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Old Gold&Black
WAKE FOREST’S STUDENT NEWSPAPER SINCE 1916 VOL. 105, NO. 5
T H U R S DAY, F E B RUA RY 14 , 2 019 “Cover s the campus like the magnolias”
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Ron Stallworth visits Wake Forest The inspiration behind the new motion picture BlacKkKlansman addresses campus community BY LILY WALTER Staff Writer waltm15@wfu.edu
Attorney General of Virginia, Mark Herring, has also admitted to dressing in blackface in the past. In the wake of these instances, other universities such as UVA and UNC have begun audits of their own yearbooks. Between 1903, when the first issue of the Howler was published, and 1987, there are a range of references to lynching, the KKK and other racial slurs in the text. The old editions also include photos of students dressed in blackface, KKK-style uniforms and Confederate flags. The instances of individuals wearing blackface show up most prominently between 1952 and 1979. In a photo from the latter year, two students are shown dressed in blackface and holding lanterns with the caption: “All and all the complexion of the campus changes drastically as students dress up and parade to parties.”
On Thursday, Feb. 7, Wait Chapel was filled with students and community members alike to hear from Ron Stallworth, the man behind Spike Lee’s most recent film BlacKkKlansman. Stallworth is known for his undercover police investigation into the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the 1970s, a story immortalized in his memoir Black Klansman, and then again in Lee’s 2018 film. Invited here as a keynote speaker for Black History Month, Stallworth’s visit was co-hosted by the Department of Sociology and the Intercultural Center. After his speech, he stayed in Wait Chapel for a book signing. Wearing a shirt that read “Inside a Black Man’s Mind,” and a headset microphone, Stallworth opted to walk freely around the front of Wait Chapel. He then set about walking the audience through the step-by-step version of what his experience infiltrating the KKK was like. Stallworth’s investigation began in 1978 with a simple phone call as a response to an ad he saw in the paper for the Klan. According to Stallworth, the Klan had had an important role in Colorado politics in the 1920s and was trying to regain a hold in his area. After chatting with the Klan member, Stallworth gave his actual name and the undercover office’s phone number. He recalled being surprised when the Klan called him back a few weeks later using his own name, but immediately saw the opportunity to gain more information. He spoke with his partner Chuck, who was white, and the two set off on their now-famous project to infiltrate the KKK. Chuck was Ron in person, Ron was Ron over the phone, and the Klan members never differentiated between the two. Over the course of their investigation, Stallworth and his coworkers were able to expose Klan members in the military, thwart cross-burnings and ultimately prevent the KKK from gaining a foothold in Colorado again.
See Howler, Page 6
See Stallworth, Page 5
Photos courtesy of the Howler
(Left) Students wear blackface for a carnival in 1967. (Top right) A group of male students in blackface perform in 1977. (Bottom right) A man in blackface poses with an individual in a KKK-like hood at a Sigma Pi event in 1976.
Photos of blackface addressed The university released a statement on the discovery of racist references in the Howler BY OLIVIA FIELD News Editor fielor17@wfu.edu
Following racist scandals involving Virginian politicians, the university addressed the presence of racist references and photographs in old editions of the Howler, as similar photographs surface in the yearbooks of other universities. Released on Feb. 8, the official statement given by the university discussed President Nathan Hatch’s condemnation of blackface, the university’s role in the consortium of Universities Studying Slavery and the commission of a historian to complete a more full documentation of Wake Forest’s history. “In times like these — times of ‘government scandal’ or ‘national
tragedies’ or ‘challenges to civility and democracy’ or ‘searching for solutions to grand problems’ or, in the case of this past week, ‘reckoning with historical, persistent and systemic racism’ — it becomes a moral imperative that Wake Forest commit time, space and facilitation for conversation, as well as action,” said José Villalba, vice president of Diversity and Inclusion and chief diversity officer for Wake Forest. On Feb. 1, a photograph surfaced of two men, one dressed as a member of the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) and one dressed in blackface, that appears on the yearbook page of Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia from his medical school days. Although he has gone back and forth on whether or not he was in the photograph, he claimed to have previously dressed in blackface. The photograph has caused a lot of backlash, but Northam has insisted that he will not resign. In addition, the