-Rebecca Wu ‘21
February is Black History Month. At this time of the year, while we commemorate the legacy of African Americans who made profound impact in history, it is also important to note the contributions of several St. Mark’s alumni to the cause of promoting racial equality.
Martin Luther King Jr., Prominent Leader of the Civil Rights Movement, Biography.com
In the periods before and during the Civil Rights Movement, two St. Mark’s alumni, Jerome Kidder and Malcolm Farmer, worked to advance African American’s rights. Over the course of history, their alma mater, St. Mark’s School, also made concerted efforts to integrate students from diverse backgrounds into the predominantly white community.
While the Civil Rights Movement took place mainly between 1954 and 1965, it took root in the liberal and radical milieu of the late 1930s, during which Jerome Kidder, St. Mark’s Class of 1901, worked against racism and prejudice. He worked on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights organization whose mission is “to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination.” Later, as the principal of the Calhoun Colored School in Alabama, Kidder dedicated to training African-American students to become teachers in rural communities. Furthermore, witnessing the unjust treatment of African Americans in the South, Kidder fought against lynching. In February of 1938, Kidder, then, in his 50s, traveled to St. Mark’s and gave a talk about the miserable situations of African Americans and his endeavors to improve the lives of African Americans in the South. According to The Echo of Their Voice: 150 Years of St. Mark’s School by Nick Noble ‘76, Kidder informed students that in the South, “the whites believe the Negroes [are] worthless, [so] they try to obtain as much work as possible from the Negro with the least possible pay.”A student reporter of the In-between Times, which was a school newspaper at the time, reflected that “None of us could have helped being stirred by the talk, and besides amazement and pity, there must have been a great deal of admiration for a man who would undertake such an apparently thankless job.” Kidder concluded his speech by challenging students to take the initiative to follow his path of protecting African Americans’ civil rights.
An alumnus who followed Kidder’s path was Malcolm Farmer, St. Mark’s Class of 1957. When Farmer worked as a lawyer at a leading Providence law firm, he once saw a photograph of a police officer in Mississippi wrestling an American flag from an African-American child. Startled by the unjust treatment of African Americans presented in the photograph, he decided to quit his comfortable job to go to Mississippi to use the law as a means to protect civil rights workers and thousands of disenfranchised African Americans. In January of 2018, Farmer came back to St. Mark's and gave a presentation to the Third Form. He recalled his experience of being violently beaten for defending civil rights workers and being sent to a white jail. He was even threatened with a shotgun held to his head by a deputy sheriff. In addition to his compelling story, he explained to the Third Form that "The Civil Rights Movements ended state-sanctioned racial discrimination and segregation, but it did not end institutional racism. Racism continues today." Besides calling for civil rights, he also worked diligently in protecting human rights, voting rights, LGBTQ rights, and educational opportunities after Farmer returned to Providence.
Malcolm Farmer '57, Distinguished Alumnus
In addition to these two St. Mark’s alumni, two heads of St. Mark's School also committed to advancing African-American rights, attempting to enroll African-American students in the School. For the first a hundred years of St. Mark’s, there were no African American students enrolled. However, a headmaster in the 1940s, Mr. William Brewster, and the headmaster after him, Mr. Barber, attempted the integrate the school. Despite the two headmasters’ attempts to enroll African-American students, the Board of Trustees were unsupportive of their decisions. For many years, no African-American students wanted to be the pioneers, coming to St. Mark's, who had never had an African-American student. They would rather go to other institutions, such as Milton Academy or Worcester Academy, who had been accepting African American students for years. In the early 1960s, however, A Better Chance, a program whose mission was to prepare students of color for a better education, started to recruit students of color for St. Mark's. Benefiting from the A Better Chance Program, Ethan "Tony" Loney, enrolled at St. Mark's in 1965. For a long time after, however, the number of African-American students at St. Mark's remained small, and many experienced difficult transitions into the predominantly white St. Mark’s community.
Ethan "Tony" Loney '69, Distinguished Alumnus, First African-American graduate of St. Mark's, and for many years Director of Diversity at NBC.
St. Mark’s has become much more diverse over the past few decades. “Of course, the definition of diversity has also broadened," said School Historian Nick Noble '76. “For example, the idea of having a wide variety of food offerings and appealing to different cultures would not have crossed people’s minds back in the 60s and 70s. The concept of affinity groups was unknown as well. We had good teachers and a tight community, but it was so much less diverse.”
Today, St. Mark’s is a very different place than it was during its first century, before integration. And as we celebrate the life of Dr. King, it is good to look back at St. Mark’s history and at individual alumni who advocated for Civil Rights.