The Presence of African American Men at Centre College in the Late Nineteenth Century

Art History

Palmer, Lauren Annalise

Frederick, Amy (Mentor)

English

This paper is part of a larger project: a multi-campus ACS grant to build a shared online digital archive relating to the history of desegregation at Centre College, Furman University, Rollins College, and Washington and Lee University. As southern colleges founded long before the Civil Rights movement in the United States, the experiences and stories of our African American students, staff, and faculty within the historical contexts of our local communities have not been fully understood, researched, or archived. For our Race, Photography, and America class last fall, we wrote visual analyses of photographs in the Centre archives relating to the project. This paper will first offer a visual analysis of a photograph from the 1989 edition of the Ec-Centric titled “Electricity Laboratory.” The visual analysis will serve as a transition for researching the employment and possible education of African Americans on southern campuses during the late nineteenth-century.