Racism on Campus: Yearbook Pictures From Prominent Virginia Colleges (1890-1930) by Stephen C. Poulson, Hailey S. McGee, and Tyler J. Wolfe | March 7, 2021 | Fall 2020
Photo by Kimberly Farmer (Source: Unsplash).
Trigger Warning: Images and words in this article may be triggering to some of our readers as some of the photos feature racial slurs and anti-Black violence. As disturbing as these images and words are, Contexts Magazine aims to be transparent about the historical and current ways that racism manifests in the United States and around the word. This is one such example.
What do college yearbooks tell us about the social histories of universities? We asked this question during a political scandal following the discovery that Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s personal page in his Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook (below) featured a man in blackface standing beside another dressed as a member of the KKK.
This Black History Month, the Black community has been sharing their stories that havenât been told over social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. Whatâs particularly unnerving to see is how many other individuals havenât learned about Claudette Colvin, Jane Bolin and other Black heroes.Â
In my Sociology 110 class with Stephen C. Poulson, I was educated on how yearbooks capture history and how Poulson, along with students Hailey S. McGee and Tyler J. Wolfe, read through UVA, W&L and JMU yearbooks from 1890 to 1930, creating the study Racism on Campus: Yearbook Pictures from Prominent Virginia Colleges (1890-1930), where they showed normalization of racism in the pasts of these Virginia universities.Â