00:00:00.330 - 00:00:41.350

Right. Dr. Byrd, how are you doing today? I'm pretty excited about this Friday. I'm excited about, I feel like, I'm excited about today's doc talk, but I still feel like

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we've been doing doc talk all week. And this is, this is like, this is like just doc talk three or something. The culmination, the culmination. Yeah.

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Yeah. A decent amount of talking about task force stuff this week. Is this the third week of class? Second week of class? I should know.

00:01:05.530 - 00:01:17.160

I don't know. I feel like I should know this. It's kind of a blur. Well, you know, we started the online and then getting used to in-person. I had a student earlier in here who said that it's kind of like the first week of

00:01:17.160 - 00:01:32.880

school again. So trying to find rooms and get situated, so. I'm just trying to excuse feeling tireder than I should feel at this point in the semester.

00:01:33.710 - 00:02:06.410

In my, my unscientific anecdotal survey of campus today and yesterday, there would be something wrong if you weren't feeling just a little bit like, "good thing it's Friday," as opposed to, that this is, people have been working so hard on on campus and it's, and it shows, I think I want to say, right.

00:02:06.740 - 00:02:22.640

The staff, the faculty, the students, just everyone at Rice has been working so hard to make this, this year great, and I know I'm appreciative of all the work that the students are doing and that my colleagues and... Absolutely.

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Folks are doing to keep this place up and running. Yeah. But we're still glad it's Friday. Yeah. Because Friday means it's doc talks, so thank--TG--GIDT.

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I'm ready. I'm ready. What are, what are you, what are you gonna, oh, we didn't welcome, did we welcome? We gotta, we have to welcome our, we have to welcome our guests. So glad to see you all here.

00:02:45.560 - 00:03:06.710

Thanks for joining us. Spread the word about what we're doing here every Friday at 12 central. We are looking at documents that we think are important to the charge we've been given as a Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice, and making sense of them.

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What, what questions do they answer? What, more importantly, what questions do they raise for us as we continue in our research? So we're glad that you're here. We hope that you'll keep checking in on the website.

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We do have some some programming coming up from the, from the the task force later this semester. So hope to announce those soon. And I do want to say on the doc talks front that in two weeks you want to mark your calendar because we're going to be joined by special guests, at least one special guest,

00:03:42.830 - 00:04:06.170

hopefully more than one, historian to come and speak with us about one of the updates we released this summer on our research about the history of slavery. And so you wanna put that down on your calendar for September 24th. Dr. Martha Jones from Johns Hopkins University and others, et al, will be joining

00:04:06.170 - 00:04:22.190

us on that Friday. Today, though, the document that I brought and I think we realized as we were talking before we went live, the document you brought as well, are both from a later period of our chronological scope, the early 20th century.

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And so the document that I brought today is from 1923, and it's the Thanksgiving issue, the Homecoming issue, of the Rice Thresher from November 29th, 1923. Hopefully everybody can see that. Is that what that thumbs up means, Dr.

00:04:42.590 - 00:05:02.900

Byrd? Okay. So this, this digitized version of the Thresher is in the Woodson Research Center, and I originally found it for reasons unrelated to the part of it that I wanna talk about today, but let me just briefly kind of point out some other interesting parts of this issue.

00:05:03.080 - 00:05:24.410

This, you can tell, was an issue that came out around the same time that alumni were returning to the campus for the big Homecoming game. "Today's game," says the Thresher, is gonna be the season's best. The Owls are ready to take on TCU in the Homecoming game, and so alumni are returning

00:05:24.410 - 00:05:43.010

to campus. You can see this nice little, I guess, owl dressed like a pilgrim, I'm presuming, who's welcoming alumni. There is a welcome from the president at the time, Edgar Odell Lovett. Of course they're touting new things that are appearing on campus, like the chemistry

00:05:43.010 - 00:06:02.330

building, which was going to be the best in the South. And I think I came across this issue because of a little reflection over here in this column under Rice Topics about the game against TCU. And it's sort of interesting that the Thresher, whoever wrote these little items

00:06:02.330 - 00:06:30.920

over on on the left, pointed out that TCU was the northernmost university in the state and Rice was the southernmost in the state, and so, in a way, they were going to be fighting on the gridiron, sort of a "Civil War," quote unquote, in football. And the Thresher went on to sort of expand on that metaphor by talking about the colors

00:06:30.920 - 00:06:51.130

of Rice, the Rice Institute, the colors, blue and gray, and asks if alumni or students have ever considered the true significance of those colors, and gives a little potted summary here of the Civil War, the War of the Sixties. See, 1923, it was still possible to say "the sixties," and everyone knew you meant the

00:06:51.130 - 00:07:13.870

1860s. "The War of the Sixties saw fighting between the grey and blue, but the North and South is cemented now more strongly than ever before. Blue and gray now suggests unity, unity in protection of of the common good." I can't remember if we put that in one of our lengthy footnotes in the summer updates.

00:07:13.870 - 00:07:32.470

You're nodding yes, Dr. Byrd, do you wanna share what we concluded about sources like this? Yeah, but now that I've, now that I've been so aggressive in my agreement with you, I've realized that sometimes it's hard to distinguish what you remember wanting to put

00:07:32.470 - 00:07:58.540

in a footnote and what, what you did put in a footnote. But this definitely figured into our thinking about a reconcilia--I can't even say the word now, but an idea of reconciliation that that pervaded the campus from its earlier days, from its earliest days, and the way that one of the prime ways

00:07:58.540 - 00:08:26.320

in which the universities, the university understood itself is as being a point of a kind of burying of of antagonism between North and South. But but what we point up, one of the things we point up about this is what's absent from this kind of reconciliation, and who's absent from these ideas about what the North

00:08:26.320 - 00:08:46.120

and the South are, and and that to approach post-Civil War America in this way means we really have to put some energy into dismissing ideas of of black freedom and black citizenship. Yeah, there's sort of a, sort of an absence.

00:08:46.120 - 00:09:03.580

And even in this small potted summary of of what the war was about, all we know is the War of the Sixties saw fighting. Not mentioned is what that fighting might have, have been about, but so, yeah, I'm glad you remember that. But now I'm not surprised, I'm not surprised you remember

00:09:03.580 - 00:09:18.490

that footnote, we worked on the update... But, but someone, someone has remembered it in the chat, and that has made my day. Yes. When when you say, I remember the footnote.

00:09:18.610 - 00:09:33.670

The footnote, yes. Right. That's what, that's what we want people to remember. So that's what I think initially brought this issue of the Thresher to to our attention. There's also some interesting things in here related, I think, to that that update from

00:09:33.670 - 00:09:52.300

the summer, too. There was a discussion here of William Marsh Rice. It's kind of interesting that Edgar Odell Lovett, in addressing the alumni and welcoming them back to campus, sort of invokes the memory of William Marsh Rice and says he would have been the first to welcome these "sons and daughters of the university

00:09:52.300 - 00:10:15.550

he founded." And he tells an anecdote that one of Rice's nephews, we can presume either William Marsh Rice Jr., Or perhaps Benjamin Botts Rice, both members of the board by this point of the Rice Institute, might have shared with Lovett their recollection of saying, "Uncle William, the people are saying a lot of nice things about you and

00:10:15.550 - 00:10:36.640

your gift." And the elder, elderly gentleman hesitated and says, oh, it's not, it's not William Marsh Rice Junior or Benjamin Botts, it's Jo, so that must be Jonas Rice. "Your father has a monument in his boys and girls. I have no children." So there's kind of a reflection here of what some of William Marsh

00:10:36.640 - 00:10:56.410

Rice's motives might have been in making his gift to the Rice Institute. And that theme is kind of continued down on the fourth page of this issue, where there's a portrait of William Marsh Rice that is is published, and it says here in the caption that each year at Thanksgiving, Homecoming students and alumni of Rice pay tribute to

00:10:56.410 - 00:11:07.900

the memory of the founder. And it describes him here as a creator, "a creator of businesses and cities and fortunes, a creator of a university. Calmly, wisely, greatly, he planned, worked and achieved.

00:11:07.900 - 00:11:32.500

His was the doctrine of creation, of accomplishment." So we could probably spend a whole doc talk just discussing and unpacking that description of of the founder, or maybe we can linger over this early version of the school song that's reproduced here, which, if you know how to read music, you'll discover is not quite the melody that that students

00:11:32.500 - 00:11:52.330

sing now at the end of commencement or at the end of sporting events, although the lyrics are familiar about fighting for the grey and blue and being loyal and true to Rice. But I just kind of wanted to show you those other things of the issue, that's not what I wanted to talk about.

00:11:52.540 - 00:12:19.410

These are the things that that brought me originally to the issue, but what I wanted to discuss is an article on the third page of this issue of the Thresher. And this article, I think, gets at a little bit some of what you were saying earlier, Dr. Byrd, about what was missing in some of the reconciliationist memories in histories of

00:12:19.410 - 00:12:42.540

the South, which is discussion of black freedom and of African American life in the South. And this is an article that in the very same issue does give us a partial window onto the experience of at least one African American woman who's referred to in the article as, quote, Aunt Jenny Petit.

00:12:42.540 - 00:13:00.300

Aunt Jenny Petit. And as we read this article, which is by presumably a student named R.T. Wilbanks, although that's a question that we can explore and find out who wrote this article. Jenny Petit is described here as someone, a woman that "most of the football

00:13:00.300 - 00:13:24.640

men know" on campus, but that maybe some of the alumni would not know. It says here that Wilbanks is writing "for the benefit and education of the Slimes and alumni." Maybe we should pause there and and define who the Slimes were. That was a term that was used in the early years of the Rice Institute for new students.

00:13:24.670 - 00:13:41.740

We've come a long way. We don't refer to our new students as Slimes anymore. But Wilbanks is saying the new students and some of the returning alumni might not know who Jenny Petit is. And so Wilbanks introduces us to her.

00:13:43.630 - 00:14:10.990

He says that she arrives every Monday and Thursday on campus at West Hall in a one-horse shay, a one-horse buggy, in order "to take care of the laundry of some dormitory men." As she expresses it, she "washes the Rice boys." And she says in this interview or conversation, she's quoted, we'll talk about that in a moment, but she's,

00:14:10.990 - 00:14:35.360

she's quoted here by Wilbanks as saying that she's been doing this work ever since the institute first started in 1912, and that in those days, "she lived in the woods behind Colonial Park, which was Joyland, located where the Hermann Park Zoo now stands," and that she had lived there for a long time, she'd "raised a large family.

00:14:35.360 - 00:14:58.600

[...] She used to have the assistance of her young daughter, but now brings," Wilbanks says, "her diminutive nephew along to read the names on the bundles of clothing" because "she herself cannot read." And then we learned that Aunt Jenny, as Wilbanks calls her, is no longer living there in the, the land that's now Hermann Park.

00:14:58.610 - 00:15:22.160

She's living in a place called "Pierce Junction, nearly 12 miles from the institute," but she still comes back and "makes the rounds regularly." And so she has the kind of unique perspective in 1923 of being someone who could remember the earliest campus. And it says at the end that when she came in her first trip to the Rice Institute

00:15:22.160 - 00:15:43.500

to take up laundry for the students, she backed her cart up to the administration building, which was then the only representation of Rice. That was the, the main building on campus, and Wilbanks says "she has since watched the Owl kingdom grow to its present size, and expressed satisfaction that the new Chemistry

00:15:43.500 - 00:16:05.340

Building would be as great or greater than the other buildings in the quadrangle." And she concludes by saying that she's a Rice booster. She says learning is a fine thing, and it's shameful, she says that there weren't more boys who took an interest in going to school, but she's always been a backer of the

00:16:05.340 - 00:16:23.640

Rice Institute, is what she tells Wilbanks. Now, the audience who's here live looking at the, the document can tell if you're reading along that I have not been quoting exactly the, the quotes that Wilbanks gives from Jenny Petit, because it is rife with racist dialect.

00:16:25.080 - 00:16:51.840

And in fact, at the beginning of this article, Wilbanks even uses a racist slur to refer to Jenny Petit, and he also refers to her as a mammy, which would have evoked and still would evoke for historians from from the Jim Crow era, a particular archetype, or I guess we should say, a stereotypical representation of African American women of a

00:16:51.840 - 00:17:10.050

certain age. And a lot of the dialogue in this exchange is also reproduced in a in a dialect you'll often see when white journalists or interviewers from this time were recording what Petit or African American interlocutors said.

00:17:10.830 - 00:17:34.750

And of course, with with critical distance, we can question whether or not Petit actually spoke this way. And so I've been, I've been being careful not to use that same dialect. But it's so thick, that dialect, when you read this, this article, that when I first read this, I've learned over time on this task force to be kind of appropriately

00:17:34.750 - 00:17:53.560

skeptical of some of the things you read in the Rice Thresher because there's pranks in the Thresher, there's joke issues in the, in the Thresher. This didn't strike me as as one of those because it's a Thanksgiving Homecoming issue. But the thought kind of occurred to me, is this a, is this a stock character that's

00:17:53.560 - 00:18:13.920

being represented here? Or or can we learn more about Jenny Petit? And it turns out at the risk of overstaying my, my time and looking at another document, that there is a a Jenny Petit who appears in the U.S.

00:18:13.920 - 00:18:35.510

Census for 1920 in Harris County. I'm gonna zoom in a little bit here so you can see that her her race is marked down by the census enumerator as black in 1920. She's 66 years old, she's divorced, she's the head of her household, which includes a

00:18:35.510 - 00:19:02.570

daughter. Remember the, the article referred to a daughter. It also referred to her diminutive nephew, and there is no reference here in the census to a nephew, but it does say that she has a stepson named Walter, ten-year-old. So would have been 13 if, in 1923, when the Rice Thresher article was written, and I

00:19:02.570 - 00:19:25.130

didn't talk about the part of the article that refers to her nephew's name as Walter "Woodrow" Wilson, and it says that Walter Wilson "has great ambitions." He wants to be a second Booker T Washington or Roscoe Conklin Simmons." So I noticed that name Walter because it appears here in the census as well in, in Jenny Petit's household.

00:19:25.130 - 00:19:49.550

And that's one of the things that that gives me some confidence that this is a record of the same woman that is interviewed in this Thresher article from a few years before in 1923. And we learn as we scroll across that in the census at least a few years before, her occupation was described as being general, either a general occupation, and

00:19:49.550 - 00:20:08.120

that she lived on a farm, and that she was employed on her own account. That's what these two initials here, "OA," mean. Instead of working for an employer, she was working on her own account. And that kind of fits the same idea that that we're getting from this 1923 article.

00:20:08.120 - 00:20:41.700

So, so to me, what you, you learn when you put those two sources together is that this article, which is, is so clearly a product of the racist stereotypes and dialects of its, of its time, nonetheless is providing us a way of learning about one of the earliest African American women to work on the Rice Institute campus,

00:20:42.150 - 00:21:02.220

coming to take laundry away from the students who lived there on the campus in the Rice Institute and who was apparently continuing to do that even in 1923. So that's the document that I brought to share today, Dr. Byrd, and I'm kind of curious to hear your reactions to it.

00:21:04.360 - 00:21:38.170

I love this work because it's, one, one reason I love it is because it's trying to recover, right, to, to, to find what we can find out of a work that may not take the subject as seriously as we want to take her and does not, is not really attempting, I don't think, though this should be questioned, right, to, to

00:21:38.170 - 00:22:07.480

preserve her in her humanity for posterity. And so the mission of the writer doesn't perfectly align to our mission. But we, we only have to work with what we have to work with. And I really appreciate your moving from this to, to, to material that

00:22:07.660 - 00:22:32.490

does allow us to to get a a more detailed and humanizing view of her life in the, in the census. Well I think, I think that's you know, to me it kind of connects to our our discussion last week on the doc talk when we were using an image of some of the night schools in

00:22:32.490 - 00:22:54.780

Houston from around the same time actually, in the 1910s, this kind of progressive era moment in Houston's history, and, and we were looking at a photograph of an elderly African American woman and and someone who was described as her grandson, who turned out not to be related to her, sitting in this night school.

00:22:54.780 - 00:23:16.680

And we were trying last week to see if we could learn more about, about her and about him, and and you raised the question last week of, well, we know that they were attending these segregated night schools and, but that doesn't necessarily answer the question fully of what the relationship was between black Houstonians in that period and

00:23:16.680 - 00:23:38.280

the Rice Institute. Can, can we just assume that there was, was no connection or contact between the institute and, and African Americans in the city, given that the institute was segregated? And here we're getting evidence that, in fact, there were moments and people

00:23:38.280 - 00:23:59.040

and times when Rice Institute students at an all-white university interacted with members of Houston's African American community. And of course, one conclusion we could draw from this as well, what we're seeing from the way Wilbanks writes about her, not taking her humanity seriously, we are, we can use

00:23:59.040 - 00:24:19.680

this source to learn something about what the attitudes of Rice Institute students would have been towards women like Jenny Petit. But then we can also read against the grain, as you're suggesting, and put this evidence together with other sources to see if we can learn something that the original creator of

00:24:19.680 - 00:24:35.700

this source did not intend for us to learn. And I'm kind of curious along those lines, if you see anything, when you said that there might be some, some things we could, could gain from this article that give us a bigger picture of Petit's life, what stands out to you?

00:24:38.020 - 00:24:57.760

Well, when, when you said bigger picture, that, now I'm hesitating, I feel like I may, I may fail this test. Because one of the things that that that sticks out to me in terms of relationship, right, it, it begs the question, I don't mean this as an, answering a question, but

00:24:57.760 - 00:25:20.830

you used the term "booster" when you described her her relationship to to Rice. And that's a term, and an idea even, I mean, we can, we can substitute terms for it, but, but that idea is one that I think is, is worth us really sitting with for a while, right, because.

00:25:22.780 - 00:25:42.190

..I gotta watch myself, right, I was about to draw conclusions, and we can't draw conclusions. But but the questions that that it raises is what are the, right, how does Rice figure into her home? Right. How does it figure into her home life?

00:25:42.580 - 00:26:13.140

How does it figure, or does it figure, into her relationships with people at the, at the institute? And it may also beg the question of whether there are Rice boys, as she puts it, who, and we've gotta, I wanna be careful, right, but I don't have time enough to be careful, so I'm about to make some mistakes.

00:26:13.140 - 00:26:39.700

About whether there are relationships worth pursuing that Rice boys felt they may have had with her and with her family. There's a web of relationships that we don't have access to, but they, they exist. It does seem like, Wilbanks says, most of the football men know her.

00:26:39.700 - 00:26:54.880

And maybe kind of what you're asking us to do is unpack, what does that mean? What do they, what do they know, what, what do they not know, but what is the relationship that at least they feel they have with Petit? And conversely, how does she view the Rice Institute?

00:26:55.360 - 00:27:12.700

That's the question that you're getting at. And of course, Wilbanks interprets her comments as, she's a Rice booster. She's a backer of the Rice Institute, and that's the way he ends his article. But there's also some parts of this article that hint to me at at a more complex story,

00:27:12.940 - 00:27:36.400

because it refers, as we said earlier, to her nephew, Walter Wilson, which the census says might not be her nephew, might be her her stepson, who Wilbanks says has great ambitions. He wants to be a second Booker T . Washington. He, he wants to gain education himself, is kind of what we can, can read

00:27:36.400 - 00:27:55.690

into that. And then he quotes Mrs. Petit here, saying, "I tell him that he won't ever be able to set up in a fine office and boss the white men, but I know that he could make a heap of money if he gets a little more education," she says.

00:27:55.690 - 00:28:19.900

So I think within that is like a little bit of a more complex picture, perhaps, of her understanding of the segregated world in which she lives and he lives, and what opportunities are available to him that that are different from the opportunities that are available to Wilbanks, let's say, or to the Rice boys, as she calls them, whose laundry

00:28:19.900 - 00:28:41.380

she cleans. So I think, again, we're reading all of this through the lens of Wilbanks reporting to us what she's saying, but there, there is reason to to complicate the description of her as a booster, but also reason not to dismiss the idea that she she has ideas of her own about the Rice Institute that are a mixture of negative and

00:28:41.380 - 00:28:56.260

positive. And I would, I'd, I would also, we're historians, so I won't say, I won't say you're getting out of your depth. I'll say I'm about to get out of my depth, right.

00:28:56.670 - 00:29:16.470

We're historians and I'm about to do some work that we should ask our friends in Herring Hall to do. But, but both of these people are working through tropes and stories and ways of dealing with one another, and we've concentrated on Wilbanks's approach here, but

00:29:16.470 - 00:29:40.860

Ms. Petit is, I think there's reason to believe, is doing the same. Right, she, she understands the tropes that one, there's one, or she may understand the tropes that one uses when talking with or speaking about the white boys at Rice Institute. And so one of the things that it would make me want to consider is the meaning

00:29:40.860 - 00:30:08.160

of, "I tell him he can never sit up in a fine office and boss the the white boys." So there's a, there's a plain meaning to that, but because it's a trope, we also want to consider, right, because of what we know about African Americans wearing the mask, right, and, and, and the actual actions of African Americans in the Jim Crow South,

00:30:08.160 - 00:30:25.200

which is sometimes doesn't align at all with what we, what we think is possible for them. I would want to explore whether the meaning of what, whether that means she did whether that means she did or did not tell her stepson or nephew. Right, right, right, exactly.

00:30:25.370 - 00:30:51.000

What would be possible for him? Yeah. There's interesting work of course about, if we look not too many years beyond this article, when the WPA interviews were were recorded by employees of the New Deal state to to interview people like Petit who were born during the period of slavery.

00:30:51.000 - 00:31:18.240

And we can kind of infer from the census records that she was born in the 1850s. So she would have been, as many of the WPA interviewees were, a young child or young woman during, during the last years of legal slavery in the American South. And of course these WPA interviews have been a tremendous resource to historians of

00:31:18.240 - 00:31:39.450

African American history, but they also come with a lot of the problems that you are, that you're, that you are identifying with the tropes and the lenses that many of those white interviewers like Wilbanks brought to those encounters, and what I think some scholars have found is if you compare the interviews conducted by African American

00:31:39.450 - 00:32:03.900

interviewers, you know, Zora Neale Hurston speaking to, to a formerly enslaved person, you get some some different takes, if we, if we wanna use a contemporary term, then you would if you're looking at the the WPA interviews that are conducted by white interviewers because of the way that that changes the the dynamic and and the

00:32:03.900 - 00:32:20.790

conversation in the room. And I think you're right to point out, we need to take that into account when we're looking at this interview as well. And one of the, one of the, the, thanks for bringing up those WPA narratives, because

00:32:20.790 - 00:32:47.970

you've sent me to one that I think helps raise additional questions about these. At least in my reading of some of those contrasting narratives for interviews done by white interviewers and interviews done by black interviewers, one of the things that I think is fascinating about those is even when they end up being different in some very

00:32:47.970 - 00:33:19.590

critical ways in terms of perspective, what I think still exists is that, so, in an interview with the, with a black interviewer in which a black interviewee may be more self-assured about their place in the white world and much more critical in their treatment of of white people, is that, is that those perspectives are, if you have

00:33:19.590 - 00:33:45.750

them, they're hard to scrub out, right. And so when you compare, when you compare both articles, you can, you can find traces of that self-assuredness and of that harsh criticism, even within the ones that are done by white interviewers, and that's why I think visiting, revisiting that advice to her

00:33:45.750 - 00:34:07.630

nephew is so key because, right, that's precisely, right, you flip that, and that's precisely the advice flipped that that black families have traditionally given their children, just in reverse. If you want to boss these, these white men, you are going to have to get an education, r

00:34:07.740 - 00:34:19.930

ight. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that's that's there's kind of a barely a thinly veiled critique perhaps in those lines that maybe Wilbanks doesn't realize he's he's letting through, or maybe

00:34:19.930 - 00:34:30.910

he does, right, but that's that's... Maybe he does. Maybe he does. Maybe he does. There's, there's an interesting point when you bring up education that I noticed, I meant to bring up earlier in the census.

00:34:30.940 - 00:34:50.350

Here, and this gets at what we're discussing about the position of the interviewer in this encounter, h[e says that she had the assistance of her young daughter, but now brings her nephew to read the names on the bundles of clothing, because according to Wilbanks, she herself cannot read.

00:34:51.580 - 00:35:05.100

Well, when you look over at the census from three years before in 1920, there is a line, a column on the census, can they read or can they write? Each person in the census. And here it's a little unclear.

00:35:05.100 - 00:35:26.670

It actually says, yes, she can write, according to the census enumerator, and at least at some point it said yes here for "can read," And I can't tell whether that was crossed out or obscured by a no by the enumerator, or the other way around. But it's actually a little bit more of an open question from the census's perspective

00:35:27.150 - 00:35:46.830

of whether or not she can read or write. But it's, I think maybe what's, what's important to flag here is that she has not attended school in the last year as, as an, as an older woman, but her, her stepson, who Wilbanks refers to as a nephew, has attended school.

00:35:47.310 - 00:36:06.960

And that that gets us back to some of the questions we were talking about last week, about what educational opportunities would have been available to to someone like Walter. There's one other thing, I know we, I'm really interested to hear about the document you brought, but some of the chat, we're getting some rich suggestions and

00:36:06.960 - 00:36:23.280

comments in the chat. And if you have questions that you'd like to put in the Q&A or in the chat for later, we'll try to save some time to come back and talk about them. But one of the things that's come up from one of our audience members is Pierce Junction. Where was Pierce Junction?

00:36:23.700 - 00:36:46.590

Because Wilbanks says that, that Petit was "living in the woods behind Colonial Park, where the Hermann Park Zoo now stands." So, in other words, right across Main Street from the Rice Institute, that's where she originally lived. But now she was living out at Pierce Junction, nearly 12 miles from the institute.

00:36:46.590 - 00:37:09.420

I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole last night, probably stayed up too late trying to learn more about about Pierce Junction. And you can find Pierce Junction on on some older maps of Harris County. This one, I believe, was from 1915 or 1920, but you can, you can see here, Pierce

00:37:09.420 - 00:37:35.940

Junction at the intersection of Holmes and Almeida, Almeida Road. And if we, if we come up here, of course here's, here's Main Street. So if we were to go, go down Main Street today and sort of cross 610, we would be close to the the site of what was then called Pierce Junction, you know, around the

00:37:35.940 - 00:37:59.340

area generally, a little bit south of of Astroworld, those of us old enough to remember Astroworld. And in in this era in the 1920s, it was an oil field. Because after the Spindletop discovery of oil in East Texas, rigs started popping up

00:37:59.760 - 00:38:25.500

everywhere in in East Texas, including just outside of Houston, just outside of the city limits, and so this was an area in the early 1920s that would have been covered with derricks and oil fields, and that created some, some new economic opportunities for African Americans in the city to work in various occupations as Teamsters.

00:38:25.740 - 00:38:48.630

I pulled down this, this little clipping from the Houston Post that showed a photographer's bird's-eye view of Houston in 1922, so just a year before the issue we've been talking about, and juxtaposes here a photograph of the Rice Institute, the administration building on the left, and on the right, the Pierce Junction derricks,

00:38:48.630 - 00:39:11.940

which gives us kind of an idea of what Pierce Junction would have looked like then. Of course, it also brought all of the same, if it brought economic opportunities for for African Americans, all the same dangers that life in a Jim Crow city like Houston brought. There's an example here of a shooting that took place, for example, in Pierce Junction,

00:39:11.940 - 00:39:38.250

also in 1922, after, according to this report, a man named Frank Roberts supposedly insulted a white married woman on a Sunday morning and was shot and later died, we find out in later reports from the Houston Post. So one question I have that I would want to learn a lot more about is, is what led to

00:39:38.250 - 00:40:03.310

Petit's move from Colonial Park to Pierce Junction, 12 miles away? I mean, 12 miles in 1923 is not 12 miles, the 12 miles that we would cover today on Main Street getting between Rice Institute, and we learn here, she was taking a one-horse shay all the way from Pierce Junction to to the institute.

00:40:03.310 - 00:40:24.450

And the area that she had been living in, this kind of woods behind Colonial Park, which was, I learned when I was going down the rabbit hole last night, an amusement park that used to exist at the, in the very early years of Hermann Park's development. So that's why it's referred to as a "Joyland, located where the Hermann Park Zoo

00:40:24.450 - 00:40:47.190

now stands," and that, that development of the park was kind of part of the same progressive-era reform spirit that we talked about last week to develop new parkland, to create leisure spaces for for white workers in Houston to spend time with their families on the weekend.

00:40:47.790 - 00:41:09.420

And so in 1912, that's where Petit was living in these woods, but on the other end of all of that development, this creation of this amusement park and the development of Hermann Park, now she's living 12 miles away near oil derricks in I think a very different kind of neighborhood perhaps than the one that she had lived in before.

00:41:09.420 - 00:41:31.170

So that raises all kinds of questions for me about how the development of Houston impacted women like Petit and the relationship between the Rice Institute, which was very much in favor of of those kinds of progressive-era developments like like Herman Park, the relationship of the Rice Institute to those those changes.

00:41:32.330 - 00:41:42.950

More questions there than answers. Great stuff. But a lot of answers. Well, I think it's you, know, we've often made reference, I think, on these doc talks

00:41:42.950 - 00:42:05.390

and in the updates, too, to a much better known early African American figure in Rice Institute history, Jack Shelton, the athletic trainer for the football team. But until we came across this, this newspaper article, I don't think that we knew of any record or mention of Jenny Petit, a woman who, as I said, is one of the earliest

00:42:05.900 - 00:42:27.650

African American women who would have labored on the Rice Institute campus, and so that's, it's very important, I think, in our work to recover stories like hers and add them to our narrative as an institution, and not just add them to our narrative, but try, as we've been talking about today, understand better her narrative and and her

00:42:27.650 - 00:42:37.790

own point of view on the history of the Rice Institute to the extent we can with the sources we have. Yeah. Great stuff. Great document.

00:42:39.480 - 00:42:58.970

What do you have for us today, Dr. Byrd? So I've got a piece from 1923 as as well. And sometimes during these doc talks, I know we're historians and we're supposed to tell

00:42:58.970 - 00:43:13.940

the truth, but sometimes we're not telling the complete truth, right. So sometimes, we're kind of working through these documents, but sometimes we've already worked through them and we're pretending to work through them. You're not supposed to, you're not supposed to let, you're not supposed to pull the

00:43:13.940 - 00:43:30.530

curtain back. Pull the curtain back. But what I'm about to do today is more fully in the spirit of doc talk, like we're, this is, I'm gonna work through a document way too fresh, right.

00:43:30.530 - 00:43:42.740

I'm actually scared. I'm gonna, I'm gonna work without a net here for a second. And so the document, if I can, uh oh. You got it.

00:43:42.770 - 00:43:53.360

If I can. I've got my, my Zoom thing is in the wrong place, and it's making it hard for me to get started. Okay. My Zoom toolbar.

00:43:55.150 - 00:44:20.870

But I wanna, I wanna, start with this, which is a not high enough resolution piece that comes from the Campanile from from 1923. And it has the look of a, of a stage play. There's a, there's a curtain across most of the back wall.

00:44:21.170 - 00:44:44.150

There are three figures on the stage. One woman in a, in a long dress with a white shirt and also with an apron, with her hair tied up in what my daughter would call a bonnet. And this one character that I just described has her hand on a, on a rocking chair.

00:44:44.150 - 00:45:09.980

And next to that rocking chair are two other figures. One appears to be a woman in a bed. She looks to be resting, or actually may be in some distress. And a nattily dressed figure, looks to be a man, with a, a cap on, is leaning down over

00:45:09.980 - 00:45:31.490

her even though he has access to a chair near him. A spread is, is across the bed, a decorated spread, and the bed is pushed up in a way that hospital beds are often pushed up. So she's sitting up, is being helped to sit up, and, and she's looking off in the

00:45:31.490 - 00:45:50.660

distance, even though a woman who could be her nurse is looking at her, and the son, the, the male figure is looking away. And so this is the document that I wanna start with. And I should also say, though, it's not completely clear by this resolution, is these

00:45:50.660 - 00:46:11.570

characters may or may not be in blackface. It's not completely clear from from this piece. And then I want to show, uh oh, I'm having a computer problem here. I'm not, not, let's try that.

00:46:11.570 - 00:46:33.440

Okay. I was having trouble forwarding my slide. And the next slide of people in the same room with the same figure resting and the male, nattily dressed male figure. But that, that male figure is now being accosted by another female figure who is also

00:46:33.440 - 00:46:50.540

well dressed. She looks to be trying to persuade the man to do something, and he looks, he looks resistant to it. And so these are the documents that I wanna start with today, and they're from a section

00:46:50.750 - 00:47:30.680

of the yearbook that deals with plays, one-act plays, and productions that are being put on by the students, and this, this one production is called The Dreamy Kid, which, which a group of Rice thespians put on in 1923, and it's a one-act play written by Eugene O'Neill, who was a highly decorated writer from, from the 1920s.

00:47:30.680 - 00:47:45.380

I believe he won a Pulitzer Prize and maybe a Nobel Prize. Someone should look that up. But very, very highly decorated. I actually think I have looked that up, that was me doing that, that thing I said I wasn't

00:47:45.380 - 00:48:07.790

going to do. But I think they've looked that up. But what I, one of the things that, that draws me to this is this is the same kind of, kind of racist or racialized play acting that that we see and we've seen in other places on campus that we've analyzed.

00:48:07.790 - 00:48:33.080

The May Fete for example, and, but, but this one is slightly different and, or may be slightly different, and is worth some consideration or some reading, some close reading in its own right. And I wanna, as a, as a way of, we're not gonna spend a lot of time with this, but I

00:48:33.080 - 00:48:55.180

just want to get us into it and then raise the questions quickly. One of the...I'm taken by a quick review of this production that shows up in the Rice Thresher, and I'll read it on a different screen so I don't have to put my face in the camera, but it reads as follows.

00:48:55.570 - 00:49:17.290

The outline part reads as follows: "The Dreamy Kid, O'Neill's drama of New York Negro characters, is reported to be advancing rapidly toward production requirements." So the play wasn't yet done when this, when this is, when this article is read. "The dramatic values of the play have been recognized and given full sweep in

00:49:17.290 - 00:49:37.840

rehearsals. One of the difficulties encountered by director J.C. Tidden has been, has been that of the attainment of the correct Negro dialect. There is said to be an appreciable difference between the enunciation of the Southern Negro and the Northern Negro, as in other characteristics.

00:49:37.840 - 00:49:56.350

The Dreamy himself is an unusual type of Negro, rather nervous and quick, a combination of the Bowery tough and the superstitious black. One character which Southern audiences will recognize and appreciate is that of Mammy," right, we've just talked about that.

00:49:56.350 - 00:50:17.980

"The aged darkie who lies on her deathbed with hallelujah, praise the Lord on her lips, and gravely warns her grandson of the evils which will follow him if he deserts her at this moment," and then goes on and on to speak to, to speak to some other characteristics of the play.

00:50:18.730 - 00:50:45.210

What I find remarkable here, a couple of things is, one, it informs the ways that story speaks to real, real life. We can see by, by this article, which is more firmly written in the, about story, about fiction, about theater, we can nevertheless see the ways in which this, this

00:50:46.720 - 00:51:07.000

treatment of this play finds its way in the kind of treatment of Ms. Petit and the ways that those interactions are framed in the piece that you shared. But what I, and I may have gotten out of my slideshow just a little too quickly, but I wanna rush, so I don't think I'm wanna bring it back up.

00:51:07.000 - 00:51:31.250

But this question of dialect, I think, is important, and Professor McDaniel, you've already spoke to the ways in which it's, it's manufactured or largely manufactured. I wanna speak briefly to the ways in which it may be selectively manufactured, right, that, that in the, in the Rice Thresher, no matter how people actually speak, right,

00:51:31.270 - 00:51:47.920

they're more, Rice Institute students are more likely to be reproduced in a, in a in a similar fashion, no matter how they speak. But when they show up in the, in the Thresher, their language will be regularized in a, in a certain way.

00:51:47.920 - 00:52:08.860

And whether they have dialects or not, they likely won't make it in, likely won't make it into the Thresher. But that's not necessarily, that's often not the case with black characters. But the one, one, there are a few things that I find interesting about this, this racism,

00:52:08.860 - 00:52:31.990

right, about the, the racism that makes itself clear in this, and that is, it raises to me the, the difference between this and the court gestures, jesters of, of the May Fete, right. What, what are the, it raises issues of differences in blackface that I think are

00:52:31.990 - 00:52:51.550

worth grappling with, right. One of the things that the writer is saying is that the cast of this play is really wrestling and finding problematic inhabiting this world that Eugene O'Neill has has written out for them.

00:52:52.300 - 00:53:20.170

And so one of my questions has to do with the ways in which the complexities or the apparent complexities of this, this play are overlaid, right, with complexities in real life, the, the complexities of interactions with black characters on campus and off campus, which we know Rice students would, would have had, that, that I find interesting

00:53:20.170 - 00:53:40.030

and worth pursuing. And now I'm really about to go out on a limb here, Right, We've, we've treated, or I've tended, I've tended to lean toward the analysis of, stress a certain type of analysis, about blackface, because I think it is a predominant analysis.

00:53:40.090 - 00:54:04.460

The way in which it belittles African Americans, and this blackface does the same. But is that all it does? Right. It belittles, But is that all it, is That all it does? And and one of the things that I think is worth pursuing is the ways in which this,

00:54:04.760 - 00:54:30.260

does, does this blackface also do any preparation? Does it, does it, does the, the ways in which it, it, it requires a more dramatic inhabiting of of human relations. Does it do anything else as, as, as well?

00:54:30.860 - 00:54:52.710

And so those, those are the questions, or one of the main questions that, that, that this document leaves me with, and that I will want to pursue further. Does, does, does it raise anything for you, prof? I think it's fascinating and it's making me think of, of another set of articles, maybe,

00:54:52.750 - 00:55:15.220

maybe we can look at them in a future doc talk, that shows one of the literary societies on campus, also in the 1920s. In one event, it was the, the PALS Literary Society, they hosted a reading of poems produced by some leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

00:55:15.370 - 00:55:33.980

And so they, they had an event where they read these poems out loud, and one, one can assume, talked about them, discussed them. I think the article says, and it's kind of related to the point that was being made in this article about Northern versus Southern dialect.

00:55:35.270 - 00:55:59.210

They commented on the rhythms in the poem and tried to analyze how those rhythms might reflect the speaking dialect of of different communities. Then the same group, the PALS group, a couple of years later, is having a blackface party. And so I think what you're getting at is the complexity of trying to understand

00:55:59.210 - 00:56:16.790

what's going on for students who are doing both things at once. I mean, they're obviously, they're obviously, as you say, taking these, these racialized and racist assumptions and layering them on to the stories that they're, they are encountering in real life.

00:56:16.790 - 00:56:41.240

But there's also this, this wrestling or grappling that I don't think you see in the May Fete court jester that we've discussed in earlier documents, of trying to get it "right" from their perspective, failing, surely, but, but is that, is there something in that trying, I think is what you're, is what you're getting at, that we need to take

00:56:41.240 - 00:56:50.600

cognizance of. Because, because it impacts what they're gonna do. Absolutely. It impacts what's gonna happen when they do, when, when desegregation begins.

00:56:50.600 - 00:57:13.250

I mean, where my mind went was, as we look at events like this or plays like this closer to the moment when, when black students arrive at the university for the first time, what kind of preparation, what kind of work has been done? And I'm using "work" there in a very historian, cultural analyst kind of way.

00:57:14.030 - 00:57:45.040

What have these activities, what have these performances, is maybe the better word, that have been going on prior to the arrival of any black student, done to shape the environment in which those students arrive to get their education and live? Yeah. And I think, though, I want to rush, right, with you into the 1960s, right, I, but

00:57:45.070 - 00:58:14.200

one of the things that we also have to explore more, more carefully, right, about the 1920s, is just what a what a dramatic and potential-filled moment it was as as well. So, I mean, I've done some looking through the Threshers for references to "socialist," and "socialism," and "communist, communism." And, right, so there,

00:58:14.650 - 00:58:35.820

there will be, there will be a black man running for Vice President of the United States not too long after this, right, on the socialist or communist ticket. And, and, and there will be black people in Alabama who can vote, who will, who will vote for him. Right.

00:58:35.860 - 00:59:06.370

And I, and I say, one of the reasons I bring that up is because this, this, the complexities that define the ways black people inhabit the white imagination on campus, the degree to which that complexity is rich, right. There are, there are certainly opportunities at Rice and within Texas and within other

00:59:06.370 - 00:59:32.220

parts of the South to, to find real life butting up to imagination. And if education is preparation, right, trying to figure out what the consequence of that preparation could or would be, I think, is exciting. I think it, again, it connects back to last week, of this progressive-era moment in the

00:59:32.220 - 00:59:59.430

1920s when, you know, there is this, this opening up of conversation, but also it remains closed in some ways too, you know, we can imagine that these, these students who are in this play probably think of themselves as pretty progressive, you know, and yet it's a progressivism that that still embraces segregation as the, the modern

00:59:59.430 - 01:00:22.650

way of of addressing race in a pluralist democracy. So I think that's, there's opportunity there, but it's also limited opportunity. And I'm struck by the fact that, the reference we've been making to the May Fete, as I'm sitting here thinking about the date, that actually comes after, seven years after

01:00:23.100 - 01:00:46.080

the document that we're looking at here, in 1930. So these more complex--if they are more complex, I think we're, we're leaving that question open as we're working through the sources--that more complex opening or opportunity doesn't mean that there's kind of a linear step towards desegregation or

01:00:46.080 - 01:01:07.360

integration, because then we get things like the May Fete in 1930 that show a much more flattened idea. Yeah, absolutely not, not meant to be, to, to think about it as progressing towards something, right.

01:01:07.370 - 01:01:25.460

You know, if these are the, if these are the students who were then going to be in positions that administer things like the night schools that we were talking about last week, you know, the idea would, that I think Lovett and the faculty at Rice had, was to prepare students for those kinds of roles in civic leadership.

01:01:26.060 - 01:01:46.880

And so I think your question about how, how does this experience at Rice Institute shape what those students then take into the world in these positions of power and influence, is important. Another question that I think this really interesting document raises is, to what extent are faculty and administrators at the Rice Institute

01:01:46.880 - 01:02:03.290

encouraging these kinds of explorations, or grapplings, and to what extent is it, is it student-driven and student-led? The examples that, the example I gave was of one of the literary societies that was engaging with these Harlem Renaissance poems, and I have to wonder, were they, were

01:02:03.290 - 01:02:19.640

those poems being taught in the classroom? I'm guessing probably not. Was Eugene O'Neill being discussed from, from the lecture hall, from faculty at Rice at the time? I actually, that I actually don't know.

01:02:20.180 - 01:02:29.450

Or was it students who were pushing the envelope by by putting on performances like this? Yeah. Lots of good questions.

01:02:30.050 - 01:02:51.830

This was a good doc talk. This, you know, even though you you ruined our secret a little bit by saying that it's not always improvisational, but often it is. And, and, and I think a lot of these, for example, I didn't know you were going to be bringing a 1923 document, the same year as the one that, that I brought.

01:02:51.830 - 01:03:10.190

And it's always a pleasure to to have these conversations, and it leaves us with a lot to think about and move forward with in our research. Thank you as well to the audience for the excellent comments and questions in the chat. We hope to see you next Friday and hope that you'll invite others to come and join us in

01:03:10.190 - 01:03:12.620

these conversations. Have a great weekend, everyone.