Dolores T. Kendrick

By ANVI BHATE, GRACE KEYT, ANNA KIM, SAFIRA SCHIOWITZ, CLARK WU and AUDREY ZHANG

Staff Writers

“My family did this amazing thing—they never sat me down and told me that I should see racism as something I would have to fight for the rest of my life,” English Instructor Dolores T. Kendrick said. 

After growing up in Washington, D.C., however, Kendrick came to Exeter and waged this fight. One of the Academy’s earliest and longest serving Black female instructors, Kendrick was honored with the only portrait of a woman of color currently hanging in the Assembly Hall, cementing her status as one of Exeter’s movers and shakers. 

Kendrick’s mother, Farai Chiedya, was a local music teacher who co-wrote a hit song in the 1940s for jazz crooner Billy Eckstine. Kendrick’s father, publisher Robert “Ike” Kendrick, founded Capitol Sunlight, a popular Black weekly newspaper. 

Though her father wanted to pass down his newspaper business, Kendrick saw that “there was no world for a Black woman to be in the newspaper industry at that time. I knew I was going to college to become a teacher.” 

Kendrick started teaching at the Academy in May 1972, just two years after the first female students enrolled. “It was a tougher time, I was a double minority,” she said.

“They were teaching Black writers. What happened was that, after I came into the department, we got into more women writers,” Kendrick recalled. 

One of Kendrick’s primary missions at the Academy was making the English curriculum more inclusive. “I said, let’s integrate our traditional teaching with contemporary works. We brought in Native American, Asian writers,” Kendrick said. “And with that more women came in. We finally started discussions of who we were teaching and how we were teaching it.”

“This was not all a bed of roses because I’m not sure that all teachers, not even the women, wanted to step in that direction,” Kendrick said. 

Her attempts to move the English Department in new directions meant standing up for herself to male colleagues. “You had to prove yourself in a way that male colleagues did not,” she told The Exonian in 1990. “Many times a woman would bring up a new idea and nobody would pay any attention to it, but two or three minutes later a man would bring it up and it would be well received. That would happen a great deal.”

Loneliness and isolation were also common in the Academy’s male-dominated environment. In fact, none of the women hired in 1968 and 1971 remained at the school two decades later. Even with a desire to remain and succeed, accomplishment in the male hierarchy remained an extremely intense uphill battle.

The female faculty who stayed, including Kendrick and former Dean of Students Susan Herney, developed their own “support network of friends,” mostly from teaching at Exeter Summer School.

Kendrick played an instrumental role in establishing racial justice programs at the Academy. “She was a champion in the battle to fight prejudice,” then-Assistant Principal Thomas Hassan said in 2002.

In 2011, English Instructors Mercy Carbonell and the late Christine Robinson wrote about Kendrick’s major role in laying the groundwork for the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations in The Exeter Bulletin. “She and [Barbara] James formed the Minority Support Group, which designed, in 1984, a symposium—including speakers, films, photo exhibits and discussions—which would take place between January and April of 1985,” they wrote. 

Kendrick also supported the Robbins Memorial Symposium, an annual event which aimed to “revive the culture of the original indigenous people in America.” “[It] empowers what we do in the classroom with Native American literature,” Kendrick said. “I hope to see more of this in the future because this culture is older than, and has an influence, on ours.”

Kendrick’s commitment to inclusion including awareness of faith. “Traditionally, students had called the week before grades ‘Holy Week’ because of the large number of exams given,” Kendrick said. “It had become a part of official school vocabulary and appeared on school calendars and schedules.”

Kendrick saw the phrase as “thoughtless and inappropriate.” “We do not recognize the actual holy week in the school calendar and leave students to obtain permission from the executive committee in order to participate in a very sacred and important Christian liturgy that is rightfully theirs,” she said. 

After a unanimous vote was cast among the faculty, “Holy Week” was no longer official school terminology.

While teaching at Exeter, Kendrick was recognized for her remarkable poetry through the Yaddo residency for artists in Saratoga Springs, New York. She was elected twice, in the summers of 1985 and 1986. Notable artists who have taken part in the residency include William Carol Williams, John Cheaver and Truman Capote. 

During her time at Yaddo in 1985, Kendrick began working on her book of poetry, which projected the voices of Black slave women. This book, later published as The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women, won the Anisfield-Wolf Award, which recognizes literary works that have significantly contributed to our collective understanding of racism and appreciation of cultural diversity.

On April 5, 2002, Kendrick performed a poetry reading for the Exeter community. Students noted her unique reading style and manner of presenting: she assumed the role and voice of her characters. In one of her poems, she adopted the voice of a enslaved mother who drowned her children, desperate to help them avoid a life in slavery.

After retiring from the Academy, Kendrick was named the second Poet Laureate of the District of Columbia. She hosted events throughout the city, including a day devoted to African American poetry during Black History Month. She also developed and managed the Young Champion Poets Program, which provides local young poets the opportunity to write and perform their own work. Kendrick served until her death in Nov. 2017.

She also helped found D.C.’s School Without Walls, a highly rated public magnet school.

This school was born out of a unique idea of non-traditional learning in a regular office building, amidst other workers. 

Kendrick also worked for the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, which works to organize free events to the community, provide funding and grants, and make art accessible to all. Kendrick specifically worked on developing programs for students and for poets.

As the Poet Laureate of the District of Columbia, Kendrick spoke and read her work at the National Book Festivals, organized by the Library of Congress. It was at the 2005 Festival where she was recognized as the “poet gift of Washington, D.C.” 

Kendrick became the first woman to retire from the Academy’s faculty. After she left, she became the Vera I. Heinz Professor Emerita. In 1998, her portrait was hung on the west center wall of the Assembly Hall. She remains the only woman of color whose portrait is included in that space.

On May 1, 1998, The Exonian reported on the portrait’s unveiling. “April 25,1998 was a memorable weekend for many as the unveiling of the portrait of Ms. Dolores Theresa Kendrick took place at the library at three o’clock in the afternoon,” The Exonian read. The portrait, by artist Numael Pulido, took a year to complete and was financed by Patrick O’Donnell, spouse of former Principal Kendra Stearns O’Donnell.

Kendrick’s legacy lives on in those that she has touched with her words and the many initiatives and organizations she founded during her lifetime. She will forever be known as a pioneer and inspiration. “I was taught to value myself as an individual, to value myself as a person,” Kendrick once said in an interview with the National Visionary Leadership Project. She made it her life’s mission to teach others to do the same.