Blackface, KKK hoods and mock lynchings: Review of 900 yearbooks finds blatant racism

[Eugene]

Source: USA Today



Blackface, KKK hoods and mock lynchings: Review of 900 yearbooks finds blatant racism

In one of the most extensive searches of college yearbooks ever, we found blackface and Ku Klux Klan photos like Ralph Northam's far beyond Virginia.

Brett Murphy, USA TODAY
Updated 1 hour ago

The old yearbook photos capture the lighthearted moments from college worth remembering – smiling faces, pep rallies and cans of cheap beer.

But tucked in and among those same pages are pictures of students dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes and blackface, nooses and mock lynchings, displays of racism not hidden but memorialized as jokes to laugh about later.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a stunning number of colleges and university yearbooks published images of blatant racism on campus, the USA TODAY Network found in a review of 900 publications at 120 schools across the country.

At Cornell University in New York, three fraternity members are listed in the 1980 yearbook as “Ku,” “Klux” and “Klan.” For their 1971 yearbook picture, a dozen University of Virginia fraternity members, some armed, wore dark cloaks and hoods while peering up at a lynched mannequin in blackface. In one of the most striking images – from the 1981 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign yearbook – a black man is smiling and holding a beer while posing with three people in full KKK regalia.



Reporters collected more than 200 examples of offensive or racist material at colleges in 25 states, from large public universities in the South, to Ivy League schools in the Northeast, liberal arts boutiques and Division I powerhouses.

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Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/02/20/blackface-racist-photos-yearbooks-colleges-kkk-lynching-mockery-fraternities-black-70-s-80-s/2858921002/

[GitRDun]

1. This does not surprise me in the least.

I was born in 1963. I grew up in white suburbia. Most of the adults I knew had some racist views, although I think if asked directly they would deny they were racist at all.

They were all nice folks, but, like America today, we have difficulty facing who we really are.

The Republican Party today is nothing more than the last gasps of white people trying to find ways to cling to power, wealth in the face of a population that diversifies more each year.

These articles that point out who we are as white folks, or were in this case, are a healthy means to push us all in the right direction.

Thanks for posting.

[dalton99a]

2. Excellent article

[littlemissmartypants]

3. I'm so glad my gmom had such a strong moral compass.

There's no way she would have tolerated any of this behavior from anyone in our family. It was made crystal clear this behavior is unacceptable, unequivocally.

I don't understand how others can treat their fellow humans this way. How so many behave so callously. I know it's learned aberrant behavior. I just wish people hadn't learned to accept it thereby passing it down to their progeny. It's just so wrong!!

Sometimes people can be so cruel and disappointing.

[marble falls]

4. I do not know how I missed all that. Its not as if there weren't identifiable racists ...

in my schools, we knew who they were. Even in the early sixties our schools in Akron, Ohio were racially mixed. I remember the first interracial date to a prom and that she got spit on, but there was no other violence over it. And it became more common.

The KKK was a criminal organization to us, and yes, we dressed in German army stuff because if we were playing war in the fifties you had to have Germans, too and a lot of our dads and uncles had brought home souvenirs that ended up in our getups.

Once when we were young in the fifties, my brother, sister and I had an uncle who lived with us while attending Case Western Reserve put a swastica on red rag and nail it on a broomstick and we marched around the block. Our neighborhood (we lived in Cleveland in the fifties) had a high percentage of 'DPs' (Displaced Persons from Europe) and one fairly old guy jumped over his fence to grab that flag, all the time chanting "good kids, good kids, bad flag, very bad flag." First we knew the Germans were more than just the opposition in a war.

When I was six, I did use burnt cork with a Halloween costume: I went as Emmet Kelly.

[Blue_Tires]

5. k+r