Over ten weeks this summer, 10 A&S Summer Fellows, 1 Spider Intern, 5 faculty mentors, and 1 community partner (Untold RVA) collaborated on The Race & Racism at the University of Richmond Project. Final projects focused on the Race & Racism Project included exhibits, podcasts, and digital stories. Over the next few weeks, we will feature these works.
Dominique “Dom” Harrington is a junior majoring in American Studies and minoring in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She worked with the Race & Racism project for the Fall 2016 seminar in the course Digital Memory & the Archive, where she developed an exhibit entitled “George Modlin’s Segregated University of Richmond” with team members Bailey Duplessie and Madeleine Jordan-Lord. This summer, she continued working with the project remotely from her hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana–she created some 60 individual digital items for our Omeka digital collection and contributed blog posts, including several site visit posts highlighting black history in Indianapolis.
Dom’s final project was an exhibit entitled “Faculty Response to Institutional and National Change (1968-1973).” A bit about the topic in her own words:
To date, the Race & Racism at the University of Richmond project has examined several key players to the university campus: college presidents, students, and staff. However, a major group of folks that have the power to shape the culture of the school is missing: faculty and administrative staff. To look at their role at the University, I chose a five-year window, 1968-1973, defined by change for both the university and the nation to explore exactly how these figures fit into this project. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, racially restrictive covenants became illegal in real estate, two Olympic athletes staged the iconic silent protest by raising their fists instead of placing their hands on their chests during a medal presentation ceremony, and Star Trek aired the country’s first televised interracial kiss. A Virginia case, Green v. New Kent, made it all the up to the Supreme Court where the justices ruled that “freedom of choice” was not a legal response to Brown v. Board of Education as it was not a sufficient method to integrate the school system. That same year, the University of Richmond enrolled its first residential black student, Barry Greene, on its main campus. Barrier shattering changes filled the rest of these years as well, particularly with the rise of liberatory movements for women, black folks, and the LGBTQ community to the anti-war movements that swept the nation.
Explore Dom’s exhibit and others via the project’s digital collection at memory.richmond.edu