The Breeze JMU experts uncover racist history of college yearbooks

By MORGAN BLAIR The Breeze

JMU sociology professor Stephen Poulson has taken it upon himself to shed light onto dark history in Virginia colleges, and he said he’s using the schools’ own yearbooks to do so.

Poulson went through the old yearbooks of multiple Virginia colleges and said he looked for examples of racism and racist imagery in them. In some of JMU’s old yearbooks, he found many examples of blackface and racial slurs, as well as some glorification of racist acts. These can be seen in JMU Libraries’ Special Collections archives.

“I’d say if the scrapbook we receive is pre-1950, I’m more surprised if I don’t find something problematic than if I do,” Tiffany Cole, an archivist at JMU’s Office of Special Collections, said.

Poulson said he first became interested in finding examples of racist acts depicted in yearbooks, particularly of white students in blackface, after it was reported by The New York Times in 2019 that former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam appeared in blackface in his own college yearbook at Eastern Virginia Medical School.

“There was the picture of someone [later revealed to be Northam] dressed in blackface beside another man dressed as a member of the KKK,” Poulson said. “That kind of precipitated this investigation.” see YEARBOOKS, page 10

Poulson’s book, “Racism on Campus: A Visual History of Prominent Virginia Colleges and Howard University,” explores examples of blackface and other racist depictions in college yearbooks. He studied the old yearbooks of Virginia colleges like Old Dominion University, University of Virginia (U.Va.), Longwood, Washington and Lee, as well as JMU, and compared them to that of Howard University, a historically Black college (HBCU).

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