Is IU’s bicentennial history being whitewashed? That question became relevant as video and stills from the university’s Moving Images Archive streamed on giant screens overhead at Assembly Hall. The video was the opening for a stirring speech by actor Viola Davis in a combined Bicentennial/Martin Luther King, Jr event that attracted 8,000 people.
The images and narration purport to chronicle and highlight the illustrative past of Indiana University’s first 200 years. There was, however, aside from an emphasis on athletics, few glimpses of African Americans.
Even the barrier-breaking first African American students to attend IU — Carrie Parker, Marcellus Neal and Francis Marshall — were absent.
No mention of the black student protests of the 1960s or the black student athletes’ boycott that hastened the creation and expansion of the African American Studies Department — one of the first in the country, envisioned and led by Dr. Herman Hudson.
In the video, the campus is mostly quiet, fun-loving and white. Adam Herbert, the African American president of IU from 2003 to 2007, also missed the cut. As expected, the iconic Little 500 bicycle race was a highlight, but not the first multiracial team to participate in what was until then an all-white student affair.
In the 1990s, it was a multiracial student coalition that boycotted classes and forced the university to honor the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. No mention.
IU is not alone in avoiding race, which makes it more difficult to deal with its continuing relevance. The erasure of the black presence is true more broadly as well.
One may wonder if or when Indiana University will be inclined to correct the historical record with images, words and deeds that speak to rather than contradict the beacon of light and truth for all who enter that its motto professes.
Yet the question persists: Is IU’s rendering of its bicentennial history a whitewash?
Audrey T. McCluskey
Professor Emerita, African American and African Diaspora Studies; past Director, Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center; past Director, Black Film Center/Archive, Indiana University
