Talk about history and Karma. Buried in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch is a column by librarian Larry Hall who recollects a horrible tale of power elite racism at William & Mary, the nation’s second oldest university that proponents love to dress up in fluffy history and the usual Rights of Man blather.
Hall’s engrossing tale involves a senior at W&M in early 1945 who also edited the student newspaper, The Flat Hat. Marilyn Kaemmerle took some bold risks for the time. In honor of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, she wrote an editorial that asked why there were no blacks at segregated William & Mary, questionned Southern white perceptions that blacks were physically and mentally inferior and even had the guts to ask why blacks and whites could not intermarry, which was illegal in Virginia at the time. After all, she noted, America was fighting the Nazis at the time over just such issues.
As Hall notes, Kaemmerle was anxious to spark discussion but a silence became defeaning. As a student from Michigan, Kaemmerle may have misjudged just how deep institutional racism was in the South at the time. Free speech, the lifeblood of any university, did not exist for some topics in the Old Dominion, mother of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and all those other brave patriots and fighters for human rights that the old, white “Virginians” love to bring up all the time.
Then, in an eerie way reminiscent of the recent controversy over former W&M President Gene R. Nichol, the Board of Visitors struck. Egged on by rector J. Gordon Bohannon of Petersburg, who opined that “a girl who reflects such heresies is not a proper person to be editor,” the board pushed the school to suspend the newspaper and fire Kaemmerle as editor.
Just as in the Nichol case 63 years later, students angrily protested, but the crackdown was complete. Kaemmerle’s brave ideas almost caused her expulsion, but the effort failed when board member threatened to resign if it happened. She was allowed to graduate. Once again, eerie flashbacks. Nichol would have been fired outright, too, had it not been for the threat of resignation by a visitor behind the scenes. Still, the powers of Virginia’s ruling elite prevailed – both Kaemmerle and Nichol were out.
There’s one more strange irony here. The Times-Dispatch published the “Time Capsule” with the fascinating Kaemmerle tale. Yet the same newspaper once censored its best editor for questioning the status quo and white supremacy.
Virginius Dabney was one of the best editors the state ever produced. His progressive views and intelligence won national respect for the Times-Dispatch in the middle part of the 20th Century. But the white power elite, of which newspaper owner Tennant Bryan was a part, silenced Dabney when he tried to speak out against the racist and horribly-backward policy of Massive Resistance to desegregation in the 1950s.
As journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff note in their excellent 2006 book, “The Race Beat”:
” . . .Virginius Dabney was blocked from opposing massive resistance by Tennant Bryan, the principal owner of Dabney’s Times-Dispatch as as well as (James) Kilpatrick’s News Leader. Bryan and Dabney struck a deal: when the owner wanted militantly segregationist editorials, a business executive with a flair for writing, not Dabney or his editorial staff, would supply them. At one point, Dabney considered leaving his post but got only one nibble, from the Cox papers in Dayton.”
As for Kaemmerle, W&M wrote a letter of reconciliation in 1986, long after the ideas she espoused becme accepted. Jim Crow came to an end by law in the 1960s as did Virginia’s hate-based ban on inter-race marriages. When she died in 2001, an obituary in a newspaper in Arizona where she lived praised her heroism and for being ahead of her time.
As for Nichol, after a few days of thunderous silence, the board announced that he wasn’t that great an administrator and was a lousy fund raiser. The fact that he was an outspoken liberal who challenged long-held views wasn’t a factor in his contract not being renewed, the board claimed.
The cases of Nichol, Dabney, Kaemmerle demonstrate the hideous tendency in Virginia for the power structure to move from the safety of barricaded rooms to punish those who ask too many questions or somehow threaten the status quo, especially when that status quo is so badly flawed. Yet the same power elite will wrap themselves up in history and pompously proclaim just how wonderful their ancestors were and how important forward thinking and equal rights are.
–Peter Galuszka