Swarthmorean Silence
In its early days, the Swarthmorean often published articles on borough politics and propriety. But in 1931, it shut down what could have been a constructive discussion of race and segregation. Founder, editor, and Swarthmore alumnus Robert E. Sharples (class of 1925) not only failed to stand up for Swarthmore’s Black citizens, his refusal to engage with a plea for civil rights made it clear who counted — and who did not.
In a front-page article from 12 June 1931, the Swarthmorean reported how, “contrary to past expressions and promises,” the landlord of a twin house on the southwest corner of Yale and Brighton avenues rented one half to a “colored family.” This breach of the borough’s de facto racial segregation was interpreted as a sign of some imminent broadening of the Historically Black Neighborhood of Swarthmore, derisively known as the “Scrapple Hundred.” According to the Swarthmorean, the rental “roused public feeling in the neighborhood to a point of great indignation.”
Three weeks later, the Swarthmorean published a letter by Jesse Herman Holmes (1864-1942), a Swarthmore College professor of religion and philosophy.* A Quaker activist, Holmes criticized the newspaper for the “spirit” of its earlier article, deploring “the presence here of that indefensible prejudice, which is one of the worst features of our world situation.” He also referred to an incident that was being deployed as a rationale to keep Black Swarthmoreans in their literal and metaphoric place: a noisy party that apparently spurred white neighbors to complain to the police. Holmes pointed out that “Negroes are not alone in being occasionally inconsiderate about late parties.”
For the Swarthmorean, however, the case was closed. A terse response to Holmes’s reproach betrays the paper’s — and, by implication, the white community’s — acceptance of the racist status quo. The response claimed that the paper had published “both sides of the colored question.” While that might have been technically true, the two sides hardly received equal time or treatment. Although the newspaper did not traffic in vicious racist rhetoric, and never went so far as to furnish a defense of residential segregation, the Swarthmorean made it sound as though the “great indignation” attributed to the white people who felt threatened by their Black neighbors was justified. As for the other side of the “colored question,” the only words printed on behalf of racial equality were the ones in Holmes’s letter.
It appears that the borough’s Black citizens were not imagined as part of the Swarthmorean’s readership. In the issues from 1929-1931 (as far as my cataloguing project has so far taken me), except for rare occasions, they remain invisible. The newspaper’s tacit endorsement of institutionalized racial discrimination is subtle and polite, fully in keeping with (white) Swarthmore’s sense of itself as tolerant and enlightened. But the refusal to engage, the decision to remain silent on a pressing issue, speaks loud and clear.
*That same year, Holmes would join a Philadelphia committee to defend the “Scottsboro boys,” eight young Black men convicted by an all-white Alabama jury and sentenced to death on bogus charges of raping two white women. Continuing to advocate for civil rights, in July 1933, he took part in the first of the college’s four Institutes of Race Relations, alongside W. E. B. DuBois and other scholars and advocates for racial justice. In 1934, Holmes would run as a Socialist in Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial election.
Retired history professor and former Swarthmore resident Laurie Bernstein has been busying herself during the pandemic by developing a database from back issues of the Swarthmorean, starting with Volume I, Number 1 from 1929. From time to time, we will reprint an article she selects from our archives with her commentary.
