September 18, 2014
On Thursday, September 11, students, faculty and staff crowded into the Red Pit to hear Professor of Classics and Africana Studies Shelley Haley speak about the history of diversity and inclusion at Hamilton College. The lecture gave insight into the College’s interactions with nonconformist students, students of color, female students and groups affiliated with issues of diversity.
Haley prefaced her lecture by explaining, “It is very easy to suppress people from the past…who we don’t like.” She went on to state, “Histories are annihilated,” citing the lost identity of Sally Hemings and the misconstrued glorification of the Louisiana Purchase as examples. Haley pointed out that histories can also be misunderstood or forgotten at academic institutions. “We constantly reinvent the wheel, and old issues seem new,” she said. “This is what has happened with diversity and inclusion at Hamilton College.”
Haley began her presentation on the history of diversity and inclusion at Hamilton by reading a passage from Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History Maurice Isserman’s book On the Hill: A Bicentennial History of Hamilton College, which discusses the racial diversity of the Hamilton-Oneida Academy. However, this experiment in interracial education was not successful whatsoever. From its inception, the Hamilton-Oneida Academy struggled with cultural differences: Haley explained that while Reverend Samuel Kirkland expected to be teaching men, Chief Skenandoa sent girls to the Academy, as he believed that women should be educated in order to be in charge of policy-making.
After the Hamilton-Oneida Academy dissolved, the newly formed Hamilton College admitted very few people of color until the latter half of the 20th century. Even so, students were very involved in the abolition movement in the first part of the 19th century; Oneida County itself was known as a “hotbed” for abolitionism. Students’ activism was not received well, however. Haley read a document from the Library Archives highlighting how donors to the College threatened to stop providing funding if students continued to fight for the cause of abolition. Haley then read the March 2014 letter from Hamilton’s current Board of Trustees regarding divestment, in which the Trustees claimed that the College’s main objective is education, not activism or “ends other than academic,” because education is “a public good in itself.” As Haley stated after reading the 2014 letter, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Haley then discussed the lives of the few African American students who attended Hamilton in the late 19th and early 20th century. Joseph Lee Spurlake, the first African American student to graduate from Hamilton, graduated in 1889. “When was Hamilton founded?” Haley asked. She then sarcastically answered, “You do the math.” When Spurlake’s picture was finally hung in the library in the late 20th century, students defaced it by taping a used sanitary napkin on it.
The Class of 1923 admitted six African Americans, most likely because these men had served in World War I. “They did not have a happy time,” said Haley, who read a letter that two of the men had written to President Elihu Root. The students expressed their discontent with the racist attitudes of white students and faculty at the College. “We know that the entrance of four Negro students last year did not meet with the unanimous approval of the Faculty,” the letter, written by Roy A. Ellis, said. The letter went on to state, “We risked our lives for Democracy; we are American citizens, and are not to be insulted or ridiculed because of the unfortunate conditions of servitude of our forefathers or because of the hue of our skin.”
As decades went on, attitudes toward diversity and inclusion improved. Haley showed the audience a Spectator article from 1960 with a front-page headline titled “College Students Picket, Demonstrate Disapproval of Southern Segregation.” Students went to Woolworth’s in Utica to protest their discriminatory practices toward African American customers.
In 1970, the Higher Education Opportunities Program (HEOP) came to Hamilton, and in 1980, Phyllis Breland became the first woman of color to graduate from Hamilton. Breland went on to become both the first woman and woman of color class speaker, and she is now the Director of Opportunities Programs at the College. The 1990s and early 2000s brought a slew of cultural diversity groups to campus, including SHARP (Students at Hamilton Against Racism and Prejudice) and a campaign to get a cultural diversity center on campus, which resulted in what is now the Days-Massolo Center. Haley highlighted the efforts of The Movement and Divestment Club as continued diversity and inclusion activism on campus.
In conclusion, Haley stated that Hamilton has come a very long way with diversity and inclusion issues, but “It’s what we do with that diversity and inclusion” that matters. She went on to tell the students in the audience, “You’re continuing in a very proud tradition. You should keep doing it,” because “grown-ups are scared…they don’t want to do it because, gee, it could hurt the endowment.”
Haley’s lecture did not just give audience members insight into Hamilton’s history: her speech was also a rally for current students to reclaim the College’s troubled, racist and sexist past and harness the spirit of those dissenting groups that dared to challenge the College’s status quo.
No comments yet.
Comment Guidelines
Please log in to post a comment