JMU staff uses yearbooks, scrapbooks to uncover dark parts of school history

slave-run plantation society.

Poulson said JMU’s yearbooks had some problematic content, but yearbooks at universities like U.Va. were more extreme.

“In [the yearbooks of] the University of Virginia for example, we really found some extraordinary content as it relates to caricatures,” Poulson said. “There were some really dramatic representations of violence being perpetrated by the KKK, for example.”

After the class ended, Poulson said, he still felt drawn to the project. He said he continued his work, finding himself unable to turn away from the old yearbooks.

Cole spends a lot of her time doing the same thing in her work as an archivist, except with documents that have a connection to JMU and the wider Rockingham County area, including the school’s old yearbooks and scrapbooks donated by alumni from various student organizations.

“At Special Collections, we document local history in addition to the history of the university,” Cole said. “We do our very best to document the history of the university, and this history is very complicated. There are troubling parts of the university’s history. We do not want to whitewash any parts of the history — it is what it is.”

Cole said she feels it’s part of Special Collections’ job to explore all sides of the university’s history, even the delicate parts, using the immense collection of records at their disposal.

“The documentary record can help us to kind of flush out some of these more problematic parts of our history,” Cole said. “It is our job to tell the good, the bad and the ugly — everything: the triumphs of all student experiences, but also the troubling parts as well.”

Among the old yearbooks and scrapbooks in Special Collections, Cole said there are examples of racist caricatures and racist language, such as racial slurs, to the point where she has a list just for the yearbooks that contain blackface. She also said there are countless scrapbooks donated by alumni that contain similar racist caricatures.

“I’m surprised if I don’t see a confederate flag,” Cole said, “or if the student wasn’t a member of the Lee Literary Society or if there isn’t some kind of reference to a minstrel show” — a performance often containing stereotypes about Black people performed by white actors in blackface, according to Britannica.

Literary societies like the Lee Literary Society, which took its namesake from Confederate general Robert E. Lee, are some of the groups, Poulson said, that help teach what he called the “racialized ordering” of the world at that time, referring to the segregation and the general ideas of racial superiority that were prominent in the South during that period.

Meg Mulrooney, the vice provost for academic programs and equity, chair of JMU’s Campus History Committee and a professor of history, said the school’s old literary societies were social clubs that students had to be approved to get into and served as exclusionary and elite groups for students at the school.

“They functioned very similarly [to Greek life organizations] in creating, sort of, cliques,” Mulrooney said. “They had hazing rituals and they had bids, so you had to be accepted.”

A more direct connection to this time exists in the school’s buildings, like the dorm Garber Hall, for example, which was named after Dorothy Spooner Garber.

Garber, who once served as Madison College’s Dean of Women, is mentioned in the Special Collections’ copy of the first volume of “The Virginia Teacher.” In the educationfocused periodical’s school activities section, Garber’s listed as being part of the minstrel show “A Dark Night at the Normal” while she was a student at the former State Normal School for Women, which was later renamed James Madison University.

Cole said while there are no pictures of Garber doing blackface herself, there are pictures of previous stagings of this exact show, all featuring blackface.

One major impact of these depictions, Poulson said, is that many of the students in Garber’s graduating class were training to be teachers and therefore took these ideas they learned and brought them “back out into the world” and into their own classrooms.

The Breeze itself participated in these depictions at one time. In 1954, three white students in blackface were featured on The Breeze’s front page, and two articles, one from 1953 and the other from 1979, both featured students in blackface as well. This, Mulrooney said, was a reflection not of one individual’s problematic views, but of a culture as a whole and the people — both staff and students — who let this culture continue.

“The Breeze was reflecting culture the same way that the yearbooks were,” Mulrooney said. “Both publications had to be approved by the faculty and staff. It didn’t have the independence it does now. Really, from its founding in the ’20s through the 1960s and ’70s, it was considered an organ of the institution.”

Poulson said one of the things that make these representations troublesome is the fact that they were coming from a teacher’s college, because teachers often influence the world around them.

“You have a culture that normalized racism, and these institutions of higher education reinforcing those ideas,” Poulson said. “That was what was unnerving. While these places might have been progressive in terms of the way people think about the education of women, for example, they were some of the worst places in the country in terms of the maintenance of ideas that supported segregation.”

Mulrooney said JMU has taken steps toward rectifying the troubling parts of its past. Since 2017, JMU has had its Task Force on Racial Equity that makes recommendations to the university for how to better accommodate marginalized students. In addition, Mulrooney said JMU switching from its own application website to the Common App is another big step because it makes it much easier for potential students who may come from varying backgrounds and levels of internet access or financial status to apply to the university. The transition to the Common App also requires prospective students to make just one application that can be submitted to multiple different schools, therefore expediting the process, Mulrooney said.

Mulrooney also cited Paul Jennings Hall, named after an enslaved man who was owned by James Madison, and Taylor Hall, named for the first African American member of JMU’s Board of Visitors, as other steps the university has taken to account for the darker parts of its history. Something important to note, Mulrooney said, is in the late 1970s, JMU became not just a school for all races but also a school for all genders.

“JMU’s still evolving from a place for only white women,” Mulrooney said. “It’s important we educate ourselves, that we actually study the history of this institution as a way of understanding why it is the way it is and how we can make it better.”

CONTACT Morgan Blair at blairml@dukes.jmu.edu. For more on the culture, arts and lifestyle of the JMU and Harrisonburg communities, follow the culture desk on Twitter and Instagram @Breeze_Culture.