Racial Ridicule at George Mason

In its formative years, George Mason College (GMC) was a predominantly White school. Robert Houston, an English professor from 1968 to 1969, recalled that he taught one Black student and his place of work had no Black faculty members.[1] This did not go unnoticed.  On campus there were complaints and reports that GMC practiced racial discrimination.  The accusations focused on student recruitment and admission procedures. Until 1969, the university expected applicants to identify their race and attach a photo of themselves, a policy that the Chancellor of the college only decided to suspend after a few student protests.[2] When asked about why such requirements were necessary, Louis J. Aebischer, the Director of Admissions at the time, said that “nobody thought anything about it."[3]  George Mason administrators and many students did not seem to think anything about other matters such as their culture of racial parody and ridicule on campus.

In March 1966, the Virginia General Assembly approved the transformation of George Mason into a four-year college. That same month school officials and the Fairfax City government forcibly relocated a Black man named Andy Smith. He lived in a trailer adjacent to the campus. In a letter to the Fairfax Director of Health, GMC administrator J.L. Vaughn affirmed his commitment “to do everything possible to remove this unsanitary eyesore on the grounds of George Mason college."[4] Andy Smith was then threatened with court-ordered eviction, which seemed to accelerate "his agreement to be moved."[5] A handshake deal was struck to avoid the legal action.  Smith was shunted to his new home, another trailer fixed to a plot at the city sewage plant. In the 1965 GMC yearbook, his trailer appears in a collage alongside a sign that reads “DO NOT ENTER: PRISON."[6]

To college administrators, Andy Smith was a removable "eyesore," but to the students he had become an object of satire and even a school mascot. The yearbook photo of his trailer was framed by smiling and smirking faces of White undergraduates.

George Mason College had a familiar and unique minstrel tradition. Miss George Mason College of 1968, for example, was a white woman in painted blackface adorned with a dress designed to make her look pregnant.[7] She played up longstanding tropes of Black womanhood as excessively carnal and fertile.[8] By contrast, one of GMC’s only students of color was awarded “Mr. Ugly” in 1970.[9]

Blackface students were a fixture at Halloween parties; the image of a couple posing gleefully in their minstrel costumes is from a 1970 event.[10] Another pair of White undergraduates dressed up as indigenous Americans, painting their faces, sticking feathers in their hair, and tying bandanas around their head.  Minstrel culture often dovetailed with "playing Indian" in the United States during the 19th-century and 20th-century.[11]

In a 1971 edition of GMC’s student newspaper, the Broadside, an article on the front page is titled “Wife Sought for Indian Stud."[12] A man named Mahendra is described as a “dark, exotic (maybe erotic) young man” who was “stalking our campus for the past several years."[13] Evoking the image of a "dark" sexual predator, the article claims that Mahendra is “in need of some assistance from our female students’ bodies."[14] Such portrayals were not simply bad or racy okes. They signaled racist hostility.

Perhaps the most grotesque and offensive display of white supremacist thinking at George Mason was the annual “Slave Day."[15] From 1968 to 1971, college students, some of whom are pictured in this exhibit, set aside time each year to run a charity "slave auction."[16] On Wednesday and Thursday of the selected week, undergraduates bid on a person they wanted to enslave.  On Friday, the buyers got to "own" their human property.[17] As an article from the 1968 campus newspaper recounts, “if you were lucky enough to outbid everyone for your slave, then you had all day on Friday to make him, or her, kowtow to your every command.” For those without the funds to bid lavishly, the article encouraged students to form a pool of buyers and with their purchased chattel become “a group of masters."[18]

Students depicted in the yearbook photographs drop jaws and purse lips during bidding wars.  Their animated faces are plastered on shiny pages alongside phrases such as “who will buy?” “I want that one…” and “going twice."[19]

The mock "slaves" held various signs, including a white woman with a placard saying “Please Buy Me."[20] A man of color was labeled “Property of TKE," a fraternity.[21]

One of the sponsors of Slave Day – Tau Kappa Epsilon (TKE) – made the event its annual service day in 1971. To give back to the surrounding community, the fraternity took a group of Black orphans on a tour of Dulles International Airport and concluded the day with a picnic in the woods.[22]

A closer examination of GMC's formative years shows that the needs of Black students were not only ignored. Blackness itself was relentlessly and cheerfully derided by the white student body. Irma Wilson, one of the only Black students at GMU in the late 1960s and early 1970s, confided in an interview with the student newspaper that her “impression of the attitude of most black students at Mason is that we’re all just waiting to get out."[23] 

By Ky Buckner

Endnotes

[1] Robert Houston, Interview with Ky Buckner, July 16, 2021, Zoom Recording, Black Lives Next Door Project, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA.

[2]Anonymous, Letter to Incoming Freshman at George Mason College, “Welcome to the Battle,” September 1970, Special Collections & Archives, University Libraries, George Mason University.

[3] Jim Corrigan, "Aebischer Rap Other," Broadside, September 29, 1970.

[4] Letter J.L. Vaughan, Fairfax, to Dr. Harold Kennedy, Fairfax, “RE: Housing Hygiene Case 1214, Plat 68-2 ((1)) 3, Fairfax County. Occupant - Andrew Smith. Owner - University of Virginia,” March 24, 1966, Special Collections & Archives, University Libraries, George Mason University. 

[5] Ibid.

[6] George Mason College, The Advocate (Fairfax, 1965), Special Collections & Archives, University Libraries, George Mason University; http://images.gmu.edu/luna/servlet/detail/GMUDPSdps~36~36~75714~102816:The-Advocate;JSESSIONID=8e4b5c9a-5862-429a-a22c-0fc719920cd4?trs=1&mi=0&sort=Title%2CDate%2CCreator%2CSubject&qvq=q%3A1965%3Bsort%3ATitle%2CDate%2CCreator%2CSubject%3Blc%3AGMUDPSdps%7E36%7E36&cic=GMUDPSdps%7E36%7E36, accessed on 7/30/21.

[7] George Mason College, The Advocate (Fairfax, 1969), Special Collections & Archives, University Libraries, George Mason University; http://images.gmu.edu/luna/servlet/detail/GMUDPSdps~36~36~75774~102820:The-Advocate?sort=Title%2CDate%2CCreator%2CSubject&cic=GMUDPSdps%7E36%7E36, Accessed 7/30/21.  The scholarly literature on minstrely is vast.  The following studies informed my analysis of GMC's blackface culture of racist ridicule: Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Americans Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Yuval Taylor and Jane Susten, Darkest America: Black Minstrely from Slavery to Hip-Hop (New York: WW Norton, 2012); Maurice Manring, Slave in A Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998).

[8] Juliet Walker and Deborah Gray White, “Ar'n't i a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South,” The Journal of American History 73, no. 3 (1986): 754.

[9] George Mason College, The Advocate (Fairfax, 1970), Special Collections & Archives, University Libraries, George Mason University; http://images.gmu.edu/luna/servlet/detail/GMUDPSdps~36~36~75789~102821:The-Advocate?sort=Title%2CDate%2CCreator%2CSubject&cic=GMUDPSdps%7E36%7E36, Accessed 7/30/21.

[10] George Mason College, The Advocate (Fairfax, 1971), Special Collections & Archives, University Libraries, George Mason University; http://images.gmu.edu/luna/servlet/detail/GMUDPSdps~36~36~75820~102823:The-Advocate?sort=Title%2CDate%2CCreator%2CSubject&cic=GMUDPSdps%7E36%7E36, Accessed 7/30/21.

[11] Broadside, November 3, 1970; Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 5.

[12] Anonymous. “Wife Sought for Indian Stud,” Broadside, November 10, 1971 Special Collections & Archives, University Libraries, George Mason University.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] George Mason College, The Advocate (Fairfax, 1971), Special Collections & Archives, University Libraries, George Mason University; http://images.gmu.edu/luna/servlet/detail/GMUDPSdps~36~36~75820~102823:The-Advocate?sort=Title%2CDate%2CCreator%2CSubject&cic=GMUDPSdps%7E36%7E36, Accessed 7/30/21

[16] Bell, Sandy. “Slave Day Is Strange Day.” Gunston Ledger. November 15, 1968.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] George Mason College, The Advocate (Fairfax, 1971), Special Collections & Archives, University Libraries, George Mason University; http://images.gmu.edu/luna/servlet/detail/GMUDPSdps~36~36~75820~102823:The-Advocate?sort=Title%2CDate%2CCreator%2CSubject&cic=GMUDPSdps%7E36%7E36, Accessed 7/30/21.

[20] Broadside, November 10, 1971.

[21] George Mason College, The Advocate (Fairfax, 1969), Special Collections & Archives, University Libraries, George Mason University; http://images.gmu.edu/luna/servlet/detail/GMUDPSdps~36~36~75774~102820:The-Advocate?sort=Title%2CDate%2CCreator%2CSubject&cic=GMUDPSdps%7E36%7E36, Accessed 7/30/21.

[22] George Mason College, The Advocate (Fairfax, 1971), Special Collections & Archives, University Libraries, George Mason University. http://images.gmu.edu/luna/servlet/detail/GMUDPSdps~36~36~75820~102823:The-Advocate?sort=Title%2CDate%2CCreator%2CSubject&cic=GMUDPSdps%7E36%7E36, Accessed 7/30/21.

[23] Larry O'Neill, “Blacks Rap on Admissions.” Broadside, March 13, 1972, Special Collections & Archives, University Libraries, George Mason University.