Judith Hall Howard ’73

By MOKSHA AKIL, INDRANI BASU, TINA HUANG, SELIM KIM and ELLIE ANA SPERANTSAS

Staff Writers

When Judy Hall Howard ’73 attended the Academy, she was one of around 60 Black students on campus. However, when she visited campus again when her cousin, eleven years her junior, attended Exeter, she noticed that fewer Black students attended the Academy. “I’d call this institutionalized racism,” Howard said. “If there was true diversity, there’s no reason we wouldn’t have more Black faculty and more Black students.”

Howard was part of the Academy’s first group of eighty boarding women, joining forty day student girls. Of all the female students at the Academy, only nine were Black. 

The Exeter Experience

Prior to Exeter, Howard attended an all-girls private school in Massachusetts. She cited Exeter’s larger Black student population as her primary reason for transferring schools. 

Howard recalled one of her first trips to the Academy as a prospective student. “I came up to Exeter for my interview,” Howard said. “My tour guide was an African American boy who I became friends and kept in contact with before I got admitted. I remember thinking ‘this is great’ right from the get-go.” 

However, after attending the Academy, Howard acknowledged that “Exeter was no study on the hill.”

“There was an assumption that we should’ve just blended in,” she said. “They were thinking more about enriching the boys and the white students than they were about how the female students and the students of color were feeling with being others in this ratified environment.”

As she dealt with her identity as a Black student, Howard grappled with being one of the first women at the Academy. Howard believed the school initially treated coeducation as an “experiment.”

During Howard’s time, Bancroft and Hoyt Hall were the only two girls’ dorms. “They put the girls on opposite sides of the campus and divided the Black girls 50-50 between the dorms,” Howard said. “If you put four Black girls in one dorm and four in the other, they’re not automatically going to gel and become friends.” 

“When I moved into Bancroft, they had not removed the urinals,” Howard said. “They took plywood with a lock on them to cover the urinals and put cubbies on top for our toothbrushes. It was almost like they were saying, ‘We’re not going to get rid of these urinals because let’s see if this coed thing is going to work out or not.’ It had a temporary feel, and they didn’t make an effort to have a complete change until some years later.” 

During her time at the Academy, Howard was involved in multiple campus clubs, including the school’s radio station, WPEA. “It was me and a group of white guys on the WPEA board,” Howard said. “I have a picture of us together—I think it really captures Exeter at that time.” 

At the station, Howard started a radio show called Kid Korner, where she read stories and played music for faculty and local children. “There was a very small group of people who did [WPEA], and we loved it,” she said.

Howard was also a member of DRAMAT. “They really welcomed us when Exeter went co-ed,” she said. “It opened up many opportunities for shows you could do. You could have girls act instead of prep boys who had those high voices. I spent more time in the Fisher Theater, which opened my senior year in 1972, than any other place on campus. ” 

The theater’s inaugural performance was of West Side Story. “If you knew anything about West Side Story, you knew there were no people to play half the roles who had the background to do so,” Howard said. “The person who played Anita was a blonde; they put her in a brown wig and what in hindsight was basically Blackface, or brownface—they used dark makeup to make her look Puerto Rican. An African American guy played one of the other leads, Bernando, but the other kids of color in the show were in the background.” 

In her upper year, Howard and other Black students lobbied for a Cultural Center for the Afro-Exonian Society. “[We] hosted a conference for Black students who attended New England prep schools,” she said. “Leroi Jones, the famous poet, spoke at this conference. Imagine—a bunch of Black men in afros, leather jackets and shades coming to Exeter, New Hampshire. That was pretty amazing for the time.”

Faculty

“The teachers were the ones who voted on whether Exeter should be co-ed,” Howard continued. “When I got on campus, one teacher came up to me and said, ‘I just wanted to let you know that I voted against co-education. I don’t want you to be here.’”

When Howard attended the Academy, there were only four Black faculty members. “There was a Caribbean Spanish teacher—it was her first year and she wasn’t assigned a dorm,” Howard said. “If you didn’t take Spanish, you wouldn’t even know who she was.”

English Instructor Bill Bolden was another Black faculty member. “If you talk to Black people who went to Exeter in the late 60s and early 70s, they’ll talk about Bill Bolden,” Howard said. “Mr. Bolden was like an uncle and second dad to some people.” Howard had her sixteenth birthday party at Boulden’s apartment. 

“[Mr. Bolden] was very grateful that Exeter became co-ed,” Howard said. “I think it was because his daughter Sybil, who went to Exeter High, could see more girls who looked like her. When I visited [Exeter] to see the unveiling of Mr. Bolden’s portrait in the Assembly Hall, Sybil was also there. It had been 20 years since I last saw her, but she remembered me. That showed me how important representation is; how important it was for her to have Exeter be co-ed.”

Admissions officer Haywood “Woody” Torrence, the third Black faculty member, later became a government teacher in the Fairfax County Public School System, where Howard’s daughter went to school. “During one parent teacher conference, he took all the public school desks and put them in an oval, and he looked at me and winked and said, ‘You know what I’m talking about.’ He’s one of my few ongoing Exeter connections,” Howard said. 

The fourth Black faculty member was Dolores Kendrick, a poet, playwright and English teacher at the Academy. Kendrick produced her own play during Howard’s senior year; it featured several Black students.

Another teacher who impacted Howard was History Instructor Jack Herney, with whom she still keeps in touch. “On some levels, I found a voice at Exeter, and Jack Herney was a teacher who really made a big difference for me,” she said. Howard took American history with Herney and recalled that she was quiet in class. “In [the U.S. History] class, we were finally having a discussion about slavery, and some kid made some stupid racist remark, and that’s when I started talking.” 

Reflecting on the Academy

Howard has kept up with the Instagram account @BlackatExeter and noted how the situations described in the posts could have happened in the seventies. “That makes me sad because, 50 years later, we should be beyond this kind of stuff,” she said. 

There should have been a better support system for minority students during her time at the Academy, Howard said. “Few people thought to make sure you were okay, to look at the many other ways that you might feel like another in your daily life at Exeter… I have not one fond memory of most of the faculty members in my dorm. I didn’t feel that faculty supported students equally. I can look back as an adult and say, ‘That shouldn’t happen, and if it’s still happening, it’s a problem.’” 

“When I look at @BlackatExeter now, and I see some of the same things I remember are still happening, I just want to shake someone and yell, ‘What are you doing?’” Howard said.

Howard noted that the experiences alumni of color had at the Academy will continue to stick with them. “If you look at the Exeter Bulletin when a reunion is coming up, there’s always a page saying ‘Does anybody know where these people are?’ and the lists are mostly students of color or people who had been kicked out,” Howard said.

Howard has never attended one of her class reunions. 

Going Forward

After graduating from Exeter, Howard attended Yale University and later Harvard Law School. A retired lawyer and school system administrator, she continues her work in advocating for minority student achievement in the Fairfax County Public School System. “Our public school system, if it already isn’t, will soon be majority students of color, but 80% of the faculty in the nation’s 10 largest school systems are white,” Howard said.

47 years after her graduation, Howard commented on the Academy’s lack of diversity in both its student body and faculty. “There’s no excuse for a private school with its latitude—and its ability to recruit students—to not do a far better job than a public school,” Howard said. “[Exeter] should look at their student body as not only representative of the national community they draw on, but the global community as well.”

Additionally, Howard called for the facilitation of a network of alumni of color. “I know not everyone wants to come to Exeter, New Hampshire, but that’s why [Exeter] need[s] to tap into their alumni network,” Howard said. “There are alumni of color who have done extraordinary things that they could reach out to, but they’ve never done that. I’d like to see that happen.”

“I think students of color at the Academy would like to know more about who came before them—to meet those people,” Howard continued. “Exeter has been very good at the boy network, the old white-boy network. But they haven’t made the effort to facilitate or encourage other networks. And unless they facilitate them, there’s no way they can happen.”

The Academy cannot simply move on from @BlackatExeter, Howard concluded. “@BlackatExeter should be a wakeup call,” Howard said. “[Exeter] should be proactive instead of reactive. They should know that even the people who seem involved still have moments when they feel separate and apart.”