Stories

Queer Christianity at Davidson College From the 1980s to the Present

November 13, 2021 by ispadalecki@davidson.edu

L. Collins, L. Walton, C. Clawson, with I. Padalecki

This post, utilizing primarily the oral history of a lesbian Davidson alumni couple, Heather McKee (‘87) and Jane Campbell (‘87), will examine how Christianity and Christian spaces within Davidson College’s history have impacted the experiences of queer students at Davidson. While for some queer students, Davidson’s Christian identity contributed to an isolating environment, others experienced Christianity as a means of companionship and acceptance. We treat the legacy of this tension as a phenomenon of changing experiences over time, chronicling student life from earlier decades up to the current campus culture in 2021 and examining how queer experiences of Christianity at Davidson have both changed and stayed the same across time.

Queer Isolation and Christianity at Davidson in the 1980s

Davidson College has been affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, specifically the Davidson College Presbyterian Church (DCPC), since its founding in 1837. ¹In 1985—while Heather McKee and Jane Campbell were students at Davidson—the denomination declared lesbian and gay full church membership unconstitutional. ² Davidson’s affiliation with this church—which, at the time of McKee and Campbell’s time on campus, rejected basic rights for LGBTQ+ individuals—created an unwelcoming culture for queer students at Davidson.

This photo shows Davidson College Presbyterian Church in 1987.
³

It was not only through official church policy that Christianity on Davidson’s campus contributed to the isolation of LGBTQ+ students. One undergraduate student, Dee Reynolds, wrote in the 1986 Quips and Cranks yearbook that “the shadow of the church spire reaches far,” referencing the anti-LBGT+ presence and beliefs of many Christian student groups at Davidson.⁴ Throughout the 1980s, several of these anti-LGBTQ+ groups thrived on campus, including the Catholic Campus Ministry, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and Intervarsity Campus Fellowship.⁵

A clipping from the 1986 yearbook Quips and Cranks in which Dee Reynolds writes about the prevalence of Christian culture on Davidson College’s campus.

Davidson’s culture, so influenced by these institutions and groups on its campus, oftentimes did not provide an open and accepting space for queer exploration and identity. In other interviews conducted with Davidson alumni, one encounters a culture in which high-profile administrators and church leaders in the Davidson community were not open about their sexuality, at least to the knowledge of the student population.⁶ Reflecting on the atmosphere at Davidson, McKee stated:

As far as I know, there was no support for LGBTQ students. And that’s really sad, I mean, it’s terrible, I struggled […] there were classmates that we had and dear peer folks who left Davidson. Because they couldn’t get support, and, you know, it just was such a toxic atmosphere.⁷

Queer Exploration and the Church

Stopping there, however, does not tell the full story. Scholars of queer history have recognized how churches historically have fostered queer exploration and identity, even as church teachings and procedures said otherwise. Social events, church groups, choirs, and retreats all provided the opportunity for church members to gather and spend significant time with members of the same gender.⁸ Additionally, as scholars have pointed out, church buildings, as they remained frequently unoccupied and unlocked during the weekdays, also provided the physical space to engage in queer sexual activity.⁹

In more recent decades, churches in Davidson have served as spaces that fostered queer love and identity. Such fostering was not underground—it was established by official church policy. In fact, McKee and Campbell had their service of blessing at DCPC, becoming the first lesbian couple to be married there in 2013.¹⁰ This was important to the couple due to their close ties with the Presbyterian church and the role that their faith has played in their identity formation. Indeed, McKee, who has a Master of Divinity and is an ordained elder, noted that: “when I really came out was at seminary.”¹¹ This complicates the sometimes-oversimplified notion that Christianity and queerness are intrinsically in conflict.

This photo shows the members and coach of Davidson College’s Women’s Golf Team in 1986. Jane Campbell is on the far left, and Heather McKee is on the far right.¹²

Campbell and McKee’s choice to be married in a Christian service was not only impactful for them. Sharing a memory about their friendship with an older Davidson alum, Bill Benson, Campbell recalls: “We had at our service a blessing, and as everything was getting ready, I looked out into the sanctuary and just about lost it because I was wearing my Navy service dress white uniform and, lo and behold, in was walking Bill Benson in his World War Two era service dress uniform.”¹³ She went on to explain that after Benson passed, she was approached by his children, who communicated to her that:

We firmly believe that dad got to live these extra months because you guys changed it and you guys gave him an appreciation and understanding […] Our father didn’t live a life where he would have accepted your relationship. But it was- it was you guys, […] it was two Davidson alumni, and it was a Davidson alum who served in his navy. ¹⁴

Making Space for Queerness and Christianity at Davidson

McKee and Campbell’s marriage at DCPC serves as a powerful symbol for the politics of belonging and visibility. Conducting this ceremony in the Davidson context created a public demonstration of a lesbian couple taking up religious and social space on Davidson’s campus to celebrate their love and companionship. Further, their relationship with Benson demonstrates how such visibility fosters a culture of acceptance. This speaks to the capacity for influence that Davidson could yield when making the campus and its Christian spaces safe and affirming environments for queer students to celebrate their identities openly and visibly.

Regardless, there is still much to be done to make Davidson a safe space for queer students. When asked what Davidson students and administrators could do to make it a better place, McKee and Campbell both cited the presence anti-LGBTQ+ fundamentalist Christian groups at the school as a continued barrier for queer students, emphasizing the importance of inclusive religious dialogue on campus.¹⁵

Thus, the complicated history of queerness and Christianity at Davidson continues to unfold, revealing a relationship between queerness in which Christianity, sin, and sexuality are much more nuanced than any one size fits all conception. Heather McKee and Jane Campbell’s marriage and ongoing leadership roles point to the possibilities for radical change in the politics of belonging on Davidson College’s campus and in Christian spaces more broadly, and demonstrate the importance of oral history towards more deeply understanding and potentially altering these historically-contingent relationships between sexuality and Christianity at Davidson College.

Sexual Cultures, Social Hierarchies, and Narrated Experiences at Davidson College

October 1, 2021 by ispadalecki@davidson.edu

R. Hickman, E. Conklin, E. Propst, with I. Padalecki

“He was sort of endlessly harassed on campus… people would throw rolls and things like that… I think he was driven out, and I think he left freshman year. And while I was sympathetic, it was just an absolute object lesson of, do not come out, you know—this is not at all a place for that.”¹

As part of the Davidson College Gender and Sexuality Oral History Project, Wilson Hardcastle ‘93 recalled the social ostracization of a student bold enough to attend Davidson College as an openly gay man in the 1990s. For many students marginalized for their racial, sexual, or gender identities before, during, and after their time at Davidson, the “typical Davidson experience” of sex and sexuality revolved around being white, heterosexual, and cisgender. As current students at Davidson College in the class of 2022, the authors of this essay understand how our own experiences of and perspectives on sexual culture at Davidson influence our readings of these oral history interviews—which offer a wide variety of memories and thoughts regarding how the Davidson campus community has expressed and organized sexuality in the past and present. These oral histories make clear that throughout Davidson’s history as an educational institution, gender, racial, and sexual identities have impacted students’ abilities to gain social status and acceptance. On Davidson’s campus, these social structures have contributed to an incredibly varied social culture of engagement with sexual and romantic interaction, including seriously dating in pursuit of marriage, engaging in casual and frequent hook-ups, and the prospect of having neither opportunity due to social or romantic isolation.

The “Davidson Experience”?

As pitched to incoming and prospective students by official college messaging, the “Davidson experience” offers small classes, exceptional professors, and a party culture dominated by welcoming fraternities and eating houses. Davidson fraternity and eating house organizations have established a predominantly white, heterosexual, and cisgender social scene, which has consistently informed and reinforced the College’s dating culture. Specifically, the party scene created by these social organizations has historically excluded openly queer students and students of color and created barriers for their sexual and romantic lives on campus. In his oral history interview, Daniel Hierro ‘17 describes his experience with fraternities at Davidson, reflecting upon the “racist or homophobic” actions of these historically white, male, and heterosexist organizations.² Hierro recalls how the Davidson community never actively tried to make these white and homonormative³ spaces more inclusive, stating that “there were never really substantive things to address the problems that were there before minorities.”⁴ While fraternities and eating houses participated in creating a singular narrative of party and hookup culture, the Davidson administration and other authorities failed to address these exclusionary social environments.

Photo titled “Toga” by Rob Kosicki, c. 1995. Courtesy of the Davidson College Archives.

As a result, many students regularly experienced rigid social hierarchies as part of their experience at Davidson College. For queer students and students of color, this hierarchy often led to a very limited social scene in which students were compartmentalized into or excluded from different organizations based on their identities, on Patterson Court⁵ and beyond. In her interview, Nethea Princewill ‘93 describes being one of the only Black women in Warner Hall House. Princewill describes how “all the Black kids were automatically sent to the BSC,” signifying a rigid social hierarchy wherein students were assigned to certain social spaces and, subsequently, levels of social capital based on their gender, sexuality, or race.⁶ Judy Harrell Hooks ‘85 described a similar experience in which she felt that she, a Black woman, could only attend events hosted by the Black Student Coalition⁷ rather than those hosted by the fraternities or eating houses.⁸

The social scene was similarly limited for members of the LGBTQ+ community. Even within the often small queer community, many queer student organizations created predominantly white spaces and cultures that continued to exclude and marginalize queer people of color on Davidson’s campus, as expressed by Daniel Hierro ‘17, a gay Afro-Latino man:

“I could throw a rock and hit a white gay person at Davidson, but, for me, I wanted to be able to hook up with people where I didn’t have to explain my existence.”⁹

These oral histories describe Davidson’s as a place where racialized and sexualized social and romantic geographies formed as a result of social pressures, regulations, and hierarchies enacted primarily by and for white, heterosexual students. These social hierarchies restricted not only the ability to build strong communities within these social scenes, but also the ability to feel respected, seen, and understood by one’s peers and potential romantic partners. Considering the experiences of the narrators, the ability to participate and feel comfortable in this overwhelmingly white, cisgender, and heterosexual social and party scene was a privilege not offered to all Davidson students.

Patterson Court Party, c. 1985. Courtesy of Davidson College Archives.

Sexual Culture and Change at Davidson

Across many oral history interviews, narrators articulated their own broad visions of how Davidson’s sexual culture has operated. Collectively, these alumni describe a campus culture in which sexual and romantic experiences at Davidson mostly happened either in casual, party-based sexual hook-ups or in monogamous, marriage-bound relationships. Especially for those with marginalized racial and sexual identities, having sex and being in relationships outside of these two categories were difficult, if not seemingly impossible.

Additionally, many of these oral history narrators seemed to share the assumption that satisfying sexual or romantic experiences were critical indicators of whether people enjoyed their time at Davidson; however, this was not universal. For Nethea Princewill, navigating Davidson as a Black asexual woman, who would have liked to date romantically but not sexually, was challenging, as she didn’t have the sexual or romantic “luxury” to which many white and heterosexual students had access.¹⁰ Within the broader context of what Princewill remembers as a white Christian purity culture in North Carolina in the early 1990s, the choice between marriage and casual sex was a cultural assumption that structured white and heterosexual dating cultures at Davidson and beyond. This dichotomy left little space for her desires and identities.

Photo of a couple at the Old Well on Davidson’s campus, c. 1980s. Courtesy of Davidson College Archives.

As Davidson has become more publicly progressive in terms of accepting sexual, racial, and gender diversity, some of our narrators, like Jane Campbell and Heather McKee, have come to see what was once a resoundingly repressive and isolating campus as a place progressing in terms of including sexual and gender minorities. For Campbell and McKee, their path-breaking lesbian marriage ceremony at Davidson College Presbyterian Church was part of broader participation in institutions like the U.S. military that have historically excluded LGBTQ+ people.¹¹ As for others, what may be currently more positive perspectives on Davidson’s progress remain closely tied to memories of experiencing the campus’s lack of acceptance, representation, and open discussion of different sexualities.

While we can hold space to celebrate efforts to include and meaningfully represent sexually marginalized people, our narrators’ memories, including Campbell’s and McKee’s, point toward a wider social experience of exclusions, silences, and erasures for those who have not conformed to white, Christian, and heterosexual culture. This collection of perspectives on sexuality at Davidson College provides a limited glimpse into how previous versions of Davidson have experienced what it can mean to be queer or straight, Black or white, and future interviews will illumine even further what is already a nuanced understanding of Davidson’s sexual cultures.

“You gotta be present, you have to be visible, and you have to be inconvenient”: An Oral History Interview with James G. Pepper ‘65

August 29, 2021 by ispadalecki@davidson.edu

G. Payne, S. Nissler, I. Padalecki

In 1965, just a year after Davidson College became officially integrated, James Gibbons Pepper––a well-liked young man who served as an executive official in the Sigma Chi fraternity and a student athlete––graduated with a degree in Business Administration.¹ James, known to most as “Jim,” fit the demographic profile of many Davidson students at the time: a legacy student from a wealthy, well-respected family who grew up in North Carolina and attended a prestigious preparatory academy in Virginia. According to Jim, however, he subverted the standard followed by many of his all-male Davidson peers when he moved to New York rather than returning to his small southern hometown. Jim experienced a significant transformation: after three years of working as a financier on Wall Street and experiencing city life, he realized he was gay.

Jim formed close relationships with other queer people and became a part of the gay community in New York City. He nostalgically describes life as a young, gay professional in the 1970s with a successful, burgeoning financial career and an active social life. “I knew hundreds of people, thousands maybe. […] There were party drugs, […] and […] there were some really fun clubs to go to. […] It was sort of a golden era of clubs, and I enjoyed every moment of it.”² However, like many prominent queer New Yorkers whose careers depended upon not only their intellect, but also their social prowess and air of respectability, Jim did not openly discuss his sexuality with colleagues: “Everyone at work just socialized separately. I felt no need to share my sexual orientation.”³ When the HIV/AIDS pandemic developed in the early 1980s,⁴ Jim’s sexuality and his professional life converged: “When […] the AIDS crisis hit, it changed everything. And I became active. Just because there was so much ignorance, there was so much discrimination, […] I mean, people were dying.”⁵ Jim subsequently became one of the most prominent HIV/AIDS activists in the New York gay community. However, his journey as a leading advocate for queer rights began at Davidson.

Jim Pepper’s oral history interview, conducted by Davidson College students in May of 2021, highlights the tensions and convergence between the values he gained at Davidson and his HIV/AIDS activism in New York City. Furthermore, in analyzing his important post-graduate work in comparison to how he and other alums are frequently remembered for their monetary contributions to Davidson College, we can see the biases present in institutional memories of change.

Pictured above is James Pepper’s senior yearbook photo, 1965.⁶

Exclusion, Tolerance, and Difference: Jim Pepper’s Experiences at Davidson College

Jim Pepper’s educational foundation helped him make the transition from Davidson to New York City: “somehow in Davidson I learned to be really, really, really tolerant […] it taught me [to] say no to meanness.”⁷ Jim noted the growing religious diversity of Davidson and the admission of a Black man into his fraternity as a catalyst for his recognition of exclusion and inequality. Jim stated that at Davidson,

You become tolerant of differences … and I didn’t know that I was different. But it just kind of turned out I was! But I was tolerant of … all different kinds of people. […] And then at Davidson, […] they were not bigoted––maybe deep down, you know because of cultural things, they may have been––but when it came to voicing, they would voice against discrimination.⁸

Jim claims that his time in college taught him valuable lessons that made him a tolerant and thoughtful individual. One of the key aspects of Jim’s Davidson experience that he cites as especially formative is the school’s Honor Code, which he feels helped instill in him the value of respect and an appreciation for community care.⁹ Davidson also taught Jim how to think critically. “Davidson did teach me how to learn. To figure things out. And that’s what I think matters most when you get an education,” he says.¹⁰ Using this analytical lens, Jim goes on to profess his appreciation for the ambiguity of knowledge: “Half the stuff you learn will prove to be wrong. So … be flexible, be willing to take information that’s different from what you thought was so, and then be able to analyze it.”¹¹

However, having attended mostly private, religiously affiliated, all-male institutions where he felt exclusion was all too common, Jim believes he “lucked out” by not knowing about his sexual identity while at Davidson.¹² “If I’d been out, I probably would not have been in a fraternity, and then I probably would have been, you know, ostracized by or kidded relentlessly on [by] the other students,” Jim says.¹³ Although college can be a time to experiment with sex and sexuality for many students, it is crucial to note here that the subject of sexuality, especially nonnormative sexuality, was deeply taboo in the Cold War U.S. where homophobic persecution was a state-sanctioned norm.¹⁴ Paradoxically, however, the pre-Stonewall era culture that kept Jim from exploring his sexuality in undergraduate school also allowed him to feel accepted by his Davidson peers and generally fulfilled in his social life:

When I was there, I could party, you know, no different from everybody else at Davidson and the fraternity. And I didn’t identify myself as being gay; it just hadn’t occurred to me. And I really didn’t know how to deal with women, though, because I had never––since puberty, I’d been away at school. I never, never dealt with women my own age, so you know it’s not that I was missing anything […] I was never really particularly at ease with women. And so, the sexuality part was, it just wasn’t in my mind.¹⁵

Although he felt safe as a Davidson student, Jim does remember seeing overt discrimination take place in campus spaces, including Greek Life. He describes feeling discomfort during fraternity rush when his classmates who weren’t “cool characters” were relegated to the “losers’ room” during parties.¹⁶Understandably, Jim felt even more disturbed by the way that his fraternity’s national guidelines still refused to recognize Black members after the college was desegregated––a practice that would continue even after Mike Maloy (‘70) became the Davidson’s first Black fraternity member, causing the local chapter of Sigma Chi to disaffiliate in 1969 and then disband altogether in 1972.¹⁷ This is indicated by the fact that––according to an article published in the Davidsonian in 1969––the vote to disaffiliate in order to include Black students was contested by some on account of “unity” and “fairness.”¹⁸

An article published in the Davidsonian in 1969 discussed the contentious nature of the vote to disaffiliate Davidson’s chapter of Sigma Chi in protest of the national group’s lack of inclusion of Black students.¹⁹

According to Jim, he “applauded” the fact that “[Sigma Chi] made [Mike Maloy] a brother, and [said] to hell with […] the national fraternity.”²⁰Jim goes on to express exactly how he felt about the exclusion he witnessed at Davidson and beyond, saying, about his fraternity: “[…] I liked the people; I didn’t like the way they excluded people. […] The idea of exclusion, […] it’s still with me. I don’t like exclusion, whether it’s [against] the women’s movement, or Me Too, or the Black movement, […] I just cannot embrace it at all.”²¹ In fact, it is through this same perspective that Jim has been able to look back at his time at Davidson. Although he was not aware of any Davidson peers who were openly gay at the time, he later realized that there were other queer students who attended school with him––including a friend who came out to him personally decades later, before tragically passing away from AIDS. In this way, Jim’s interview and experience emphasize a key point: we cannot assume a straight Davidson throughout history, despite that queer students do not appear in the archives until far into Davidson’s existence.

New York and HIV/AIDS: Postgraduate Experiences with Activism and Social Change

During Jim’s years at Davidson and his move to New York City, America underwent a period of social change and unrest that was “marked by sustained efforts to challenge inequalities in the nation’s political, economic, and social structures.”²² Furthermore, the cultural changes that occurred in the “Civil Rights decade” of the sixties allowed gay and lesbian “activists to achieve access to public space and a mainstream political vote.”²³

These social changes impacted Davidson’s culture and shaped the atmosphere that Jim encountered in the city. Jim portrays his time at Davidson as a formative reason for why he became part of the gay rights movement and advocated for gay rights in the eighties while balancing a successful career in finance. Davidson taught him how to learn and how to begin to recognize diversity.²⁴ At Davidson, Jim did not yet know he was “different,” but he still felt nurtured. Jim’s recognition of the intersectionality of discrimination in college demonstrates a consciousness on the part of gay rights activists in the sixties and seventies that led to a push to build broader coalitions. For example, the Mattachine Society of Washington (a homophile activist organization) often compared the oppression of homosexuals to that of African Americans and drew parallels to the Civil Rights Movement as part of its effort to legitimize and clarify its strategies and center homosexual rights as civil rights.²⁵

However, Jim also credits New York itself in forming his life experiences. Whereas his classmates generally returned to their hometowns after Davidson, Jim moved to New York, “and so, my life experience is so different from them.”²⁶ Jim’s reference to the experiences that he had because of New York’s sociopolitical culture highlights scholars’ arguments on sexual geographies and the location-specific nature of sexuality and culture. Public gay male scenes were quickly being developed in US cities, including New York, during the early 1970s, allowing for a greater interweaving of politics and sexuality that certainly contributed to Jim’s “different” experience and later activism upon moving to the city, particularly after connecting with members of the gay community, advocates, and even gay Davidson alum.²⁷

*Pictured here is the program for the John. W. Kuykendall Award honoring James Pepper on June 5, 2015.*

Jim’s philosophy on and experience with activism in New York reflect broader tactics employed by organizations like ACT UP, which lobbied and protested against the FDA (and other government entities) and the media in efforts to increase funding and resources available to those suffering with HIV/AIDS and decrease the spread of stigmatized and victim-blaming messaging related to the epidemic. They protested with passion to communicate the urgent need for public health policies that would affirm the rights of all people to enjoy bodily autonomy and comprehensive, accessible care. As Jim alludes, their anger and disruptive action, while inconvenient, is what forced people to pay attention.²⁸ In June 2015, Davidson honored Jim with the John W. Kuykendall Award for Community Service at his fiftieth reunion. This moment was a convergence of Jim’s time at Davidson in the sixties and the activism he pursued New York City. Davidson issued a statement expressing that “With his usual drive and commitment, Jim assumed a leadership role in both fundraising for and the shaping of AIDS policy for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC). He raised millions of dollars and enhanced awareness of this global health crises, undoubtedly helping to save countless lives.”²⁹ Jim expressed this drive and commitment while discussing the strategies that he pursued as an activist in New York:

You gotta be visible. And you have to be inconvenient. […] when you’re protesting, put caution to the wind. And you make your statement. And it’s good … the more outrageous it is, the more coverage it gets. That … and the more minds it changes. Some people, no matter what you do, they don’t like it. […] But you gotta do it sometimes.³⁰

While Jim’s activism and philosophy align with historical observations that occupying public space and asserting visibility were critical features of the gay rights movement and AIDS response during this period, Davidson’s remembrance of Jim’s exceptional work and his classmates’ response exhibits the remaining relevance of class and respectability in collective remembrance of activism. The statement from the college regarding Jim’s work centers the astonishing financial impact of Jim’s activism in New York and remarks upon his professional and activist achievements simultaneously, tying his (respectable) professional success in the finance industry to his work that led to the Stonewall Community Foundation.³¹While Jim speaks to the dual role of “respectable” activism such as fundraising in his interview, he also speaks to the difficult nature of achieving success and the “inconvenience” he and his fellow activists had to pose in New York City in order to make the strides. It is critical for the college’s memory of Jim to highlight not only his individual activism and hard-earned financial success, but also the broader contexts of radical, direct action that eschewed narratives of “respectability” and defined the activist philosophies of Jim and other gay rights activists in the 1980’s.

Institutional Memory and Oral History

Although Jim expressed great thanks to his time at Davidson for instilling in him values of justice, tolerance, and kindness that he carried forward into his activism in New York, he also discussed mixed receptions when he returned to Davidson in 2015. Though Jim expressed gratitude for the reaction he received from the Davidson administration, he described an awkward and dismissive reaction from some former classmates.³² He elaborated that many of his class did not seem to like the idea that he was gay, telling the following story about his roommate from Davidson:

I have no contact with him now. Because … I think he thinks it reflected on him. That he and I were roommates for basically six years, then … and I was gay. Well, what does that make him? I didn’t, you know, I don’t think he has exhibited so much good … good judgment. […] I’m sorry that that’s the reaction. But he wouldn’t … he hadn’t been to a reunion. … people didn’t come up to me, and have much to say.³³

Though he did not receive a welcome reflective of his own generosity, Jim still finished the story with a laugh and an expression that the reaction of his classmates (pictured below) meant little in comparison to all that he had done in the years after his time at Davidson, stating: “Frankly, I don’t give a damn. [laughs] I don’t … they haven’t been part of my life for 55 years.”³⁴

Members of the classes of 1965, 1966, and 1967 stand together or risers on the lawn in front of the Chambers building during an alumni gathering in 1981, when Jim had already moved to New York and started his career. Jim Pepper is in the group on the far left.³⁵

It is essential that we tell the stories of changemaking alums like Jim Pepper in their entirety and reflect on how he is remembered by Davidson College. Although Jim received an award from the college on behalf of his activism, prior to conducting this interview, most of what the student interviewees knew of Jim Pepper related to his contributions to the art collections at Davidson College.³⁶ This reflects broader patterns in institutional memories that prioritize the contributions of alumni on account of monetary donations to the college as opposed to the contributions they have made, as is emphasized by Davidson College’s Statement of Purpose, through living “lives of leadership and service”³⁷ on behalf of and as marginalized people. In fact, the work of Jim Pepper did far more than aid the LGBT community; the public health policies he and his peers advocated for, including compassionate use of experimental drugs for life-threatening illness, are still working to increase the health and wellness of all people well into the 21st century, including during the COVID-19 pandemic.³⁸

Oral history is an essential method for expanding beyond singular institutional histories that emphasize stories related to donations made by alumni rather than diverse histories of change-making, especially those related to issues of sexual diversity.³⁹ This task is especially urgent for those who survived the AIDS epidemic. Jim remembers: “AIDS killed all of my close circle of friends.”⁴⁰ Though Jim survived the epidemic, so many queer elders were lost to this disease and government negligence towards its impact on the LGBT community.⁴¹ Therefore, oral history interviews with folks like Jim Pepper are essential archival efforts to ensure that this generation of LGBT individuals are remembered not for the victim-blaming narratives the Reagan administration spun about their sexual promiscuity prior to the AIDS epidemic, but rather as a community that came together in extraordinary times when abandoned by the state to take care of one another and forge a collective queer consciousness and community.⁴²

Further, in conducting oral histories interviews with LGBT alums like Jim Pepper, who lived on campus before such students were actively recognized as part of the Davidson community, we can resist a depolicitized institutional remembering of those who have led incredible lives of leadership and service beyond the bounds of Davidson’s campus and the erroneous assumption that queer students did not exist and thrive at Davidsion prior to their institutional recognition. This requires active investment in remembering and archiving such lives through oral history projects, such as the Gender and Sexuality Oral History Project that began in 2020. These oral histories allow the Davidson community to reorient our ideas of “lives of leadership and service” towards recognizing the rich history of LGBT change-makers that worked, advocated, and contributed to Davidson and beyond prior to such a community being recognized by the college.

Project ‘87 and Establishing the Task Force on Racial and Ethnic Concerns

April 15, 2021 by ispadalecki@davidson.edu

I. Padalecki, with M. Norman

On April 13th, 1984, Janet Stovall and Stone Bynum, student members and leaders in the Black Student Coalition at Davidson College edited and published a summarized list of demands, curated in a recent BSC meeting, and directed at the institution. Their proposal, entitled “Project ‘87,” listed action items the college needed to take immediately “if its black students [were] ever to view the Davidson experience as a positive one,” challenging the school to meet these goals by 1987.¹ These demands imagined radical and direct action to make Davidson College a more inclusive, nurturing, and empowering institution for the Black and broader campus community, at a time in which the school had only fifty-two Black students, one Black professor, and one Black dean.² Changes included hiring at least ten Black American professors, a Black Dean of Students, and the enrollment of at least one hundred Black students.

*A 1984 Davidsonian article published by BSC members Stone Bynum and Janet Stovall outlining the Project ‘87 demands.*

These demands challenged and changed the institution, and the students who created, published, and defended these demands and their validity presented new contributions to the public “official” histories curated by Davidson College in the 1980s. Official histories acknowledge the significance of the 1980s as a turning point for racial justice at Davidson, but they typically do so by emphasizing the leadership of Davidson President John Kuykendall, who established the Task Force on Racial and Ethnic Concerns in the fall of 1984.³

Foundations of Davidson’s Black Student Coalition

The BSC originated from community-centered values and a vision of Davidson rejecting simplistic notions of racial equality defined as the presence of Black students. Though there had been previous organizing between and amongst Black students on campus several years prior, the organization was officially chartered by the college in 1972. The charter members emphasized three goals: fostering a “spirit of solidarity” among Black Davidson students, creating campus-wide awareness of Black student contributions, and aiding Black residents of the town in “overcoming many of the problems” they faced.⁴ BSC Charter. 1972. RG 12.13.30. Black Student Coalition. Davidson College Archives, Davidson, NC.

*A page from the 1972 charter of the Black Student Coalition (BSC).*

Early BSC initiatives show a commitment to systemic change through direct action against anti-Blackness at Davidson while building and nurturing space for Black students on campus. Alongside the creation of Project ‘87, which inspired the Task Force on Racial and Ethnic Concerns, the early members hosted fashion shows and events that demonstrated how “Black culture has made a significant contribution to the world.”⁵ Tethering of art and culture in these temporal spaces has been an important piece of Davidson and broader traditions of Black southern student organizing. Scholar of Black Studies LaMonda Horton-Stallings affirms such cultural, emotional, and social organizing as an essential counterpart to political activism and explains that “the pursuit of…equity and freedom requires declaration and action, but it will also require a particular type of vulnerability.”⁶

*A Davidsonian article describing a celebratory fashion show hosted by the BSC in 1984.*

In envisioning and writing BSC’s charter and Project ‘87, Black students made manifest their belief in a more equitable Davidson and reimagined pathways to it. The measures outlined in Project ‘87 echoed the charter’s vision of a Davidson that “realiz[es] its obligations to its Black members.”⁷

Gender, Emotional Labor, and Project ‘87

Immediately following the announcement of Project ‘87 in the Davidsonian, BSC’s student members faced backlash from the white campus community. White students called the Project ‘87 demands made by these students as incendiary, claiming that they stood apart from a politic of racial unity and drew attention to race, which disputed the college’s de facto policy of color blindness. Color blindness essentially ignores or erases race, which dulls faculties needed to identify racism. If you cannot “see race,” you cannot see and combat racism. Minoritized populations then must convince fellow students about the urgency of these demands, the presence of anti-Blackness in and around Davidson, and the necessity of institutional change. Cycles of gaslighting & erasure require substantial counter labor, emotional, intellectual, so on. Records of student debates and publications show that largely Black female Davidson students, several of whom are cited below, took on the work of publicly defending the Project ‘87 demands.⁸

Students advocated for Project ‘87 by refuting several entrenched narratives about race at Davidson. They worked against false ideas and the white perception of Black hypersensitivity and anti-white bias within discussions and critiques of institutional racism. An article written by white student Eric Hill in the April 20, 1984 edition of the Davidsonian, entitled “Project ‘87: Emotional Outcry Hard to Implement,” exemplifies the dismissive responses that misrepresented Black students’ vision. In releasing the Project ‘87 demands Hill asserts the “Black Student Coalition has lost whatever hope it ever had of being considered a group opposed to racism. Their “Project ’87” as revealed in last week’s Davidsonian is a purely emotional outcry — presented with an attitude to be expected of overindulged twelve-year-olds — calls for the Davidson College administration to adopt a policy of blatant racism in admissions and faculty hiring.”⁹ While such comments highlighted the legitimate concerns of the BSC, Black students continually confronted anti-Blackness and refuted accusations of being irrational and anti-white. Hill’s language reflects American histories of erasure and color-blind racial politics, delegitimizing Black communities through respectability, demonizing emotive and vocal resistance, and encouraging silence.¹⁰

*Davidsonian editorial critiquing the Project ‘87 demands released by the BSC, written by student Eric Hill in 1984.*

Student defenders of Project ‘87, and particularly Black women, led debates between those defending Hill’s ideas, evident in “Does Davidson Really Desire Minority Students?” Black student and BSC member Anne Elliot did the important labor of discrediting Hill’s claims. She argued against the concept of “reverse racism” that her white peers used as a critique of project goals. Challenging her critics to reflect, she asked, “How will the admission of 100 black students and 10 black professors hurt white people as a race? It might hurt individuals…but it can’t touch your race.”¹¹ She also legitimized Project ‘87’s emotive weight: “So we tell you why we hurt and you choose to dismiss our explanation as the emotional jubberings of a spoiled twelve year old…damn. We expect it of you though. Men use it on women all the time, labeling them as emotional hens in order to undermine the significance, the truth of their argument.”¹² Elliot utilizes this moment of critique created by Hill to educate and provoke reflection among her fellow students, urging them to see the white supremacist ideologies in the charges of “reverse racism,” gaslighting, and erasure of the voices of Black women enacted by their white peers.

*1984 Davidsonian editorial written by Anne Elliot in response to critiques presented by Eric Hill.*

Tasks Forces and Revivals: Results of Project ‘87

While the Project ‘87 demands advocated for the entire Black campus community, Black women also had to defend the legitimacy of themselves, as scholars and organizers, and their lived experiences, critiquing anti-Black racism and white supremacy at Davidson. Combatting anti-Black racism benefited those beyond the Black:white campus communities, targeting “color-blind” policy that ignores long histories of racism embedded in Davidson and the American South.¹³ What began as a list of demands would later become the Task Force on Racial and Ethnic Concerns created by college president John Kuykendall. The Task Force, which included several BSC members, led to many formal institutional changes, including increased admissions budget for recruiting Black students at Davidson in 1985.¹⁴

The formal changes must be considered in context of the history of Black student labor. Official histories of institutions like Davidson often de-emphasize the campus wide educational work of Black students who taught their fellow students and introduced them to nuanced anti-racist frameworks for understanding social change. Scholarship suggests that women of color do a disproportionate amount of this labor in college and university settings.¹⁵ Horton-Stallings identifies such cultural changemaking as an essential component of radical, anti-racist reimagining of ourcommunities and institutions.¹⁶ The work continues today, intensified by the events of 2020: student visions still unrealized and creating institutional change. In fact, in fall 2018, several Black women on campus launched an initiative to revive and revise the Project ‘87 demands in the wake of the revelation that two students on our campus had hidden white supremacist, neo-Nazi social media presences.¹⁷ The work continues, and documents like these Davidsonian articles must be considered to be as essential to official proceedings of the Task Force on Racial and Ethnic Concerns and broader Davidson histories.

“Not Serious Students”: Microaggressions and the Transition to Coeducation At Davidson College

April 14, 2021 by ispadalecki@davidson.edu

E. Nagy-Benson

In 1971, nine female transfer students sprawled across the porch of their campus home, Grey House. As one of the women, Gardner Roller Ligo, fixed her bike chain, a male student crossed Main Street and said: “Hi, I’m from The Davidsonian, and we want to do a story on the co-eds.” The women exchanged knowing glances; this was their new title: “the coeds.” They conversed with the student reporter, he snapped some pictures, and they carried on with their day.¹ A week later, the college newspaper went to press. At the top of the fold read: “Coeds Seek Living Experiences, But…” followed by a picture of Roller Ligo, leaning over her bicycle from behind.²

By the time that Davidson College trustees decided to formally admit female students in the early 1970s, women had been attending classes for over a century. Although denied enrollment as degree-seeking students, the daughters of Davidson faculty attended classes starting in the 1860s, and by the 1890s, more women, particularly the daughters of local businessmen, attended classes “by courtesy” of faculty.³ Research is ongoing, but hundreds of women seem to have taken classes at the college before the formal admission of female students. In 1972, the trustees voted to formally bring coeducation to Davidson. The presence of the first official female students disrupted the century-long traditions of granting degrees only to men at one of the most elite private colleges in the Southeast.

Interviews with Gardner Roller Ligo, a transfer student during the 1971-1972 school year; Dr. Vicki Switzer, class of 1974 and the first woman to officially enroll; and Cissi Lyles, class of 1979, provide powerful testimonies of their experiences as some of the first degree-seeking women at Davidson College.⁴ Although many male students and faculty responded to coeducation with skepticism and prejudice, female students advocated for themselves, created allies, and gained the respect of faculty, staff, and their fellow students.

A picture of the transfer class of women during the 1971-1972 school year on the porch of Grey House. Gardner Roller Ligo is on the far right. Taken from the Davidson Yearbook, Quips and Cranks, 1972.

Davidson’s switch to coeducation in the 1970s occured in the wake of a tumultuous and transformative decade of political movements for equality by marginalized groups, including women. In the 1960s and 1970s, women began to demand equal educational and professional opportunities and access to traditionally male spaces, including some colleges, universities, and graduate schools that had refused admission to women. In her interview, Roller Ligo described how “there were only nine of us [women] and 900 of them… You walked into the library or the dining hall and you were just hit with a wave of testosterone– I mean, there were men everywhere. They were just everywhere.”⁵ Being one of the first meant being one of a few.

Many men scrutinized their new female peers. Lyles described feeling like she was in a “…meat market.”⁶ However, they sought out the other women and respectful, equality-minded male students for support. The women also found support in the Director of Housing, Scotty Nichols. Roller Ligo described how “she came to us the first day and said: “Okay, I’m here for you. Just tell me what you need, because I have no idea what’s going to happen.”⁷ Despite the intimidating atmosphere, female students identified those who supported them and formed a community.

From the “Active and Benevolent Ladies Exhibit,” this photograph is from 1975. This sign, on Davidson’s campus, reads: “Approaching Davidson College: A Liberal Arts College For Men Founded 1837 by Presbyterians.” The words “for men” are written on as if added to an original sign that did not include those words.

In the classroom, some faculty and male students treated women with hostility. One male student wrote an op-ed about the “traumatic changes” brought on by coeducation and dismissively suggesting to his male peers that “the added perspective of a woman in a [Humanities] discussion will be just as titillating as the good old days in high school.”⁸ As Roller Ligo recalled, many women discussed having to prepare twice as much as their male peers because “…if [they] didn’t get it right, [they] got stomped on verbally.”⁹

These female students lacked academic role models, and most of the career advice they received centered around expectations that they would marry and raise children. One of the few female professors at the college, Dr. Louise Nelson, who taught in the Department of Economics between 1964 and 1988, approached the female students early in the semester and said, “You’re not serious students; you’re only here to get husbands. I don’t want you in my classes.”¹⁰ Nelson’s motivations are unclear from current evidence, and we hope to learn more about dynamics between female and male faculty and female students in future interviews.¹¹ When female students did receive academic mentoring, it was often misogynistic. Roller Ligo remembered:

One of my friends went in to talk to the Registrar, a very nice man, well-intentioned. She said, ‘I want to go to medical school.’ He said, ‘Oh, no. You mean you want to be a nurse. Right?’ She said, ‘No, I want to go to medical school.’ He said, ‘honey, I don’t think that’s going to happen.’ … She had a 4.0 GPA at Davidson, she could have done anything she wanted… It never occurred to him that a girl, a coed, would want to be a doctor, because he said, ‘you’ll get married, you’ll be too busy.

Even when the women tried to avoid conflicting with men, they could not avoid blatant sexism. Once, the director of Alumni Engagement called Roller Ligo and said:

‘We’re doing a special dinner for [the oldest alumni class] at the Carolina Inn, would you all be willing to help serve the dinner and dress in period costumes?’ I said, ‘what period?’ He said, ‘hoop skirts.’ I said… ‘what will the boys be wearing?’ And he said, ‘oh no, they will be at the dinner and you’ll be serving.’

In addition, these women constantly received comments implying they were of second-class status. For example, the women remembered the campus facilities being extremely gender-segregated. Roller Ligo said, “We couldn’t use the gym facilities, except for at specific times because the boys were there.”¹² The men were not always inclined to share the facilities, either. In 1970, “one of the women in the group loved to swim… She asked if she could use the pool….[and] she finally was told that there was a faculty member who liked to swim in the nude and he wanted to swim anytime he damn well pleased and he didn’t want some coed getting in the way.”¹³

While the women’s movement was working to shift historical ideas of women as subservient to men, many men on campus clearly still held antiquated views of appropriate gender roles. These first female students took on the emotional labor of educating them. Roller Ligo remembers telling this man, “‘We’re not going to serve all the boys.” He was puzzled, but he came over and sat on the porch one day and [the women] sat down with him. And by the time he left he got it.”¹⁴Gardner Roller Ligo, zoom interview. While these women used such opportunities to educate faculty, staff, and students and create a more progressive community, this human resources work was additional to that required in their classes and uncompensated.

Gendered sexual harassment was also pervasive during this period. The first semester that women formally attended Davidson, The Davidsonian published a cartoon of a sexualized wildcat captioned “A Davidson Woman Needs No Introduction.”¹⁵ This reduction of female students to sex objects prompted rebuttal. One woman responded to the chauvinistic cartoon by writing, “The Davidson man is known for his intellectual capabilities rather than his physique. Why is it then that the Davidson woman is pictured as a voluptuous, feline sex object?”¹⁶ When objectified, these early female students pushed back.

*The* *Davidsonian* published a cartoon of a sexualized wildcat captioned “A Davidson Woman Needs No Introduction.”

On one occasion, harassment became violent. According to Roller Ligo:

One night, one of the women got jumped in front of the guest house… This guy jumped out and grabbed her and she just screamed bloody murder and punched him in the face and ran home. And we called the police who called the Dean of Students who came and stood outside the door in his hat and coat and said ‘so what’s the big deal?’And the police officer told him the story and he said ‘well, I knew that would happen,’ and turned around and left.

A Davidsonian article titled “Night Attack on Coed Sparks Discussion of Campus Security,” published in 1972.

This incident and inadequate response left the women feeling vulnerable, and they challenged administrators to “improve lighting in several dark lanes between buildings.”¹⁷ This, however, did not prevent all assault. Roller Ligo alluded to other instances of sexual assault on campus, saying the women would stay away from parties “…because there was a lot of alcohol and boys didn’t behave well, particularly when the room was 99 percent boys and one or two women.”¹⁸ In the early 1970s, campuses did not discuss date rape or consent. While Title IX was enacted in 1972, shifts in campus culture took years (and remain ongoing). In the early 1970s, men who behaved aggressively or violently toward female students did not expect to be held accountable by the administration. Instead, women did what they could to support each other and make campus safer for themselves and future female students.

College histories have characterized the transition to coeducation as a tremendous success because female students quickly assumed leadership positions across campus and excelled academically. Oral histories provide additional information, however, on the lack of institutional preparedness, the labor of community building among female students, and the personal and emotional costs of being some of the first formally enrolled women at Davidson College. For too long, these experiences have been omitted from the school’s historical narratives. Despite a pervasive culture of harassment and open discrimination, these women demanded respect and made Davidson a more inclusive place than when they arrived. As Roller Ligo said, “I mean the absolute courage I see in the women [at Davidson College.] It’s stunning…the women in particular are just…going to change this world. You’re gonna go out and kick ass and take names, as my father used to say. And make it happen.”¹⁹ This determination is also part of our campus legacy.

The BSC’s Statement of Protest and the Old South Ball

March 17, 2021 by ispadalecki@davidson.edu

Written by I. Padalecki and edited by M. Norman

In May 1981, the executive board of the Black Students Coalition (BSC) announced a formal statement of protest against the “Old South Ball,” a tradition established and celebrated by the fraternity Kappa Alpha (KA).¹ According to scholars of the college’s history and Davidson alumni HD Mellin and Tian Yi, the annual “Old South Ball involved dressing up in Confederate-era costumes, specifically military uniforms for men and hoop skirts for women, and posing for photographs before marching down Main Street.” Steeped in Confederate nostalgia, the performance was not intended to provide accurate information about military history or antebellum material culture but to convey the support of these students for the Lost Cause, the belief common among white Southerners that the Confederate war effort had been a valiant and noble one in defense of white rule.² Photos from various iterations of this event can be seen below.

Several KA members dressed in Confederate military uniforms, complete with guns, stand in front of women dressed in long dresses representing an Old South aesthetic. Taken in the spring of 1955. This photo, taken in public and during the light of day, shows an event that happened in the heart of campus and with the sanctioning of college officials, including faculty and administrators.

A man stands in front of a prominently displayed Confederate flag, dressed in Confederate military garb. On the back of the image, the following is written: “To Dr. Chalmers Davidson, my history professor. The spirit of the Old South will forever live in the hearts of her sons- Gary Rigg, ‘72, 5/9/72”

KA was founded as the Civil War came to an end, but its members did not celebrate this event for the first five decades of its existence. Rather, the “Old South and/or Dixie Ball has evolved since 1920 as a traditional social function of the Active Chapters of the Order with the purpose to celebrate and perpetuate the social attributes of courtesy, graciousness, and open hospitality, which are values of the Old South and were prominent in Virginia when (the) Order was founded in 1865.”³ The Davidson chapter chapter of KA was not established until 1880, and documentation of their organizing this event has not been identified prior to the 1950s. It is worth noting that the 1920s and the 1950s were peak periods of Confederate memorialization and white supremacist organizing throughout the South, including, in both, a resurgence of Klan activity. In the 1950s and 1960s, many white American in the South responded to calls for Black civil rights and school integration with efforts to name school buildings after Confederate leaders and erect monuments to the Confederate war effort.⁴

Though members of KA claimed that this event was less about glorifying the Confederacy and more about a broad sense of “gentlemanly and chivalrous heritage,” BSC’s statement of protest rejected this event as Confederate nostalgia that romanticized and celebrated Davidson’s history of supporting the Confederate war effort and ongoing anti-Blackness originating before the Civil War in the institution of slavery.⁵ The BSC challenged their classmates to recognize the violence behind this event, and in 1981, asked them to wear red ribbons to stand in solidarity with their Black classmates and against “a tradition that embodies white racism…in negligence of Blacks and their feelings.”⁶

*The BSC Statement of Protest against the Old South Ball, distributed on-campus May 1981.*

Though the statement of protest generated dialogue among students who held a range of opinions regarding the racial history of the college and the meaning of Confederate symbols in the 1980s, the demonstration of solidarity was successful: the Davidson chapter of KA quietly cancelled the event to be held in the spring of 1982, and while KA chapters on other campuses continued to hold explicitly Confederate-inspired events, students at Davidson College do not.⁷ Despite this important work, there is little to no mention of the labor of Black student organizers in the BSC in official college histories, including the college’s tour guide manual. By explaining how Black Davidson students have pushed this predominantly white institution and its community members to interrogate the manifestations and histories of anti-Blackness in and around Davidson, this essay centers student leadership as a driving force for change.

KA, the KKK, and the Old South Ball

When challenged by Black classmates, members of the KA fraternity initially rejected the BSC’s statement of protest and publicized their opinions primarily through on-campus publications such as the Davidsonian. They claimed that, in celebrating the “Old South,” they were not necessarily participating in nostalgia for slavery, but rather celebrating what they considered to be positive aspects of the college’s Confederate and Southern heritage. One especially interesting example of this is the campus forum published in the May 8, 1981 edition of the Davidsonian. In this publication, several students advocate on behalf of KA and the Old South Ball.

For example, Sherman Allen, a member of the BSC and the only Black member of KA, who attended the Old South Ball in 1981, posited that an event aimed to remember and rehearse the Old South need not evoke the negative, anti-Black aspects of the Confederacy. Rather “Davidson KA’s were indeed able to separate the good from the bad in that period in history.”⁸ Allen and others insisted that the intentions of KA’s celebration of Confederate history were not racist; instead, they aimed to celebrate the Confederacy as a historical emblem of Southern values that existed outside of the South’s historical dependence on the enslavement and exploitation of Black people. One student, Lief Johnston, goes as far as to state that “the only sin that can be held, universally, against the Old South is a deadly sin: Pride. The Confederate uniform is a…reminder that a people would risk their way of life for what they believe is right. The South in the Civil War did not unitedly fight for slavery. They fought against the denial of their states’ rights.”⁹

*Letter to the Editor written in support of the Old South ball by student Leif Johnston.*

*Letter to the Editor written in support of the Old South ball by student Sherman Allen. Allen identified himself as a member of both KA and the BSC.*

A deeper interrogation of Davidsonian history, however, calls into question the idea that the history of the Confederacy as it existed and was remembered in Davidson can be celebrated without also celebrating anti-Blackness. KKK imagery and violence was extraordinarily common in the Davidson area during the early-to-mid twentieth century, including on campus. According to Mellin and Yi, Confederate flags were common in fraternity houses, and images associated with fraternities in yearbooks often featured KKK-themed imagery. Further, though students who supported the event explained that they simply appreciated chivalry as a positive and proud element of Confederate heritage, historian Martha Hodes has argued that many notions of chivalry and the Confederacy have historically been linked to the portrayal of white Klansmen as the saviors of passive white women tasked to rid society of potentially sexually violent Black men. In short, these images were (and in some circles still are) understood to be calls to arms against racial equality.¹⁰ Traditions of anti-Blackness and racially-motivated Confederate nostalgia embedded in fraternities at Davidson and in the broader community informed these performances and inspired their defense.¹¹

The introductory page of the “fraternities” section of the 1921 edition Quips and Cranks, Davidson College’s student-published yearbook.¹²

The BSC and Black Student Organizers

The labor that Black student organizers did in order to cancel the Old South Ball did not end with this statement of protest. Rather, Black students engaged in campus-wide conversations with white students who aimed to uphold the Lost Cause nostalgia associated with the event and performed the emotional labor of educating their peers. For example, in the May 1, 1981 edition of the Davidsonian, student writer Tim Whalen discusses a meeting that occurred between five members of the BSC and KA. This was scheduled at the request of KA president Eric Crum.¹³ At this meeting, representatives of the BSC were asked to make their case for protest and to listen to the defense of Lost Cause role play by KA. Despite the assertions of Crum and other KA members that an event like the Old South Ball could celebrate certain aspects of Confederate history without celebrating slavery, BSC members like president Andre Kennebrew pushed back against this assertion, stating the following in reference to this meeting: “by celebrating one side of history . . . one is implicitly celebrating a demoralized side of history that was and will always be appalling and degrading to Black Americans.”¹⁴ The meeting ended with a few concessions. Specifically, KA agreed to hold the 1981 iteration of this event off campus. The BSC’s campaign to end the tradition continued.

*Davidsonian article written to describe conversations between leadership of the BSC and KA following the BSC’s statement of protest against the Old South Ball.*

The viewpoint expressed by Kennebrew was also echoed in this same edition of the Davidsonian by BSC member Alvin Atkinson, who stated the following: “we do object…to their annual celebration of a period which, for blacks, signifies the greatest degradation and oppression that our people have ever suffered. It is impossible to divorce the splendor of that period enjoyed by a few from the gross inequities suffered by many.”¹⁵ In making such a claim, these students also echoed larger theoretical conversations about historical memory and nostalgic aesthetics. For example, historian Elaine Frantz Parsons emphasizes that despite the decline in actual instances of violence committed by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the South over time, aesthetic and cultural representations of this violent white supremacist group, such as those evoked by KA’s Old South Ball, have historically served as a culturally and socially acceptable mechanism of celebrating, normalizing, and even participating in the perpetuation of the anti-Black racism and racial violence.¹⁶ Therefore, when Kennebrew and Atkinson, among others, protested the Old South Ball, they were protesting the larger structures of violence and anti-Blackness implied within Confederate reenactments described as removed from such racist violence or purely a matter of fond remembrance of an old South aesthetic. BSC members like Atkinson and Kennebrew consistently performed the labor of remembering, reminding, representing, and educating other students about this anti-Blackness that underlies all forms of Confederate nostalgia. This unpaid labor, commonly performed by students of color has significantly changed the college. While attending classes, taking exams, and writing papers, BSC members were also theorizing how to create a Davidson community free ot anti-Black bigotry and organizing to make it happen.

*Davidsonian article written in opposition to the annual Old South Ball by BSC member Alvin Atkinson.*

The entangled histories of KA, the Confederacy, and Davidson College as a broader community are deeply embedded in anti-Blackness. In celebrating the Old South Ball and Confederate heritage while failing to recognize and reckon with the associations between Confederate identity and slavery, groups like KA attempted to write histories that absolved themselves of responsibility for maintaining an anti-Black status quo established by their ancestors. That the Old South Ball, an event so clearly linked to Confederate nostalgia, was only interrogated and eventually cancelled due to the labor of Black students reflects that the burden consistently rests on marginalized students to unearth and force campus communities, including Davidson, to recognize histories of anti-Black violence and their cultural legacies.¹⁷

Remembering Change-Making at Davidson

Despite the clear link between the institutional change resulting from KA cancelling one of the most public displays of Confederate nostalgia at Davidson College and the labor of Black students working within the BSC, the labor of Black students is rarely recognized in master narratives of Davidson’s history. Black students are not represented as historical agents of change on this campus. For example, in the 2018 tour guide manual, created to educate tour guides on how best to represent the college and its history to prospective students, the BSC is only mentioned in passing, and only in reference to the physical space it occupies on campus. The manual encourages tour guides to “speak learnedly about Davidson lore, history, and college traditions,” yet includes no mention of the continual work of students of color to create institutional change and make Davidson a more just and equitable space.¹⁸

When we center the stories of Black student community building, we call into question the traditional master narratives of Davidson College that almost exclusively characterize change as the product of top-down presidential initiative. There is no question that the values of the older, white, Presbyterian — and until now, men — who have led the college have shaped it in important ways. The kind of campus-wide education and change-making represented by the BSC protest against and eventual cancellation of KA’s Old South Ball began to suggest that other stories of leadership are central to understanding institutional change at Davidson College. By acknowledging, unearthing, and interrogating the archival evidence of the work Black students carried out to create caring communities of resilience and combat anti-Blackness at Davidson, one can push back against historical master narratives that present Davidson College as a space formed and changed by and for white people.

Presbyterian Heritage and Queerness

September 1, 2020 by ispadalecki@davidson.edu

I. Padalecki

“Established in 1837 by Presbyterians of North Carolina, Davidson is a liberal arts college dedicated to cultivating humane instincts and disciplined, creative minds.”¹

Official histories of Davidson College, such as the quote above, pulled directly from Davidson College’s main webpage, emphasize the college’s Presbyterian origins when discussing the goals of the institution, rooting its values within a particular faith.² Though Davidson College was founded by Presbyterians, with early leaders utilizing Presbyterian codes to define normative behavior and impose moral regulations on the town (for example, limiting the sale of alcohol), the College’s relationship with this faith has evolved.³ This relationship between Davidson College and Presbyterian moral values came into question following the intensification of the AIDS epidemic in North Carolina during the mid-to-late 1980s.⁴ During this time, heterosexual people became more aware of the queer folks in their communities, not because of a sudden recognition of the humanity of queer people, but rather because they perceived them, particularly gay men, as sexually immoral and a threat to public health.⁵ As recent as 2017, a working group tasked with reflecting on the College’s relationship with the Reformed Protestant Tradition and Presbyterianism released a report that posed the following question as one of its primary challenges: “In light of the broader climate, how can the College publicly affirm that its inclusive, humane, social-justice oriented vision is rooted in its Presbyterian heritage and identity?”⁶ The task, then, was to identify ways in which Davidson’s Presbyterian roots fostered a spirit of social justice on campus.

In this essay, we examine the intersections between Davidson’s emphasis on “humane instincts” associated with Presbyterian values and the presence (and, sometimes, lack thereof) of queer community members in the college’s official histories. In doing so, we critically interrogate the exclusions that accompany the sense of tradition and community that some groups associated with Davidson derive from Davidson’s Presbyterian identity and heritage.

Queer Organizing and FLAG

Queer students are absent from most archival documents that record the earliest histories of Davidson College. When we use the term “queer” in this essay, we mean people of sexual and gender identities diverging from the cisgender and heterosexual identities frequently deemed normative. Reflecting on the history of sexuality in the United States, students whose identities, desires, and self-definitions that might fit under the umbrella of queerness today would have used other terms, including homosexual and gay, in the past.⁷ Many words used commonly among students at schools like Davidson College were, and continue to be, pejoratives (derogatory terms) and therefore unlikely to have been recorded in official college records. Likewise, behaviors associated with queer students were often suppressed or denied by religious and educational leaders. Because of this lack of recognition of diverse expressions of gender and sexual identity by those empowered to record the histories of institutions like Davidson College, institutional archives tend not to include evidence of same-sex desire and non-normative gender expression until the late twentieth century, and this evidence often appears in student publications before institutional records. Davidson College’s archives are typical in lacking information about this topic for most of the college’s existence, but we cannot assume that these gaps prove a straight past. In fact, an anonymous Davidsonian editorial published in 1986 (seen below) suggested that gay students comprised a large minority of students.⁸ To continue challenging these archival silence, scholars researching queer histories seek out primary sources such as personal papers and memorabilia and conduct oral histories.

Some of the earliest discussions of queerness in Davidson’s archives reference to heterosexist violence and feelings of precarity experienced by queer individuals; peer pressure also helps explain archival silences. In the 1986 editorial referenced above and seen below, an anonymous gay Davidson student wrote that with “the current AIDS crisis and the accompanying cacophony of sick jokes and God’s wrath sermons…Davidson is the worst place on earth to come out.”⁹ Only five years later, in 1991, a first-year student who came out as gay was severely harrassed, even receiving death threats from fellow students.¹⁰

An anonymous article from 1986, detailing the stigma experienced by non-heterosexual Davidson students.

Although these instances indicate an increase in heterosexist violence on campus following increased queer visibility during the AIDS crisis,¹¹ this period also marked historic queer organizing among students at Davidson College. Amid the unfolding AIDS epidemic and movements for justice for people of color and women, queer students in the late twentieth century began organizing and speaking on their experiences of marginalization nationwide.¹² Students at Columbia University established the first official student organization for gay students in 1967.¹³ In 1991, students founded Friends of Lesbians and Gays, or FLAG, the first pro-queer student organization to receive a charter from SGA. Unlike any student organization before it, FLAG members worked to “ensure that [Davidson’s] campus is a safe and comfortable place for every individual, regardless of their sexual orientation.”¹⁴ Though the founding of FLAG, in many ways a direct response to heterosexist violence on campus, represents a historic moment in queer organizing among Davidson students, we must not assume that FLAG represented the beginning of queerness at Davidson. Rather, documents like the 1986 editorial prove that queer students existed at Davidson, and found each other, even before they were officially recorded as an important community population within the documentary record.

Two panels from a brochure published and distributed by members of FLAG at Davidson College.

Protestantism and the “Debate” over Queer Inclusion

Though many individuals in the local Presbyterian community were supportive towards queer students, some external community members (especially parents and alumni) who spoke out against FLAG did so citing Davidson’s Presbyterian heritage and identity.¹⁵ For example, a parent of a Davidson student expressed in a 1991 editorial published in the Davidsonian that “as a Christian I see homosexuality as a sin…some of the reasons for selecting Davidson..were its Christian heritage, honor code, and lack of such groups on campus.” This parent, among others, lamented paying their child’s student activity fee and indirectly supporting FLAG as an SGA-chartered student organization.¹⁶ In making such a statement, this parent utilized their own Christian belief, as well as Davidson’s continued association with Presbyterianism, to justify the exclusion of queer student organizations on campus.

Letters to the Editor published in the November 11, 1991 issue of *The Davidsonian*.

Additionally, in the 1994 and 1995 editions of the Davidson Journal, many alumni responded negatively to a student who called on the community to celebrate “157 years of homosexuality at Davidson” in reference to FLAG’s chartering. They pushed back against the idea that homosexuality had always existed at Davidson, citing strong Presbyterian values of the past as evidence to this end. One alum, who graduated in 1950, argued in an issue of the Davidson Journal (shown below) that “the 1950 Davidson always had a great reputation as an academic and Christian college….during my two years of required Bible courses, the 1950 Davidson taught me that homosexuality is an abomination.”¹⁷

Letter to the editors of the Davidson Journal from the Spring 1995 edition.

These alums and parents of students, among others, suggested that an embrace of or support for FLAG on Davidson’s campus represented a rift with its Christian heritage. The critics of FLAG discussed here, primarily alums and parents of Davidson College students, used their position as donors and stakeholders in the college’s reputation to mobilize anti-queer exclusion through the language of religiosity and tradition. By evoking religiosity as the primary lens through which change at Davidson should be viewed, they helped to construct a notion of community belonging that permitted and even depended on the exclusion of those who did not fit the heteronormative social codes of the Presbyterian church.

Power, Presbyterian Heritage, and Excellence in the College Archives

The social mores associated with Presbyterianism have influenced understandings of morality and normalized heteronormativity in Davidson since its founding.¹⁸Although Davidson students have not been required to attend services at the college chapel since 1963, theological discussions of various forms of Presbyterianism continued to frame discussions of homosexuality in terms of acceptance or rejection into the early twenty-first century. For example, in November 2009, a Davidson student aligned with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (distinct from the PCUSA, to which Davidson is officially affiliated) objected to a college panel on Coming Out Day by stating that “when Davidson officially encourages homosexuality by supporting events such as National Coming Out Day celebrating, it is unwittingly encouraging its students to turn against the God who made them…to live and die under his wrath and curse.”¹⁹ Other Davidson students, faculty, and staff refuted this interpretation; for example, in this same issue of the Davidsonian, another self-identified Presbyterian student stated the following: “The openness of the school…speaks volumes to the heritage of Davidson in the Presbyterian tradition…we can stand together to affirm homosexuals.”²⁰

In 2011, the Presbyterian Church (USA), through an affirmative vote of the majority of its Presbyteries, opened the ministry to partnered gay and lesbian people. (Notably, the first trans minister had served the church as early as the 1990s.)²¹In 2014, these Presbyteries voted to allow same-sex marriages at the discretion of ministers and sessions. This includes Davidson College Presbyterian Church. Anti-queer attitudes run counter to those expressed by current Presbyterian leadership in and around the college, who seek to provide safe spaces of reflection, faith, and belonging for queer students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members.²²

As historians, we recognize that archival silences often reflect intentional suppression and exclusion rather than absence. To explain why there’s no information about openly queer students, we must interrogate the heterosexist biases at the root of Davidson College’s Presbyterian identity and how this shapes descriptions of students in college histories. By examining backlash against early queer organizing at Davidson College, including the instances of parental and alumni criticism of FLAG in the early-to-mid 1990s and debate over Coming Out Day in 2009, we see examples of how Presbyterianism has been weaponized by certain community stakeholders as a gatekeeping mechanism, promoting a heteronormative ideology that extends a sense of belonging in the Davidson community only to those who do not deviate from moralized heterosexuality.

As students collect oral histories with Davidson alum for the Gender and Sexuality Oral History Project, we document the existence of gay students at least as far back as the 1960s. Their presence and contributions, which are the subjects of other essays in this project, are worthy of noting as part of the humanely oriented and Presbyterian-identified institution of Davidson College. To write the history of Davidson College as straight because it is Christian is an act of violence; it is also inaccurate.

Queerness and Visibility

August 26, 2020 by ispadalecki@davidson.edu

I. Padalecki

In December of 2013, Davidson College made national news when the Huffington Post published an article about disagreements surrounding the College’s policy regarding students hanging flags from their dorm room windows. According to the article, Dean Jason Shaffer, the Director of the Residence Life Office at the time that this article was published, sparked controversy when he informed Max Feinstein, a queer student, that he needed to remove the rainbow pride flag in his window as “a bystander may mistake [it]….as representative of the values of all the inhabitants of the dorm.”¹ When we use the term “queer” in this essay, we mean people of sexual and gender identities diverging from the cisgender and heterosexual identities frequently deemed normative. Reflecting on the history of sexuality in the United States, students whose identities, desires, and self-definitions might fit under the umbrella of queerness today would have used other terms, including homosexual and gay, in the past.²

Many students protested Dean Shaffer’s statement by hanging rainbow flags out of their own windows (shown below). This included students who Feinstein initially thought “didn’t care” about or recognize the queer community at Davidson College. As a result, these students helped thwart Davidson College’s efforts to disassociate queerness from its visible brand as an elite institution that educates and graduates students who excel at socially acceptable standards of academic and athletic achievement. These otherwise mainstream students acted in solidarity with students who eschew gender binaries and heterosexual norms; together, they increased the visibility of queerness within the physical landscape of the institution.³

A photo of Chidsey Dorm after Max Feinstein was told to remove his rainbow flag.⁴

A local news article regarding the flag incident of 2013, also featuring an image of rainbow flags hanging from the windows of several dorm rooms.⁵

In an attempt to avoid publicly endorsing the message of the rainbow flag and pride in non-heterosexual identities, Dean Shaffer’s response to Feinstein’s flag sparked a renewed interest among the student body in discussing the experiences of queer students on Davidson’s campus.⁶ Such a direct movement towards imprinting queerness onto the public appearance of the campus sparked conversations among students, faculty, and staff, especially in the form of “talkback” events, about the meaning of queer “visibility” that would extend beyond the initial controversy. By analyzing the actions of queer Davidson students advocating for equity, inclusion, and visibility, we can critically evaluate how queer students have been remembered and preserved in the college archives.

Queer “Visibility” and Campus Organizing

Though many scholars, including Mary L. Gray, Rosemary Hennessey, and Lisa Duggan, have presented different definitions of queer “visibility,” many emphasize that demands for increased “visibility” do not just refer to a desire to be recognized as existing. Rather, queer people who call for “visibility” want their non-heterosexual identities to be recognized as possible, natural, and normal in their communities, which have often rendered them invisible.⁷ According to queer theorist Mary L. Gray, queer organizers in rural areas (such as Davidson College and as opposed to specific urban neighborhoods that serve as magnets for queer people) have often strategically heightened their visibility when organizing for their rights and nurturing a sense of belonging. By creating coalitions with other queer people and heteronormative allies, and taking up or marking physical space within communities that have failed to recognize their existence, rural queers initiate larger conversations about equity and liberation. In this sense, a pride flag isn’t a decoration; it marks queer presence and a challenge to those who would deny it.⁸

Calls for visibility and inclusion in the physical aesthetic of Davidson College are prevalent in the college’s archival records of queer students. When discussing flag policy in 2013, students engaged broader conversations on representation and meaning. This included several students who hung the Confederate flag from their windows in response to the controversy over the pride flag. In the Huffington Post article shown above, Feinstein compared the removal of his rainbow flag to the promotion of ideologies represented by the Confederate flag, a symbol historically used to uphold patriarchal, and therefore anti-queer, white supremacy.⁹ Feinstein feared that the College, rather than addressing its white supremacist heritage and the meaning of Confederate symbols, would deny all students the ability to hang a flag from their dorm window and publicly alter the physical image of Davidson’s campus. Feinstein expressed concern about a universal flag-ban that falsely equated the rainbow and Confederate flags. He argued that “the person who hung the Confederate flag [would receive] exactly what he/she wanted,” the continued removal of pride flags on campus, while “the LGBTQ community is relegated again to the shadows of campus culture” and made invisible.¹⁰

A clipping from the Huffington Post article that ran about Davidson College’s restrictive flag-hanging policy, as preserved digitally by the archives of Davidson College.

After the immediate removal of Feinstein’s flag, the GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance), a queer student group established in 2003, hosted a talkback between students, faculty, and staff to discuss “how to increase visibility of LGBTQIA” campus group and students.¹¹ Several students provided suggestions on how queer students could be more visible, supported, and empowered by the larger campus community, including creating an LGBTQ+ “safe space” on campus, revising tour-guide procedures to make queerness a more open part of the discussions prospective students would have about Davidson College, and even creating an art installation of queer presence and support on campus. Dylan Goodman, a member of the class of 2016, summarized the talkback: “We need to make sexual diversity a part of Davidson’s identity.¹²

An article written in the student publication, the Davidsonian, after the 2014 talkback regarding queer visibility on campus.

The conversation surrounding the flag incident quickly evolved from a matter of one queer student expressing his identity to that of queer students collectively being recognized as important and valued members of the college community. Queer students and allies alike stood in solidarity with Feinstein to take up space, represented by the hanging of many rainbow flags from dorm windows. By organizing, attending, and participating in talkbacks such as the aforementioned GSA event, students championed the idea that queer students could, and should, be recognized and affirmed publicly by Davidson College. Queer students and allies asserted the right for queer stories to be heard, addressed, and acknowledged. Their calls for visibility, when examined closely, are calls for inclusion in the identity and history of an institution that, for more than a century, failed to record even minimal acknowledgment of queerness in its archival record.

Visibility, Community, and Institutional Identity

Queer organizing and advocacy that centers visibility is not without scholarly critique. Rosemary Hennessey and Lisa Duggan have argued that the visibility politics utilized by many mainstream movements for the rights of queer people have dangerously led into moments of cultural assimilation and a desire for queer people to be recognized as respectable deviants while still upholding heterosexuality as the norm.¹³ Even students who took issue with events that made visible expressions of queerness, such as the editors of the 1998 edition of student publication Libertas, which described fashion shows put on by FLAG (the prominent GLBTQ student group at Davidson College before GSA) as unimpactful and voyeuristic, recognized widespread feelings of invisibility as harmful to queer students and an urgent matter demanding redress.¹⁴

The Libertas article, “Why Did We Have to Stage This Picture?” sought to document what it was like to be queer at Davidson in 1998. A quote is highlighted: “There seems to be an invisibility of queerness on campus. Many students and professors, administrators, staff…etc seem to act as if there were no queer people on campus.”

As we elevate the activism and coalition-building between queer students and other community members and their calls for increased visibility, we must be cognizant of the limits of what can be known about that past. That the best-preserved elements of queer activism on Davidson’s campus center the notion of visibility does not indicate that other, perhaps more radical calls for justice and liberation, did not exist during the period discussed here, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For example, during this same period, queer people on other campuses organized for access to queer-affirming sexual education, counseling services, housing, and health care; the creation of academic units centering Queer Studies; and the hiring and tenuring of openly queer faculty. Many of these initiatives sought to fundamentally change institutional structures rather than include a previously marginalized group within them. Did queer students then attending Davidson College also care about these things?

The archives are silent, but this lack of documentation of more radical calls for institutional transformation underscores the limitations of relying primarily on college-sanctioned written material and the importance of preserving personal papers and non-written archival evidence including photographs and oral histories. Until the latter decades of the twentieth century, college archives existed to maintain records created by the institution rather than document the range of student experiences. For this reason, the perspectives of whole groups are silenced or obscured. Davidsonian articles, one of the few sources documenting student experiences, often have filtered queer voices through the words of straight writers and editors. The result has been a loss of nuance. For example, the Davidsonian reduced the 2013 flag debate to an “anti-queer” versus “pro-queer” debate. Personal papers, including objects like flags and candid photographs of student life, and oral histories enable a more complex understanding of the past, and along with institutional records, their collection and preservation should be a priority of college archives. Oral histories with marginalized groups are particularly important. According to scholars Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio Roque Rodriguez, oral histories that allow queer folks to tell their own stories of queerness, identity, and belonging do the necessary work of “disrupt[ing[ historical paradigms that do not or will not acknowledge the existence of bodies, genders, and desires invisible to previous historical traditions.” Oral histories, then, are necessary archival materials towards to goal of increasing and understanding queer visibility on-campus and within the archives.¹⁵

Queer students’ activism for visibility at Davidson College and claiming of both physical and archival space corrects past presentations of the student body as uniformly cisgender and heterosexual. Open queerness is now part of Davidson’s brand, and the collection and creation of records documenting the experiences of Davidson alum who identify as GLBTQ would further foster the well-being of queer students here today and those who will attend Davidson College in the future. In this way, inclusive archives can support the work done by queer students who, despite seeing very little of themselves in the College’s history and aesthetic, insisted on being visibly represented as integral, historically relevant stakeholders in the identity of the institution that is Davidson College.

School to Recital: Women Teaching Music

November 24, 2019 by tiadams@davidson.edu

T. Adams, J. Griffin, S. Moskowitz, B. Riley, with I. Padalecki

The profession of teaching is often associated with women; in 2019, approximately eighty percent of elementary school teachers were women.¹ This feminization of teaching originated in the middle of the nineteenth century. During the Market Revolution, the American economy became more market-oriented, and households became less self-sufficient. This drove an increasing number of men off farms and toward jobs that paid wages or salaries. Literacy became a required skill and teaching boys to read a necessity. In addition to performing unpaid domestic labor and childcare, women, too, felt pressure to earn income to support their families, but their options were limited by notions of gender-appropriate behavior.²Out of these economic changes emerged the ideology of “separate spheres,” which presented women as inherently suited to maintaining households as a sanctuary from the public sphere. Women’s work generally was not considered skilled “work” to be compensated monetarily; this status was primarily reserved for work done by men (manufacturing, resource extraction, craft, and commerce).³

Feminized Morality

The Second Great Awakening, a period of religious revival in which many Americans developed a personal relationship with God through participation in evangelical Christianity, also shaped gender roles in the early nineteenth century. This caused an uptick in women’s participation in Protestant churches, including Presbyterianism, increasing the association of womanhood with purity and morality.⁴

This was also related to the concept of Republican Motherhood, which emphasized women’s role in educating children to be virtuous and literate citizens that could participate in civic life. For literate women, teaching their children to read became another facet of their domestic responsibilities. The important duty fell mainly on mothers, again emphasizing women’s critical role as educators of their children.⁵

These shifts, along with the notion of separate spheres, allowed women to access the profession of teaching as an “extension of mothering,” in which women were seen as uniquely equipped to instill moral values in and provide care to children in a setting that mirrored the domestic home.⁶ This newfound ability of women to access teaching as one of the few legitimate careers open to them was clearly shown in the story of Mrs. William A. Holt, who established the first secondary school for girls in Davidson in 1860.⁷

1959 Newspaper article about Mrs. Holt’s school.⁸

Music as Access to Academia

While white Southerners expected respectable women to confine their labor to their homes and families, musical performance played an important role in early Davidson as an entry point into the public sphere for women and a source of entertainment for the whole community. The male and female members of the church club made up the choir and also performed for the students in Chambers, the main academic building at Davidson College.⁹

In southern society, music also allowed nineteenth-century women to access income as teachers. Southern white women of the upper class traditionally had access to music instruction, a talent seen as desirable in a spouse. Middle-class families aspired for their daughters to have such skills, too. For this reason, women who worked as educators often taught music because doing so conformed to gender norms and did not challenge the widely held belief that women were incapable of teaching subjects that required reason and logic, like math or science. Mary Brown Hinely, a piano instructor and choral director in Georgia, argues that the progress of women’s opportunities within American music parallels that of women’s progress within American society.¹⁰

Eulalia V. Cornelius was a music teacher who taught piano and singing lessons in Davidson. Because music lessons were an extra expense in an economically volatile period, these women likely taught children of middle- and upper-class families.¹¹ In the 1900 census, Eulalia Cornelius’ profession is not listed; only her husband’s profession, cradle-making, appears. That a census-taker obscured her skill and profession is not surprising; excluding women’s paid work emphasized the “distinctive male claim to the role of the ‘breadwinner’” that characterized the period. ¹² Nonetheless, Cornelius’s recital pamphlet makes it clear that she had a profession and generated income.

1900 Census with the Cornelius family listed — U.S. 1900 Census.¹³ Eulalia and her family are located in the bottom rows.

Printed original copy of music program with names of performers and pieces — Eulalia Cornelius’ recital program.¹⁴

Though music classes were not incorporated into North Carolinian school curriculums until the latter part of the 1800s,¹⁵ women who were music teachers earned income before this period, some of which could support their families. In an 1869 letter, Davidson resident Ann Mills wrote to her niece Ella about her professional prospects. She explained that several parents asked her to teach their children and included the wages they offered her. Mills explained: “I will teach and be glad of the chance, for I can help my family more by teaching than any other way.”¹⁶ The inclusion of the rates offered for her teaching capabilities suggests that neighbors compensated and acknowledged women’s labor–even when officials and census-takers did not. This is a cautionary reminder that singular historical narratives told by government documents, like the census, underestimate the importance of southern women’s paid, and unpaid, labor in the nineteenth century.

1869 handwritten letter from Ann Mills to Ella — Ann Mills’ Letter to Ella.¹⁷

In late-nineteenth-century Davidson white, middle-class women expanded the domestic, maternal sphere to include certain paid jobs. Teaching music became an accessible way to participate in public life while also fulfilling the idealized feminine role of educating and raising moral children.18 Therefore, through teaching music, white women in Davidson were able to leverage the expectations of domesticity and motherhood. While excluded from the faculty of the college because of their gender, records in the Davidson College Archive provide evidence that female educators were nonetheless part of the intellectual community here. As teachers and performers, female musicians nurtured young minds and the emerging arts scene on campus.

First Ladies: The Women of the Morrison Family

November 23, 2019 by mabursis@davidson.edu

M. Bursis, C. Clawson, and H. Maltzan, with I. Padalecki

Reverend Robert Hall Morrison was the first president of Davidson College, founded in 1837. He and his wife, Mary Graham Morrison, raised twelve children in a white, upper-class Presbyterian household shaped by the belief in God-given separate spheres. Under the ideology of separate spheres, a gendered social hierarchy delineated the roles of men from women. Understood to be morally pure, women were expected to perform uncompensated domestic labor while their husbands worked within the public sphere of civic life, including higher education and the ministry.

As wives and mothers, women had a role to play in preparing boys for this work, and the Morrisons’ commitment to education extended beyond Davidson College; four of the six Morrison daughters attended Salem Female Academy, a Moravian boarding school.¹ The Morrisons also owned slaves. A close study of the Morrison family including slave ownership, female education, and their participation in the Presbyterian church enables us to understand the experiences of women at Davidson College during its founding years.

The Morrisons and Slavery

Representative of Antebellum North Carolina in general, Davidson College existed in a world dependent on human bondage and exploitation. Although census statistics show that under seven percent of the free population owned slaves in nearby Alamance, Orange, and Wake counties, historian Daniel Fountain explains that this statistic obscures the widespread influence of slavery in the region.² Fountain looks not at slave ownership but instead at slave-owning households and their economic impact.³ Under his definition, the share of free people regularly interacting with enslaved people and benefiting from their labor jumps to nearly one out of every three white North Carolinians.⁴ Members of these slave-owning households constituted the Antebellum elite, including the president and several professors of the University of North Carolina. It is important to note this intersection between higher education and slave ownership.⁵

In Mecklenberg County, the influence of slavery was likely even more pervasive. Historian Thomas Hanchett estimates that, although less than one percent of the county’s population were planters–claiming ownership of more than two hundred enslaved people–twenty-five percent of the population claimed ownership of at least one enslaved person.⁶ By the 1850s, forty percent of the county’s residents were enslaved people.⁷ The Morrison family participated directly in and benefitted from this system. In 1850, Robert Hall Morrison claimed ownership of fifty-three enslaved people.⁸

Robert Hall Morrison's 1850 "Slave Schedule." Handwritten table. — 1850 Slave Schedule for Davidson’s first president, Robert Hall Morrison.⁹

In this context, the Morrison women navigated dual identities as both privileged slave owners and women subject to the legal system of coverture, in which women could not have legal identity or property independent of their fathers and husbands and were barred from many professions. Despite broader limiting gender norms, slave ownership made life easier for the women of the Morrison family by freeing them from the most monotonous and unpleasant household labor. Historian Drew Gilpin Faust describes white planter women as members of “a society that had privileged them as white yet subordinated them as female.”¹⁰

White Presbyterian Women

While the ideology of separate spheres encouraged women in the Antebellum South to focus on domestic labor, wives of Presbyterian ministers (including Mary Graham Morrison) also held a public role in the community. In this period, “Cent Societies” or “Praying Societies” provided social opportunities and raised money and support for the Church.¹¹ The development of regional and national women’s boards of home and foreign missions also started around the Civil War.¹² Though Presbyterian leadership prevented women from becoming ministers, they found authority and leadership in organizations such as the Women’s Union Missionary Society of America for Heathen Lands.¹³ Ministers’ wives, in particular, held power because their husbands and churches saw them as useful in turning other women into more active church members and in welcoming outsiders. ¹⁴

Antebellum Education for Women

Because slave-owning families like the Morrisons depended on enslaved women to perform domestic labor, their daughters had greater access to education than the daughters of yeoman families. While the Civil War overall had “a devastating effect on higher education in the South” for men, young women’s schools flourished.¹⁵ Formal education for women in the Antebellum South consisted of academics as well as religious instruction, sewing, and “polite culture.”¹⁶ Historian Christie Farnham explains that “parents never intended for [female students] to work outside the home”; thus, southern girls’ education largely enforced traditional, patriarchal gender roles and prepared these girls for lives as wives and mothers of promising young men.¹⁷ This accurately depicts the Morrison family women. Mary Graham Morrison attended Salem Female Academy from 1815 to 1816, and her daughters each attended the academy, married prominent men, and raised children.

Photo of Salem Academy and Salem College sign, 2019. — Salem Academy and College, 2019.¹⁸

Salem Female Academy had a progressive curriculum for the early-nineteenth century, according to historian Frances Griffin.¹⁹ ineteenth-century students took courses in a variety of academic and artistic subjects, including “Writing, Arithmetic, […] Botany, Algebra, […] Drawing and Painting.”²⁰ Students had strict schedules, and “any so-called ‘free’ time was to be used for plain sewing, ‘marking’ (pattern making), or knitting.”²¹ Reflecting the institution’s commitment to reinforcing traditional gender roles, Salem did not accept girls who were over fifteen years old, as this was “marrying age.”²²

Typed course catalogue page for Davidson College, 1842. — Davidson College course catalogue, 1842

²³

This curriculum contrasts from that at all-male Davidson College. According to the 1842 course catalogue, all students in the same academic year took the same courses, including subjects like “English Grammar, Arithmetic and Geography,” and “Latin Grammar, Mair’s Introduction, Caesar’s Commentaries, and Virgil.”²⁴ Davidson offered its male students fewer extracurriculars and focused on classical studies, while Salem provided its female students with creative classes and a broader selection of academic courses.

Mary Graham Morrison's obituary. One full page of typed text. — Mary Graham Morrison’s obituary.

²⁵

Several of the Morrison daughters married educators who became Confederate generals during the Civil War. Mary Anna Morrison became the second wife of Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson.²⁶ Isabella and Eugenia also married Confederate generals, D.H. Hill, a Davidson College professor, and Rufus Barringer, respectively.²⁷ Recognizing that race and class shaped women’s experiences as much as gender, the documentary record provides insight into how elite Southern white women were socialized and why they supported the Confederate war effort. Born into lives of prominence and respectability, women from slave-owning white families sought to maintain the privilege and status to which they were accustomed. Records of enslavement caution us against romanticization, however. It is important to recognize that here, as elsewhere in the Antebellum South, elite women exploited the labor of enslaved women whose names do not appear in the records of the household and college their labor sustained.