02/21/16
For the past four weeks, my fellow classmates and I initiated our special topics course, “The Black Experience at Amherst College,” by engaging with literature already written on the topic as well as familiarizing ourselves with Amherst’s available archival resources. We also agreed upon Black Men of Amherst College by Harold Wade Jr. ‘68 and Black Women of Amherst College by former Amherst history professor Mavis C. Campbell as “foundational texts” that we as a research group would explore collectively before delving into our individualized projects. I found this approach to a special topics course with multiple students quite useful and unifying since we now all share a common body of knowledge despite how our research trajectories have already started to diverge.
After reading Black Men of Amherst College, I felt extremely empowered by Amherst’s enduring legacy of black alumni who have enrolled since the 1820s, the decade of the College’s founding. In particular, I am fascinated by the story of Edward Jones, the College’s first black graduate, who successfully received his diploma in 1826 and continued to influence his nation and the world while many other blacks throughout the United States were still bound in chains. I am not suggesting that the struggles of student of color today should not be subject to proper amelioration with steadfast determination. Indeed, the horrors of the past should never be an excuse for activism and social change in the present. Yet, I am still humbled by those black Amherst alumni who walked through this campus at a time when some American states still sanctioned the dehumanizing institution of slavery. What would it have been like as a black Amherst student in antebellum America to share the same social and intellectual spaces as classmates whose parents could very well have owned people who looked just like you?
Thus, after learning about each remarkable generation of black Amherst students from decade to decade, choosing a particular topic naturally proved quite difficult. There is quite a bit of material that Wade either chose not to research or include in his study. Wade’s exploration of black history at his alma mater did not incorporate any critical reflection of black faculty and staff, not even in regard to their relationship with the student body. (Fortunately, Head Archivist Mike Kelly unearthed the forgotten story of one campus groundskeeper or custodian who was condescendingly referred to as “Professor Charley” by Amherst students in the nineteenth century. This supposedly innocuous nickname quickly reveals itself to be problematic when considering the irony that a black man could never aspire to be a professor at the College at that time.) Although I am not following through with an in-depth study of the non-student black experience at Amherst, I think the case of Professor Charley merits a reflection from me at the very least for our course website by the end of the semester.
Ultimately, I decided to investigate the large contingent of black Amherst alumni since the turn of the twentieth century who all originated from the same high school in Washington D.C. Dunbar High School, a then prestigious pubic school for D.C.’s black population, essentially became a feeder school for Amherst. Why and how did so many black students end up enrolling to Amherst from Dunbar?
The topic actually first entered my mind a couple years ago after reading Alison Stewart’s First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School. Stewart’s mentioning of famous black history-makers like Charles Drew (Class of 1926) going from Dunbar to Amherst stayed dormant in my mind. However, the topic was reawakened after I read Black Men of Amherst College in which Wade comments on the College’s deans planning special visits to Dunbar to recruit the best and brightest of D.C.’s young black scholars. Additionally, on a personal level, it was incredible for me to check out a secondary text from 1965, The Dunbar Story (1870-1955) by Dunbar teacher Mary Gibson Hundley and see my grandfather, Nathaniel Randolph (born in 1925), a World War II veteran, mentioned as one of the Dunbar students who entered the Armed Forces the summer after his graduation in 1943.
Last week, I began searching the biographical records in the College’s Archives to learn about some of these Dunbar Men of Amherst, as I like to refer to them. Each Amherst student has a “bio file” which can include various documents from photographs to obituaries. I learned that William Tecumseh Sherman Jackson (Amherst Class of 1892) became the president of M Street High School (which would later become Dunbar in the early twentieth century). According to one 2007 article from the College’s magazine, “At Dunbar, Jackson taught mathematics and coached sports for 38 years. He served as the school’s principal from 1906 to 1909. He shepherded many of his students to Amherst, which graduated more Dunbar students than any other college outside of the nation’s capital…It was Jackson who convinced Charles Hamilton Houston, Class of 1915, to attend Amherst.” [1] Thus, W.T.S. Jackson is clearly the necessary starting point for my investigation of the Dunbar-Amherst connection because he begins a cycle of Dunbar students choosing Amherst to continue their educational journeys.
This past weekend, thanks to a text-searchable PDF of biographical records from the Archives, I successfully tracked down several alumni who attended Dunbar High School. I found twenty-eight individuals so far (with class years ranging from 1892 to 1964) and created a spreadsheet to organize these alumni and document biographical data points such as their Amherst class year and career fields. In the coming weeks, I want to start thinking about potential digital tools that would allow me to map and represent my quantitative and qualitative data.
Eventually, I would like to reach out to the Digital Programs staff of Frost Library for guidance but in the meantime I believe it is important that I continue to explore archival material and collect more data about the Dunbar Men of Amherst. Indeed, there are many more questions to ask: Did any Dunbar graduates attend Amherst after 1964? Did post-civil rights era Dunbar ironically suffer because of integration? If so, what effect did this have on Dunbar’s academic caliber and the future of the Dunbar-Amherst connection?
[1] Albright, Evan J. “A Slice of History.” Amherst Magazine. 2007.
< https://www.amherst.edu/amherst story/magazine/issues/2007_winter/blazing/slice>