger of Europe and the United States. “We must get together and stabilize the white race,” Brown said. “We are all branches of the white race and should be bound together… We are all white and sprang from the white men who originally inhabited Europe.
“We must fight our battles together … If there is another war, like the last Great War, Europe and the white race will pass out of existence as Egypt and the Egyptians have done,” she continued.
Brown was not alone in her white supremacist views. On June 6, 1923, Reverend Frederick J. Libby delivered a sermon on future warfare that The Exonian transcribed. “The terrors of a future war will victimize every nation unless proper measures are taken to ward them off. To drift as we now are without taking positive steps toward reconstruction is to invite the total destruction of the white civilization,” Libby said. “We should foresee the crisis which is coming and be prepared to meet it when it arrives. Either we must destroy war or war will destroy us.”
The Hampton Institute
During this decade, the Academy continued its relationship with the Hampton Institute, a historically-Black university in Virginia. The Institute featured in a series of articles on Feb. 18, 20 and 21, 1920. “The teachers in the school [Hampton Institute] are white men, because there are many problems that can be solved only by contact of the white and Black men,” Hampton Institute representative George F. Ketchum said to The Exonian.
Two years later, in 1922, the Academy devoted a “Christian Fraternity Budget” to the Hampton institute. The Budget was a sum of $100 dollars—or a year’s tuition at Exeter. The Christian Fraternity Budget, The Exonian reported on Jan. 11, 1922, was allocated “to help solve the N-gro question and the difficulty of providing proper exercise and recreation for city boys and many other national problems of great importance.” Christian Fraternity merged in 1954 with Student Council.
For comparison, tuition at a few of America’s most prestigious colleges at the time are listed below:
University of South Carolina: $40
William and Mary College: $50
Clark University: $100
Bates College: $125
Boston University: $225
Harvard University: $250
Tufts College: $250
The donation to the Hampton Institute reflected the attitude that “educating the n-gro,” in one student’s words, should be a top priority. An article published on Mar. 8, 1924 about the ninth Merrill Lecture reported, “The N-gro is apt to be dishonest, but no white man is more eager for an education.”
Indigenous Culture
On Dec. 7, 1929, the Academy added to their collection a leaf of the “first American Bible” translated into a Native American language. According to The Exonian, New England minister and translator John Eliot was “determined to spread the gospel among the Indians and devoted ten years of his life toward completing his translation of the Bible.” In a description of Elliot’s work, The Exonian wrote, “Not only did he do this great work, but he also wrote an Indian primer so as to educate the savages enough for them to read it.”
A column titled “A Note on Sophistication,” published on Jan. 31, 1925, expressed a similar hierarchy of Eurocentric and indigenous culture. “The civilized barbarian may be roughly defined as one whose intellect, or soul, is possessed of all the virtues save one, and on that account is utterly damned and cast into outer darkness,” an anonymous student with the pen name Argus wrote. “The virtue I allude to is the quality of innocence… They are ignorant of life.”
“The truly wise man is he who knows how little he knows,” Argus concluded.
The paper’s descriptions of Eliot’s work and Argus’ “Note on Sophistication” relied on racist terms such as “savages” and “barbarian” to describe indigenous peoples.
“Removal of Existing Prejudices Against N-groes”
In the late 1920s, Corliss Lamont ’20 urged for the “Removal of Existing Prejudices Against N-groes” in a lecture at the Academy. “In each country people have different customs, ideas, and worships. This does not classify one country above another or put any nation in preference to all others,” Lamont said.
“A great many people in the United States have the feeling that only the United States and her ideas are worth regarding in this world,” Lamont continued. “That is to say, people make generalizations, or get a certain opinion of a class of people. This is unfair. A person should not be hated for his race, but should be judged by his own self rather than by the characteristics of his class. This is the way that every one of us can help to clear up the present race problem.”
To close his speech, Lamont offered a historical perspective. “In the first place, the N-gro was brought from Africa against his will by slave traders. Now when the white people have the N-gro in the country they consider him as more or less an invader of the country,” Lamont said. “We, of the modern generation, although we may not be able to bring about laws for the help of the N-gro, we can at least try to change our ideas, and, instead of having a certain opinion of the Jew and the N-gro as a class, learn to look at each Jew and N-gro as a person and not as a representative of an inferior class.”
In a time of political strife, Academy discourse reflected America. According to a 1993 Exeter News-Letter article entitled “Granite State Klansmen,” archived at the Exeter Historical Society, Klan activity in Rochester declined by 1925. Reports of the group’s violence nationwide had begun to spread. However, racial violence, discrimination and hatred persisted—at the Academy and in The Exonian.