(From left) Ja’ Nesse Jefferson, Erika Neal, Chelsea Higgs Wise and Briana Harris (Photo by Jay Paul)
Briana Harris, a junior political science major at Virginia State University, points out a photo in the 1969 Hollins College Spinster: On a spread labeled “Freshman Follies,” someone appears in blackface as a “Mammy” caricature, mouth open wide in an expression of surprise.
As one of five VSU students chosen last spring to find and catalog racist images in Virginia college yearbooks, Harris says that the image is far from an anomaly. “It was something that people just did.”
In February, a group of Richmond activists started a crowdfunding project that raised $7,000 to pay students at historically black colleges and universities $25 an hour to look through Virginia yearbooks and create an archive of offensive images. The effort follows the controversy involving a photo on Gov. Ralph Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook page depicting a person in blackface and another person in a Ku Klux Klan costume.
It wasn’t just blackface in the yearbooks, students learned. Erika Neal, a senior majoring in political science, found an illustration in a 1922 University of Richmond yearbook of an elegantly dressed woman wearing a conical “rice hat” familiar in Southeast Asian countries, looking down and appearing to serve a tray of fruit. It was the opening image for the faculty section.
“That’s when I realized this project was more than just the black experience, but all minorities,” Neal says.
RVA Dirt, a group of three women who cover city politics on their website and in the “Municipal Mania” show on WRIR 97.3 FM, teamed with community organizer Chelsea Higgs Wise, host of “Race Capitol” on WRIR, to raise money and oversee the project, which ran through May.
On a shared spreadsheet, students listed images by college, year, page number and description. They examined hardcover yearbooks from the Library of Virginia, as well as some yearbooks available online. Organizers expect to make their findings public in September, and produce a radio report by early June. See chelseahiggswise.com/racecapitol.
In April, Hollins President Pareena Lawrence decided to pull several yearbooks containing racist images, including the one from 1969, from an online archive temporarily “to limit the damage and pain those depictions might cause.” The move prompted university librarians and others to object; it was reversed a few days later.
That incident proved the value of documenting yearbook images, Neal says, “before the opportunity has been taken away.”
