Place / Retrieval

The Crimson Klan

The KKK was clearly present at Harvard. But the university rarely mentions the 20th century in its attempts to reckon with its past.

by Simon J. Levien via The Harvard Crimson on March 29, 2021

...reading,” but noted that “unfortunately, in a university as old as ours there will be many regrettable incidents involving administrators whose values are different from ours, and not all of them are easily verifiable after much time has passed.” ‘A Burning Cross in the Ivory Tower’

Tucked away in the Boston Public Library’s digital archives are a pair of photo negatives. They depict 10 men in bright white sheets, pointy hats, and cut-out eye holes, posed around the John Harvard Statue. In one shot, a hunching Klansman, propped up in the statue's lap, turns his body to face the statue, staring down the cameraman.

There are hints of formal wear; dress shoes and slacks peek out underneath the white robes. A man on the far right holds a boater hat, historically synonymous with Harvard Class Day attire. This was Class Day 1924. At Harvard’s graduation, students took a break from midday commencement exercises, donned sheets, and celebrated by playing dress-up as the Klan.

The photo description read: “Harvard Klass Kow & Klans — students having fun.”

A friend had alerted me to these photos last summer — their existence, and the lack of immediately available information about the Klan at Harvard, were alarming.

I asked history lecturer Zachary B. Nowak about the KKK at Harvard in the 1920s under University President A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877. Nowak teaches a popular class History 1636: “Intro to Harvard History: Beyond the Three Lies” and is writing a book on the “people’s history” of Harvard’s 385-year past.

Nowak, alongside almost every scholar I asked, was not aware of the KKK’s presence at Harvard.

He was stunned when I showed him the photos of the Klan at Harvard, yet viewed their existence with “less surprise.”

“This is part and parcel of a long Harvard tradition of support for white supremacy,” Nowak says, calling the Lowell years some of Harvard’s most regressive.

Similarly, University of California, Berkeley sociologist Jerome B. “Jerry” Karabel ’72, who has studied Lowell’s presidency at Harvard, says Lowell was prejudiced “on each and every issue that has contemporary relevance” — an imperialist, racist, anti-Semite, sexist, and so on.

“He is one of the very few people who would check every single box,” Karabel says, bluntly. “That simply cannot be written off to be the ‘spirit of the times.’”