"We Do Not Have Any Prejudice…but…": Racism in the Interracial Berea Literary Institute, 1866–1904

In the spring of 1866, the Berea Literary Institute, now Berea College, started its experimental, interracial school when a few African American students entered a classroom the middle of Kentucky. In response and "as if the plague of leprosy had burst upon the school," sixty-six of the white students "laid all down and fled from the terrible negro babies." However, twenty-five white students "stood steadfast," including two young white women and brothers Burritt and Howard Fee, sons of college founder and Kentucky native John G. Fee. Burritt represented the Berea plan: as a child raised and educated with abolitionist and egalitarian values, he would lead the charge in the fight against caste—a term John Fee and fellow Berea leaders used in reference to racism, white supremacy, and racial hierarchy—in post–Civil War Kentucky. This was the goal and cause of the establishment of the South's only interracial school.¹

The school's experiment in interracial education has made it an oft-referenced example of the complicated history of race, racism, segregation, and white supremacy in the post–Civil War South. Much of this scholarship has lauded the school, as well as the surrounding community, for its abolitionist roots. It has treated Berea College as a four-year postsecondary school and a two-to-three-year Normal School, even though the majority of students were enrolled in the primary levels and the institute at one point had seven departments: primary, intermediary, grammar, preparatory, the normal school, the ladies' courses, and special college/collegiate level. This was not unique; many nineteenth-century schools in the United States incorporated a similarly wide range of learning. Previous scholarship of Berea also examines John G. Fee, founder of the community and school, and his abolitionist activism; the frustration of African American students toward the end of the nineteenth century; and the end of interracial education at Berea College due Kentucky's legislation in the early twentieth century. In particular, scholars of Berea stress that the third college president, William Goodell Frost, shifted the school away from its early interracial identity. However, little scholarship focuses on the role of children and students in this community, their relationships with each other, why school leadership found them so important in the fight against caste, and how conflicted white Bereans were over the application and meaning of school integration throughout the entire interracial period of 1866–1904. Examining the students' experiences, relationships, and tensions together with statements from Berea leadership reveals the complicated nature of this endeavor and the insidious nature of prejudice, found even among a community of people who identified as abolitionists before the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.²

John G. Fee led a group of abolitionists who settled in the slave state of Kentucky with the aim to fight slavery and racism in the 1850s. These were not the first residents to oppose slavery in the state. In Evil Necessity: Slavery and Political Culture in Antebellum Kentucky, Howard Tallant writes about Kentucky's "antislavery conservatism." White Kentuckians who opposed slavery "were never able to break free from their racism, their class interests, and their natural caution," and where "Fee believed that prejudice could and should be eliminated; the conservatives had doubts on both counts." Fee's brand of abolitionism had radical goals and at times embraced radical tactics. Fee and other leaders of the Berea community promoted the immediate end of slavery, as noted in Fee's 1891 autobiography: "Slavery was a violation of the law of love, and therefore a sin; that this sin, like all other sins, needed to be repented of, and that immediately."³

Undaunted by mobs in his opposition to slavery before the Civil War, Fee remained determined to establish civil and social equality for all now that Berea's experiment had begun.

courtesy of berea college special collections and archives

John G. Fee and Berean leaders were self-avowed abolitionists; however, that alone does not make clear that they would take on the mantle...