|Rudolph Renfrow (3d row, 3d from left), 1927 Hampton Normal Student Protest Committee||(The Crisis 35[Jan 1928]).|
|Francis Benjamin Johnston, "Students in a Bricklaying Class, Hampton Institute, Hampton, VA," Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, Lot 11051|
|Robert G. Ogden Auditorium, Hampton Institute (ca. 1923)|
Copeland's editorial obliged the Hampton Principal, Dr. James E. Gregg, to respond. A white man like his predecessors at Hampton, Gregg had done much to transform what had been little more than a boarding school into a genuine college. Nevertheless, Gregg proved unequal to the challenges that Copeland raised. Attempting to stem Copeland's outrage, Gregg sent the paper a mealy-mouthed reply in which he rejected Copeland's worries about racial amalgamation. But, rather than rebuke Copeland, Gregg attempted to side-step criticism without directly confronting the basic issue. "Hampton's policies," Gregg wrote, "certainly do not encourage social mingling of the races...," although implicitly they did: Hampton had long mixed black and white instructors, and the school's few white students occupied no special place distinct from their African American parallels. In any case, Gregg's remarks were insufficient to appease racists like Copeland and his growing entourage of racial purists. Worse, Gregg's reply had simultaneously offended Hampton students who saw in his comments evidence of caving to racial prejudice.
The increasingly loud public conversation (fueled in part by Copeland's allies, including the "Anglo-Saxon Club" of Virginia) led the Virginia legislature in 1926 to approve the Public Assemblages Act (so-called Massenburg bill), which demanded racial segregation at all public events in the state of Virginia. Gregg and the trustees, noting that the law pertained only to public events, opted to make all performances at Hampton private, admission being limited to Hampton personnel and invited guests. This decision spared Hampton from public debate and its unwanted consequences on white donations, and might, the authorities reasoned, allow the controversy to die down. Gregg and the mostly-white board of trustees saw this course as a middle road, but to many Hampton alumni and students, Gregg's decision reeked of defeat and concession to racism.
|W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963)|
Consequently, when on October 8, 1927 a seemingly small disagreement broke out on the Hampton campus, the controversy almost immediately exploded into a full-scale student strike. Like many other institutions at the time, including many Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hampton had in place very restrictive rules that implied that Hampton's students were more like children than college-age adults. Regulations allowed school officials to enter student rooms at any time of day or night; required that students "bathe at least twice a week"; prohibited "rowing, sailing, and bicycle riding on Sundays," and so on. Other rules pertained to dating, in the main restricting occasions when men and women students might be alone. Increasingly, students found these rules demeaning. Therefore, when the projectionists refused to turn off the lights for the October 8 showing of a film on campus—presumably fearing what young men and women might do in the dark—students responded angrily.
|Two of the dormitories at Hampton Institute (photo ca. 1922)|
The result was the opposite of what Gregg had hoped. Immediately after being dismissed by Gregg, students gathered in an impromptu mass meeting, elected a committee of student leaders (one of whom was Rudolph Renfrow, recently graduated from the academy), authorized an immediate strike, and prepared a petition to the administration. Most items in the petition repeated earlier complaints about the failings of instructors at Hampton, some of whom had not even graduated from high school, much less college, and many of whom were white and in some cases apparently even members of the Ku Klux Klan. More than that, however, the petition sought for students more of a say in their own lives—about how late they might be permitted to study, for instance—as well as having the administration pay attention to student complaints and recommendations. To that end, the petition demanded that the administration recognize and consult with the Student Council, and, when denying student requests, "give students reasons why their requests are not granted."
|Hampton Strike Committee (The Crisis 34:346. Check mark indicates Rudolph Renfrow.|
|Pittsburgh Courier, October 29, 1927|
|Grinnell Herald, May 24, 1927|
Rudolph Renfrow was evidently not among the students most seriously affected by Gregg's penalties—lists of those expelled or suspended do not mention him, even though his name and photograph appeared in The Crisis with the others credited with organizing the strike. Having graduated from the academy as valedictorian in spring 1927, Renfrow might have been immune to Gregg's punishments. Or perhaps there was some other explanation for his name being left off the list of students who were dismissed or suspended. Even without this dramatic punishment, Rudolph's experience at Hampton had clearly primed him for further agitation in behalf of equality for African Americans.
When his name next appears in the records, Rudolph was resident in Washington, D. C. The 1936 city directory identifies him as a salesman for Investors Syndicate (since absorbed by Ameriprise Financial) and living at 143 W Street NW. Sometime before the 1937 directory was published, Rudolph evidently married Lillianette, a beautician (I have not succeeded yet in finding a record of this marriage or of their apparent divorce; Lillianette died in Philadelphia in December, 1991) and moved to 654 Girard Street NW with his bride; the 1940 census had the pair living at 1413 Half Street, an area now under development because of its proximity to the Washington Nationals stadium.
|Addison Scurlock, "New Negro Alliance" (1934), Archives Center, National Museum of American History, 0618.1/0201 (Rudolph Renfrow in 2nd row, fourth from left)|
****How Rudolph Renfrow became involved with the New Negro Alliance or exactly what role he played there is not clear; careful examination of the Alliance's newspaper, New Negro Opinion, which was not available to me for this blog post, might shed more light on the details. We may imagine that Rudolph's experience at Hampton had encouraged him to see the black-white divide more clearly, and to sense the inequality implicit in white-dominated organizations. But this is little more than a guess. What is clear is that, by working for Investors Syndicate, a business that permitted the poorest Americans to accumulate financial resources through small weekly or monthly investments (instead of demanding large deposits), Rudolph was able to work within and for the black community. Apparently the arrangement proved satisfactory on all sides. Even during the Great Depression, Investors Syndicate did not fail a single client. Meanwhile, Rudolph also seems to have prospered.
After a brief spell in the U.S. Army at the close of World War II (Rudolph enlisted in 1943), Rudolph resumed work for Investors Syndicate, but relocated to New York. In 1960 he married again, this time taking as his wife a 38-year-old Canadian, Evelyn Theobalds. The pair settled in a seaside district (3 Outer Drive) of South Norwalk, CT and there raised a son, Lee, who was still only a boy when Rudolph died suddenly at home, April 27, 1972: he was only 64. A service in his memory was held in Norwalk, but Rudolph's body was then sent back to Grinnell where on May 3, 1972, he was buried next to his parents in Hazelwood Cemetery. His wife and son remained in Norwalk for a couple of years before Evelyn decided to return to British Columbia with her son, taking up residence in Summerland, about 230 miles east of Vancouver. There she died and was buried late in 1988 in Oliver, B. C.
|Rudolph Renfrow's gravestone, Hazelwood Cemetery, Grinnell, IA (2015 photo)|
Yet, as I have tried to show, in many ways Rudolph achieved no less than his sisters. As an African American man, he stood up when it was difficult, and resisted racial bigotry and white privilege. Even while still a youth at Hampton, he opposed imperious white men who tried to bend him to obedience. As a young man in the District of Columbia, Rudolph again stood up with his fellow African Americans, demanding that they get fair treatment from the white men who controlled so many businesses in black neighborhoods. Perhaps like the unnamed correspondent whose report on the events at Hampton W. E. B. Du Bois published in The Crisis, Rudolph could say "Through my own observations and experiences...I have become keenly aware of the state of hypocrisy, racial prejudice, and backwardness into which Hampton has fallen. I myself have suffered keenly and racial antipathy has grown within me." But if Rudolph felt this way, he did not rest content with these feelings, but instead committed himself to trying to change the world he found, and all of us are therefore in his debt.