Timeline
1950 to 1960
By MOKSHA AKIL
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.
Throughout the 1950s, the Academy and the nation were divided over segregation in public schools. Landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education nominally ended legal segregation in public schools, and the Academy responded with a written affirmation of its Black students. However, an opinion in The Exonian criticized the Academy’s hypocrisy for failing to sustain a substantive population of Black students and faculty. The country also endured an influenza pandemic from 1957-1958, nicknamed the “Asian flu.”
Coverage
Toward Understanding the South Today
After the South went three years without any reported lynchings, alumnus William S. Howland, then Chief of the Atlanta News Bureau for Time and Life, wrote an op-ed entitled “Toward Understanding the South Today.” He argued this period marked a significant milestone for the region.
In the Feb. 26, 1955 issue, he wrote, “To my mind, the most striking sign of progress in the region is that lynching has been eliminated as the threat to law and order that it was a generation ago.” Just three months later, Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi. Since 1878 found no mention of this lynching in The Exonian’s searchable archives.
Another Southern achievement which Howland pointed out was the successful fight for Black suffrage. “The N-gro can and does vote,” he wrote. This statement neglected that the South was in the midst of Jim Crow.
Howland also considered the economic status of Black people. “A third big step forward is the general improvement of the economic and living status of the N-gro,” he wrote. “One has to hunt to find today the squalid shacks which were all too common in 1923.” Economic inequality ran rampant during this time.
Desegregation
In Jan. of 1950, the Academy Senate, a Model Congress club, debated the issue of segregation and housing funds for the South in a mock bill which proposed that “no Federal funds shall be withheld from housing projects because of the segregation of the N-gro, if equal facilities are provided elsewhere for N-groes.” The bill passed unanimously, 26-0.
During the debate, a student argued that “until a majority of people believe in the abolition of segregation, it cannot be accomplished, and that the bill would provide much-needed aid for Southern communities,” The Exonian reported. Another student said that “the North has no right to dictate to the South whether they should or should not have segregation.”
Segregation also factored heavily into student writing. Arguing against desegregation in the Dec. 13, 1952 issue of The Exonian, Richard S. Arnold ’53, future chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, wrote that there was no legal justification to desegregate schools. “The ‘separate but equal’ doctrine has been accepted in constitutional law since 1896. Why should there be a radical departure from established policy now, especially since such a departure would be extremely difficult to enforce?” Arnold wrote.
Arnold continued that, because the question of segregation was a state matter, “the Supreme Court most certainly [had] no call to overrule it… It will be far better for the South and for the country as a whole if the Supreme Court refuses to meddle in purely local affairs.”
The landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education ruled racial segregation in public schools as unconstitutional on May 17, 1954. The following September, Principal William G. Saltonstall released a statement in response. Saltonstall wrote that Exeter was “equally open to youth of requisite qualification from every quarter… it is strange that equality of opportunity has been denied to the N-gro in so many of our public schools.”
However, an anonymous student submitted an op-ed to The Exonian the following week, arguing that Saltonstall did not have the authority to make this statement. “Does the administration of PEA—a school in a state which actually has less than one thousandth as many N-groes as private school supporter Virginia—have the right to make this implied, criticism of the South?” the writer challenged. “Statistics say no. Although N-groes comprise ten per cent of the U.S. population, they comprise only a fraction of a percent of the students at Exeter and zero percent of the faculty.”
“Before Exeter can consider itself a ‘national school’ in every sense, integrated enough to criticize other schools, its percentage of N-groes should be somewhat more comparable to the national figure,” the student continued.
While arguing for the further integration of Black students on campus, the writer believed that it would be “unquestionably difficult” to convince Black students to attend Exeter. He then suggested “diverting some of [Exeter’s] available scholarship funds and efforts, away from finding Middle Western whites who have never heard of Exeter, toward finding Southern N-groes who have never heard of prep schools.”
“Although Tanser’s study of Black children in Kent County, Ontario, Canada… did conclusively show that the average N-gro I.Q. was 89 and the average white I.Q. 104, close to ten percent of the N-groes studied had I.Q.’s above the 115 theoretically required for adequate college work,” the writer wrote. “If Southern facilities for N-gro education are as poor as the North seems to claim, Exeter could serve the country by finding some of this ten per cent of N-groes and educating them.”
On Oct. 31, 1951, The Exonian covered future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s visit to campus. Marshall was then at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Defense Fund, which he founded. At Exeter, he urged “having the first colored law and college students admitted to southern universities in cases that went to the Supreme Court.” The Exonian applauded his “wide experience as a traveler and a lecturer.”
History Department
The newspaper also covered the controversy surrounding History Instructor Henry W. Bragdon’s American history textbook in the Jan. 29, 1955 issue. “He had to ‘adjust’ his book, he said, in order to please the market,” The Exonian wrote. “He was obliged to call the Civil War the ‘War Between the States’ to please the South, and he had to include at least one Jew and one N-gro in the text for the Revolutionary period. But he pointed out that his book may be pleasing the market in a way which he did not intend and which he does not like.”
The History Department announced a new course in East Asian History a few months later. On April 23, 1955, The Exonian wrote that the need of the course was to show “that the History Department is willing to flex with the needs of the present. The writers noted how the school’s ‘red friends’ take advantage of this area and due to this there is a ‘crying need for such a course now.’”
Published Jan. 29, 1955.
“Asian Flu” and Racism Against Asians
The Academy hosted guest speaker Dashane Ranjan Bose, whom The Exonian described as having a “keen Asian mind,” on Sep. 26, 1956. The school believed that “it was highly informative for students to talk personally and candidly with such a distinguished representative of a culture which is important in the world today, but very obscure to most Americans.”
Two years later, America suffered through an influenza pandemic from 1957-1958, which accounted for 70,000 to 116,000 American deaths. The Exonian covered many of the cancellations due to the pandemic.
Along with the rest of the nation, The Exonian consistently used the term “Asian flu” to describe the virus. For example, on Oct. 26, 1957, The Exonian wrote “The PEA Medical Department announced Monday it would offer shots of Asian Flu vaccine to students, faculty, and members of the maintenance, dining hall, and laundry staffs.”
The 1950s saw the landmark decision of Brown v. Board, which integrated public schools. Exeter, however, remained predominantly white in the years before the 1960s, a national decade of action.