(Re)Writing the History of Race at Emory

Born out of controversy, the Transforming Community Project draws staff, students, and faculty into discussing the history of race on campus.

By Leslie M. Harris

In spring 2005, forty people from all sectors of Emory University gathered for a weekend retreat to devise an ambitious roadmap for a five-year project on race and racism. The Transforming Community Project will engage Emory’s faculty and staff members, students, and alumni in conversations about the meaning of race and racism on campus and in the United States. It will also lead to the development of a community-based public history of race relations at Emory.

The project’s creation followed a difficult year of racial strife and suspicion at Emory that was unprecedented in its recent history. The turmoil began at a fall 2003 departmental celebration in which a white professor used a racist epithet to describe conditions during the department’s early days. An African American professor who had attended the event subsequently filed a complaint with the university’s Office of Equal Opportunity Programs.

After that, several worrisome incidents occurred in succession. Two non-Emory students attended a campus Halloween party dressed in blackface. When Mary Robinson, the former United Nations high commissioner for human rights, was invited to speak at Emory’s 2004 commencement ceremonies, campus unrest ensued based on remarks Robinson had made at the 2001 United Nations International Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. Some people accused Robinson of anti-Semitism. Tensions rose again when conservative activist David Horowitz was invited to campus to speak about the Robinson incident and to comment on race and political correctness.

The strain generated by these events erupted into a host of fiery debates across the campus, revealing deep divisions regarding the responsibility of the university to address such incidents. A multiracial coalition of undergraduate and graduate students demanded that the university initiate diversity training for the campus community. Several faculty members, however, spoke out vociferously against any kind of diversity training for faculty members. When the professor who used the racist phrase was reprimanded based on Emory’s discriminatory harassment policy, a faculty group presented a motion at a faculty meeting to remove regulations in the policy against discriminatory speech, because they said the regulations limited academic freedom. The motion didn’t pass, but, as one faculty member noted at the meeting, more than an up-or-down vote on such issues was sorely needed.

Toward a Resolution

Over ensuing months, the university attempted to ease the tension through different tactics. It sponsored five public dialogues on “race, diversity, and community” that involved more than two hundred faculty and staff members. Emory’s general counsel, in consultation with faculty members holding diverse views about the university’s discriminatory harassment policy, revised the policy to bring it into better alignment with national law, to clarify its relationship to academic freedom, and to improve the process by which the university community addresses problems of discriminatory harassment.

Concurrently, Emory’s president, James Wagner, who had been on the job for only about two months when the professor used the racial epithet at the departmental function, led the development of the university’s first vision statement, which includes a clear declaration about Emory’s commitment to diversity. Many who commented on the vision statement during its development expressed great pride in their sense of Emory as a diverse community and argued persuasively to feature diversity prominently in the statement. Also at the administrative level, Earl Lewis, who was appointed provost in July 2004, approved the creation of a new position at the rank of vice provost dedicated exclusively to promoting and ensuring diversity on campus. Lewis is Emory’s first African American provost and the highest-ranking African American in the university’s history.

In late 2003, an ad hoc group of faculty, staff, and students began meeting to discuss the issues afflicting the campus. They came to believe that the actions taken by the administration, while constructive, could not alone create or guarantee true community. They noted that the events of the previous fall had revealed that many at Emory felt ill-equipped to discuss racial difference; ill-informed about the history of race relations on campus and elsewhere; and unable to find constructive ways to address either exceptional circumstances or regular occurrences. They concluded that the university needed new approaches to addressing issues of diversity. United by the desire to make real and sustainable institutional progress, these individuals began the development of the Transforming Community Project.

I led the initial development of the project with Catherine S. Manegold, who was then the James M. Cox, Jr., Professor of Journalism at Emory. Each of us had separately been involved in discussions within and across departments about the racial issues that had disrupted the campus. We had also each written a working paper exploring an aspect of the problem.

I developed a plan to create small groups of arts and sciences faculty to discuss race and racism at Emory within the context of the history of race in the United States, especially the South, and to create concrete plans to address the problems identified. Manegold had particular concerns about the multiple stories about race that circulated throughout Emory along racialized paths—that is, that blacks had one story about race and what it meant at Emory, whites another, and so on. She proposed a four-year program in which students and faculty in the arts and sciences would investigate Emory’s culture of race from the university’s founding amid slavery in 1836 to the present. Together, members of the Emory community would create a more complete record of race in the university’s history than had existed before, one that would enable the university to engage in a “fact-based dialogue” about race.

We looked to several models as we developed the Transforming Community Project. The Brown University Steering Committee preceded Emory’s efforts within academia, providing one model. We also identified templates for creating community-based histories and linking them to plans for transforming the prevailing racial climate. Our models included the work of organizations such as Hope in the Cities, based in Richmond, Virginia; the Tulsa Race Riot Commission in Oklahoma; the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Wilmington Race Riot Commission in North Carolina; and the Southern Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Georgia.

All of these projects owe a large debt to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The South African process demonstrated that public acknowledgement of deep hurts and heinous crimes can go a long way toward healing community fissures that many had believed could never be resolved peacefully. Since the mid-1990s, Emory University has had a series of relationships with South Africa: study-abroad programs for undergraduates, residency programs for South African faculty members and graduate students, and a residency by Bishop Desmond Tutu from 1998 to 2000, following his service as chair of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In addition, in summer 2003, Manegold and I led a group of undergraduate students on an interdisciplinary internship program in South Africa.

An Expanded Project

Manegold and I discussed our proposed projects with faculty, staff, administrators, and students between May and December 2004. Earl Lewis, Emory’s provost, suggested that we expand our Transforming Community Project, initially conceived of as a college-wide affair, to include the entire university system. Encouraged, we articulated several preliminary objectives. We wanted to involve as broad and diverse a constituency as possible in the project and to explore Emory’s involvement in the world that blacks and whites created together in the South, from African American enslavement, segregation, and integration to the present day.

We decided the project should run for five years, from 2005 to 2010, a timeframe long enough to permit different individuals and groups to make their way into the project and develop long-term goals. At the same time, the project is sufficiently limited to permit at least one undergraduate class to experience a large part of the project as its members move through the university. The timeframe is also short enough to instill a sense of urgency in individuals and departments about the need to participate sooner rather than later.

Although Manegold and I had extensive experience in researching and writing about race, neither of us had familiarity with organizing an endeavor of this kind. As we began in 2004 to share our ideas with others across the university, we realized not only that they shared our enthusiasm, but also that, together, the Emory community had more than sufficient experience to turn the project into a reality.

Many administrators, faculty members, and graduate students had knowledge of facilitation and mediation that would prove useful for initiating a dialogue with the larger community. Alumni groups said they were interested in documenting Emory’s history, and faculty members and students expressed enthusiasm for devoting parts of courses to excavating that history. A host of others offered advice, suggestions, and assistance as the project moved forward.

As we met with more people, ideas for the project grew and changed to incorporate a broader vision. Founded as the jewel of the cotton-and-slave South, Emory was designed to educate the white elite and thus uphold one kind of racial superiority. But its history mirrors and embraces a wider array of interracial histories and legacies. The project has developed a creative and continuing conversation about the relationship between what is seen in the South as the fundamental racial dynamic—that between blacks and whites—and the multiracial and multiethnic reality that has existed throughout Emory’s history.

We knew from the start that to focus only on faculty members and students would be to ignore the long history of workers who have made and continue to make Emory what it is. Indeed, most of the attendees at five “town hall” meetings on race that took place in 2003–04 were neither faculty nor students, but staff members who wanted to share their experiences of race at Emory.

The transformative power of recognizing the work and influence of university staff members had already been demonstrated in 2000 at Oxford College, the two-year junior college affiliated with Emory. Mark Auslander, who was then an anthropology professor at Oxford, led a series of classes in restoring and documenting a nearby municipal cemetery in which the segregated black section had fallen into disrepair. As part of the project, the students constructed a museum exhibition and organized accompanying evening celebrations that included several African American families who had worked, sometimes for generations, on the Oxford and Emory campuses. The project’s success among staff, who appreciated having their contributions recognized and celebrated by the Emory community, demonstrated the importance of expanding the Transforming Community Project to include any current or former employees of the Emory community who wanted to participate.

Next Steps

In March 2005, following our initial research and conversations, the project’s steering committee held the weekend retreat mentioned at the beginning of this article. More than forty faculty and staff members, students, alumni, and administrators gathered from across the university to devise a template for the project. We had representatives from the anthropology, biology, political science, psychology, religion, and Spanish departments; the medical and business schools; the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; the facilities management and campus life offices; the university libraries; and the president’s office.

The group decided that the project’s first goal would be to launch a series of “community dialogues” beginning in fall 2005. The group stated that the events would provide a “unique opportunity to engage the Emory University community in . . . open, honest, and civil discussions concerning the multifaceted meanings, histories, and experiences of race at Emory and beyond.” Participants would begin to envision concrete ways in which the Emory community could act to create a new future around race.

Over summer 2004, fifteen faculty and staff members, students, and alumni met to design syllabi for the dialogues and to refine the goals of the discussions. Twelve people from the project’s steering committee stepped forward to serve as facilitators, including faculty members from the biology, history, and political science departments; the Office of Religious Life; and the Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Life. Staff from the facilities management and alumni services offices, administrators from the Campus Life Program, and undergraduate and graduate students also served as facilitators.

The first four community dialogues attracted a total of sixty participants. In spring 2006, we accommodated growing demand by organizing five dialogues and allowing twenty participants in each one. Each group has been diverse in terms of race and employment status. We have been less successful in achieving gender and political diversity; women have far outnumbered men in the groups, and few to no conservative voices have participated despite specific invitations to conservative constituencies.

Each dialogue group meets eight times during a semester. Over lunch or dinner, group members discuss short assigned readings or a film about race and racism. The readings and films introduce participants to general ideas about race and racism in the United States and include material on occurrences at Emory. In spring 2006, the nearly two hundred people who participated in the first year of community dialogues met in a weekend workshop to develop concrete actions based on their discussion that will benefit the Emory community.

Spring 2006 also marked the beginning of the second phase of the Transforming Community Project: the excavation of Emory’s history. A “gathering the tools” working group, which met on the same schedule as other community dialogue groups this spring, developed basic tools to help those interested in Emory’s racial heritage to engage in historical research about it. Three faculty members who have experience in oral history and archival research lead the working group. Four staff members, one student, and one Emory alumnae make up the rest of the group.

Emory’s racial history will also be excavated through other means. Undergraduate classes and honors theses will explore it, and it will be the subject of summer research projects sponsored by the Office of Undergraduate Education’s Summer Research Program, which pays a stipend and provides campus housing to students working on research projects with a faculty member. Some students have developed their own research projects independent of these models. This spring, students involved in the Transforming Community Project began work on a research effort that will encourage fraternity and sorority members to interview one another about their experiences of race at Emory and explore the history of their organizations.

To encourage faculty involvement in the project, the Ford Foundation awarded Emory a $100,000 grant in March 2006 as part of its Difficult Dialogues initiative. I am a co-investigator for the grant, along with Gary Hauk, vice president and deputy to the president of Emory. He wrote A Legacy of Heart and Mind:  Emory Since 1836, the most definitive history of the university to date. Hauk replaced Manegold as co-chair of the project’s steering committee when Manegold stepped down in 2005. The Ford Foundation grant will underwrite faculty participation in community dialogues as well as two faculty pedagogy seminars on Emory’s racial history. Through these pedagogy seminars, faculty will design new courses or add material to existing courses that address Emory’s racial past and present. These seminars will be held during summer 2006 and summer 2007.

The community dialogues and research on Emory’s past will continue through the five years of the project. We hope that our community deliberations and our research will help us move from the ambiguous reality of integration to the challenge of lasting transformation. Creating a shared history will help Emory reshape its policies and deepen its commitment to acting in a reflective and thoughtful way about issues of race.

Harris is associate professor of history and African American studies and chair of the Department of African American Studies at Emory University. She is also principal investigator for the Difficult Dialogues project at Emory. The project’s e-mail address is tcp@learnlink.emory.edu; Harris can be reached at lharr04@emory.edu.

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