The blowup over a blackface photo in the 1984 yearbook of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia prompted Hollins University, in Roanoke, to examine its own yearbook, The Spinster, for similarly offensive fare. But President Pareena G. Lawrence’s decision to remove four editions of The Spinster from its digital archive has sparked a controversy of a different sort — over perceived censorship and top-down decision making.
Lawrence, in a phone interview, said her intent was not to censor. Rather, she wanted to append educational, contextual notes to the digital yearbooks of the 167-year-old women’s college, to help explain the history of blackface and why it is offensive and unacceptable. Then, she said, she planned to return those editions to the site.
Lawrence said that when the Northam scandal arose in February, she met with Luke Vilelle, the university’s library director, and others, and that they decided to go over Hollins’s yearbooks to see if they contained blackface photos or other offensive materials. They did — in the 1915, 1950, 1969, and 1985 editions. (The yearbook was published from 1898 through 2013.) Moreover, web traffic to the Spinster site, she said, went up substantially in March. Most months, it might get 50 to 100 downloads. In March, it got 1,101, she said.
That increased attention to the site made her worry that “we would be in a reactive situation.”
Her plans to quietly contextualize the yearbooks blew away in a tweet storm by Taylor Kenkel, a Hollins librarian who goes by the handle Dusty Nitrate.
Increased web traffic showing intensified interest is all the more reason to keep the materials available.
They objected to being asked to pull the digital yearbook editions, tweeting to fellow librarians: “How have you dealt with arbitrary take down ‘request’ (more like order) that go against best practice from uni admin?” Soon after, they wrote: “am keeping this extremely vague in public b/c i don’t want to be identified publicly for raising a fuss b/c i don’t want to be out of a job but this is really messing with me because the decision is ... it’s not even a best practice thing, it’s ... morally and ethically wrong.”
“I’m not the only one here mad/upset,” Kenkel wrote, “but we have no recourse here or room to protest, it’s coming directly from the uni’s president.”
Kenkel refused, they tweeted, to remove the editions, and their boss took them down himself, even though Kenkel had already made them available on the digital commons archive.org. By mid-afternoon on Tuesday, they revealed that the university where all this was happening was Hollins. Then, librarians and others joined the Twitter fray, saluted Kenkel’s principles, and bashed the university.
Meanwhile, President Lawrence issued a public letter explaining her plan to contextualize and repost the four yearbooks. She says most alumnae and others she’s heard from have been supportive. Twitter? Not so much.
In a statement on Wednesday, the Hollins University Working Group on Slavery and Its Contemporary Legacies, and Hollins’s Wyndham Robertson Library, “strongly objected” to Lawrence’s decision. “We cannot and do not support any erasure of institutional history, even if only temporarily,” the statement reads.
Kirt von Daacke, an assistant dean and professor of history at the University of Virginia who studies race and culture, said that he can’t comment on the details of how the Hollins archive situation has unfolded. But, he said, he’s sympathetic toward Lawrence’s impulse to contextualize offensive materials online. Blackface photos and other racist imagery are intended by perpetrators to do violence, he said, and releasing them into the public without warning and explanation is “to allow them to do that violence again.”
In the digitization craze, universities scanned and posted yearbooks, and only now are scrutinizing what’s in them, he said. Now, particularly since the Northam controversy, they’re reckoning with some unintended consequences. The University of Virginia, like many institutions, is encountering the same issue as Hollins. Students have been going through old yearbooks there for three years, said von Daacke, and there is “some pretty horrifically racist material,” sometimes 35 offensive images in a single volume.
He speculates that as many colleges look more closely at their archives, they’ll find particular concentrations of blackface-type materials in the Jim Crow era, with flare-ups in the nineteen-teens and the late 1960s and early 70s. The images are part, he said, of a broader white-supremacist project with at least three main components: theatrical and cartoon blackface-minstrel depictions to dehumanize African-Americans and naturalize white rule; lost-cause apologists turning Southern Civil War generals into saints, imagining faithful slaves, and valorizing the Confederate flag; and terrorism and political violence. In yearbooks, which von Daacke calls “strange creatures,” having as much to do with wishful self-representation as fact, you’ll find permutations of all three strands. For instance, on the infamous Northham page is one person in blackface with someone dressed as a Klansman.
The jump in offensive content in the nineteen-teens, he said, coincided with a white-supremacist celebration of laws that disenfranchised black citizens, the erection of Confederate monuments, a burst of racist popular culture epitomized by the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, and Klansmen terrorizing black neighborhoods. The flare-up in the late ’60s and early ’70s coincided with resistance to integration and, in many institutions, coeducation.
“You always have to parse the images. There’s a lot of inside baseball in yearbooks,” von Daacke said. “They’re not hiding anything, they’re just speaking in a widely understood code.”
Some observers might be shocked to see blackface images at a women’s college. Von Daacke isn’t. Hollins was long a college for white women, part of a network of segregated higher-education institutions in Virginia, and we “shouldn’t be surprised to see those values on display there.”
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, interim director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said that providing context to culturally sensitive materials is appropriate. Removing them to add that context, however, is not.
“Materials that are in historical archives should remain available at all times,” she said, “and should not be removed for reasons that are not related to copyright violation, plagiarism — that kind of falsified research.”
Increased web traffic showing intensified interest is all the more reason to keep the materials available, she said. And even a quickly written explanation could warn viewers of offensive content and explain that the university is examining the material’s context more deeply.
“That,” she said, “probably would have been a better course to take in this case.”
Lawrence disagrees, saying that such contextual materials take time.
“I would take the same actions today,” she said, “no matter the social-media pushback.”
