Background & Interest

This project grew out of an interest to understand a history and legacy that I became a part of when I decided to attend Dartmouth College. My junior winter, I took a class entitled “Raising the Dead.” It was a Creative Non-Fiction course that led me to the story of Edward Mitchell. Mitchell was the first Black man to attend Dartmouth College as a member of the Class of 1828. I was amazed to learn that Dartmouth had admitted Black students, starting with Mitchell, 40 years ahead of its peers. Dumbfounded as to why this was not more common knowledge at Dartmouth, specifically within the Black community, I wanted to share Mitchell’s story.

Mitchell’s story brought me to Dr. Woody Lee, a Dartmouth ‘68 who is deeply invested in documenting the histories of Black students at the College. He illuminated pieces of Mitchell’s history that I had previously overlooked. While I had been focused on the hardships that Mitchell likely endured as the first Black man at a predominately white institution, I had neglected to see him as the intellectual, family man, and friend that he was. Lee highlighted the nuances of Mitchell’s story and showed me the ways in which I was a part of a rich, resilient history that began in 1824.

Once I had found this history, I did not want to stop looking for more pieces. In Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism, bell hooks states, “For Blacks, Chicano/as, and Native Americans, memory allows us to resist and to heal: We know ourselves through the act of remembering. When we lose sight of who we are, when we lose touch, when we lose our minds, we find ourselves through remembering, through talking cures, which are reenactments of remembering. And memory becomes thread that can bend, bind, and gather broken bits and pieces of ourselves” (107-108). The act of learning and remembering Edward Mitchell allowed me to feel more connected to Dartmouth and its history than I had ever felt before. As a Black woman from a low income background, I know this place was not created for me. Yet, Mitchell and his legacy showed me that a small piece of Dartmouth could be mine. His presence and the presence of the Black students that followed him made it possible for me to exist in this space. I wanted to continue learning about those who came before me.

As I began to research what work had already been done to document the histories of Blacks at Dartmouth, I realized that a crucial component was missing from the narrative. There was a gapping hole where Black women’s history should be. In Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, bell hooks claims, “In general, the biases of racism and sexism as well as class elitism [lead] the American public to feel that black women’s voices are the least compelling when serious issues are at stake” (27). I saw this reflected in Dartmouth’s history. Male voices, particularly white, heterosexual, cisgendered male voices, were consistently at the forefront. While Black male voices were beginning to be heard, Black female voices were still silenced or forgotten. Vicki Marks, a Dartmouth ‘73 and one of seven Black women in the first co-educational class at the College, recognized this disparity as well. She reached out to the African and African American Studies (AAAS) Department in search of a student that would be willing to research Black women’s history. After connecting with Marks via email, I knew that I wanted to dedicate a portion of my senior year to this work. To my knowledge, this is the first effort to record the oral histories of Black women at Dartmouth College.

My goal for this project was to create space for these histories to be remembered and shared. I did not want to “give voice to the voiceless.” The women who participated are by no means “voiceless.” Rather, their voices and narratives have been silenced, ignored, or forgotten. Cheris Kramarae describes this silencing in “Muted Group Theory and Communication: Asking Dangerous Questions.” She states, “Muted group theory suggests that people attached or assigned to subordinate groups may have a lot to say, but they tend to have relatively little power to say it without getting into a lot of trouble…their experiences are interpreted for them by others, and they are encouraged to see themselves as represented in the dominant discourse.” She notes that the privileged group preserves its power by “stifling and belittling the speech and ideas” of those they view as subordinate (55). In order to push back against this enactment of power, I created a space in which Black women could openly reflect upon and make sense of their Dartmouth experiences. I have actively worked to maintain the integrity of their responses, including actual excerpts from the interview transcripts in the following creative non-fiction narrative.

Through this project, I also wanted to highlight the complexities and nuances of these Black women’s experiences. In Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism, bell hooks states,

[A]s people of color and women utilize memory as a site of resistance, white hegemony responds, ‘Why all of this confession, why all this testimony?’ But when we are engaged in this psychological, archeological dig—when we rediscover not just the facts of history, but the psychohistory—we learn about our ancestors in a different way. For example, when we discover that slave women didn’t just think about killing their children to prevent them from being enslaved, they did it, as Toni Morrison documents in Beloved, we have a new and very complex vision of Black female resistance (109).

I wanted this project to be an act of resistance, an acknowledgement that these women’s narratives and the narratives of those like them matter. They are important pieces of Dartmouth’s history, whether the College decided to actively recognize it or not. Moreover, I wanted to emphasize that there is not one way to experience Dartmouth as a Black woman. Though there are continuities and similarities amongst these oral histories, these consistencies cannot stand alone to represent “the Black female experience at Dartmouth.” There is more to be recorded, more to be remembered, and more healing to be done.