This 1903 portrayal of what appears to be a fictional Moot Court proceeding, published in the Law School section of The Hatchet yearbook, suggests the normative anti-blackness of the law school culture at the turn of the twentieth century.
Scanning the first edition of The Hatchet (1903), the Washington University yearbook published from 1903 to 2011, I encountered this entry in the Law School section. The page appears to present a "blackface" moot court satire - a story-form performance of law (i.e., formalities of legal questions and proceedings), using racist visual caricatures and disregard for African American civil rights to create humor, on the one hand, and assert the superiority of the white authors (through the performance of legal authority), on the other. The piece is striking in light of the fact that Washington University had only begun excluding African American students in the 1890s, having admitted and graduated several Black students over the previous decades, particularly in the Law School. An alum of Lincoln University, Walter Farmer, graduated from WashU Law in June 1889 (see Hier 2013), and Eli Hamilton ('93) and Crittenden Clark ('97) were apparently among the only Black graduates of WashU in its first half century (1853-1903), and the last two Black graduates before the university was desegregated beginning in the late-1940s. Was this a celebration of Black exclusion from WashU Law? Many questions await further research. Whatever the fuller context, The Hatchet entry suggests the normative anti-Blackness of the WashU Law School culture at the turn of the twentieth century, and relates a longer history of entanglement with legacies of slavery, lynching and other racialized violence (see notes on the header image, below). Finally, the story highlights the value of revisiting WashU's yearbooks, most of which have fortunately been preserved by WashU Libraries (see notes below).
Sources: "Black vs. Railroad," The Hatchet, 1903; Langsdorf, Alexander (n.d.) History of Washington University, 1853-1953, unpublished manuscript, 242-243; Hier, Marshall, "Dean William G. Hammond of the St. Louis Law School." St. Louis Bar Journal, Winter 2013.
Notes: More on the (de)segregation of WashU here; More on the history of the law school here; The Hatchet was first published in 1903 and the last volume was printed in 2011. The Bernard Becker Medical Library provides online access to all the yearbooks printed between 1903 to 1928 in Digital Commons@Becker. A physical set of most volumes can be found at the Becker Library Archives, and the Washington University Archives in Olin Library retains a nearly complete set of Hatchet yearbooks.
Header image: The O'Fallon Polytechnic Building (photographed in 1876) nearly a decade after the law school started there in 1867. The building was at 7th and Chestnut, the same intersection where a free black man named Francis McIntosh was lynched three decades earlier (1836). The building's namesake, WashU trustee and benefactor John O'Fallon, is reported to have served as foreman of the grand jury that failed to indict any member of the white mob for the lynching of McIntosh.
