This is a story about how institutions respond when challenged, and how they take or miss opportunities to grow. I’m telling this story now because we can learn from it.
Over the course of my 10 years as director, I have learned a great deal about the Folger’s history. Much of what I know comes from conversations with staff, from Board meeting minutes, from newspaper articles—and, of course, from items in our collections and archives. I cannot claim to be a historian of the Folger, but I do feel I have a grasp of its current mission and how it has evolved over time. That evolution is important to discuss in the coming year, especially as the Folger is undergoing significant changes to its physical infrastructure. Before thinking more about the future, however, we need to take a closer look at our past. This column is significantly longer than most, but the story needs to be told in full. It takes us back to 1938 and ultimately to 1932, the year the Folger opened.
From the Director
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“Can we not remedy this situation?”
My own knowledge of this history grew when, in 2020, the Folger archivist, Sara Schliep, made me aware of a 1938 exchange of letters that took place between Folger Director Joseph Quincy Adams and the chair of the Folger Committee of Amherst Trustees, Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone. (At that time, the Folger was administered by a Committee of the Trustees.) The exchange centers around a request made by an African American scholar named Benjamin Brawley, who in April of that year asked to attend the annual Shakespeare’s Birthday Lecture in the theater. What was said in this exchange and how the request was handled is important, both because it casts light on the Folger’s history and because it shows why an institution like ours needs to be aware—and at times, critical—of its past. As you may have already guessed, this is a story about race. But it is also a story about how institutions respond when challenged, and
how they take or miss opportunities to grow. I’m telling this story now because we can learn from it.
Historic Collection/Alamy Stock
Photo
Professor Benjamin Brawley and the Shakespeare’s Birthday Lecture of 1938
Benjamin Brawley was a professor at Howard University and a former dean of Morehouse College. An experienced administrator and scholar, he had seen his share of bureaucratic runarounds, which is what he got when he requested lecture tickets from the Folger in 1938. At this point in his career, Brawley was the author of more than a dozen monographs and edited collections, including A Short History of the English Drama; A History of English
Benjamin Brawley
Joseph Quincy Adams
Theodor Horydczak
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here of white + black is generally accepted as a matter of course” and is “recognized by the government itself.” He added that the Shakespeare’s Birthday Lecture was an intimate “social gathering,” one that “in the past has been regarded as one of the outstanding events of the year, highly distinguished in kind.”
That same day, Adams wrote a two-page, single-spaced letter to Justice Stone. In his letter, Adams called Stone’s attention to a “problem raised this morning by the request of Mr. Brawley, of Howard University,” one for which he “should like to have definite instructions from the Trustees on how to proceed next year.” Brawley’s request was designed to force a decision on the integration of Folger social functions, to which Adams objected. The letter offered a number of reasons for excluding Brawley and other Howard faculty. First he noted, Washington, DC, is a Southern city: the “segregation
The fact that it was a social function, rather than an academic one, seems to have played an important role in Adams’s thinking. In the 1930s, Washington, DC, was a segregated city: public institutions, churches, schools, universities, and neighborhoods were segregated by law and practice. Adams was alluding to this fact when he referred to Washington as a “Southern city.” As a private institution, he explained, African Americans were permitted to use the reading room and collection, but their presence at a Folger reception would, “to use a mild word, be ‘distasteful’ to the majority of our guests.” I am now going to quote at length from the letter, which is available online:
Literature; The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States; and Paul Laurence Dunbar: Poet of his People. Several of these titles were textbooks reappearing in multiple editions. He also wrote dozens of magazine articles and articles for academic journals. Brawley’s intellect was wide ranging; it spanned topics from the history of English hymns to the contemporary politics of Liberia. His correspondence in the Moorland-Springarn Research Center at Howard University and at the University of Virginia shows him in conversation with a wide range of cultural and intellectual figures across the country. Once the quarterback of the Morehouse football team, Brawley took a second BA at the University of Chicago and then went to Harvard for graduate study. There he encountered William Allan Neilson, a prominent Shakespearean who would go on to become president of Smith College.
President Neilson was the scheduled speaker for that year’s Shakespeare’s Birthday Lecture, which was titled, “As Shakespeare Says.” In keeping with the Folger’s custom at the time, the event was not advertised. Brawley knew that his former teacher would be lecturing on April 23, which is why he approached the staff for tickets well before the event. Visiting the Folger on the morning of April 12, he made his request to James McManaway, executive assistant director of the Folger, who transmitted the request to Director Adams. A letter from Karen Martin, Adams’s secretary, was dispatched right away informing Brawley that the library had “exhausted its supply of tickets” for the 260 seats in the theater. Brawley expected to be refused, so in his conversation with McManaway he requested that, in the event tickets were not available, the Folger would put the president and dean of Howard University, along with relevant faculty and their wives, on the “Basic Invitation List,” which specified the individuals who should always be invited to major events. When Adams heard this, he panicked.
In the 1930s, Washington, DC, was a segregated city: public institutions, churches, schools, universities, and neighborhoods were segregated by law and practice.
The last sentence makes clear the source of concern: Adams knows that if Brawley and his Howard colleagues are invited to the Folger social function by virtue of their academic rank, they will feel “entitled” to come, as would other African Americans. That feeling of collegiality and belonging is exactly what Brawley brought to the Folger with his well-thought-out request.
National Photo Company Collection. Library of Congress
I do not see how an ‘issue’ can possibly be made of the matter if we, as a private institution, merely ‘fail’ to extend formal invitations to our black citizens to attend our necessarily small gatherings. Colored people in Washington have—or should have—common sense enough to appreciate the peculiar situation that here exists…They would—or should—realize that the Folger…has in mind the best interests of all concerned…[I]f they were formally invited, as if so entitled by virtue of their university positions— they would probably feel no hesitation about coming.
This was not the first time that Adams expressed a fear that Justicegroups Harlan Fiske Stone
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deliver what would presumably have been the speech of his life. The task fell to Adams, then the director of Folger research, to deliver the lecture at the opening.
Joseph Quincy Adams’s letter to Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, April 12, 1938. Folger Shakespeare Library.
racially distinct from his own might threaten a preexisting, homogenous society. At the Folger’s opening ceremony, on April 23, 1932, Adams gave the inaugural Shakespeare’s Birthday Lecture, which he titled “Shakespeare and American Culture.” Brawley had actually asked to be included in that event, but no African Americans are known to have been invited or included. Broadcast live on NBC radio and attended by President Herbert Hoover, the event was an extraordinary opportunity for this newly christened institution to explain itself and its mission. Henry Clay Folger was no longer alive to
Adams ranged widely in his inaugural speech. He began by saying that William Shakespeare deserved his own memorial in a city that honors Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. He justified this claim by presenting a history of Shakespeare’s role in American life. In the colonial period, according to Adams, it was the racial and cultural homogeneity of early Americans that made it possible for Shakespeare to take root deep in
The Folger, an institution that once operated under an exclusionary model of Anglo-European heritage, must today stand for something else—something vastly more inclusive, and vastly more self-aware.
It is worth recalling Adams’s 1932 speech for what it says about how he might have interpreted Benjamin Brawley’s request. In addition to his unease at the prospect of socializing with African Americans, Adams may also have sensed the contradiction at the heart of the history he had presented in 1932. Adams believed, or at least said he believed, that a culturally “English” nation might emerge from the racially distinct groups that arrived in the 19th century, and maintained that this would be brought about by schooling in a common culture. Yet an important part of that story was missing. Adams’s history of America said nothing about the African Americans whose ancestors were brought to America by force, individuals who by the early 20th century, in certain parts of the country, now enjoyed some of the basic rights of citizens. Adams also passed over the role of Native peoples in his telescoped history, choosing to focus on the movement of Europeans across the continent. Given these absences, Benjamin Brawley would not have fit neatly into Adams’s narrative. Here was a Black man who—teaching in a then segregated capital city—had depth of knowledge in the tradition of English letters, who held cultural and academic prestige, who knew how the game was played; and yet, despite all of these qualifications, he still could not be admitted as a social equal. In a perverse twist of Adams’s original logic, it was because Brawley belonged in that room that he and his colleagues couldn’t be permitted to enter. Their mere presence would confirm both their right to be there and their unacknowledged place in the larger story.
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These are not the last instances in which the Folger excluded
American soil. Westward expansion would add scope to a growing American secular culture in which Shakespeare’s plays played such a formative role. But then, in the 19th century, “preservation of our long-established English civilization” came to be “menace[d]” by the “forces of immigration.” In rhetoric that recalls the White racial supremacist theories of Charles Mills Gayley, one of several influential nativist academics active during the Progressive Era, Adams sets the earlier presence of the colonial “white man”—a “far-flung people who in race were essentially English”—against the waves of European immigrants who like a “plague of locusts” began “to alter the solid AngloSaxon character of the people.” He concluded by saying that universal schooling in the humanities, including the works of Shakespeare, would be the remedy for that plague, forging a “homogenous people” that exemplified the same culture, “whatever the racial antecedents.”
people of color from its institutional social and academic events. The events of 1932 and 1938 provide a mirror in which to look at ourselves, including some of the ideas that animated important moments in our history. As director, I do not like what I see in that mirror. Recounting these two episodes, I am reminded, for example, that the Shakespeare’s Birthday Lecture, which I myself delivered at the Folger in 2017, had never been delivered by a person of color until 2016. That was wrong. It was also a remarkable statement of priorities, and was interpreted as an expression of our values. The Folger, an institution that once operated under an exclusionary model of Anglo-European heritage, must today stand for something else—something vastly more inclusive, and vastly more self-aware. One way we demonstrate that self-awareness is by acknowledging that, specifically for persons of color, the Folger has for a long part of its existence been an inhospitable place. We will grow as an institution by admitting that truth and continuing to put things right.
Growth is connected to the stories we tell ourselves, and in this case, the story is like one of Shakespeare’s late plays—full of twists and turns.
Growth is connected to the stories we tell ourselves, and in this case, the story is like one of Shakespeare’s late plays—full of twists and turns. While Adams’s letter was making its way across the street to Stone’s chambers, Brawley launched a second volley. In a letter that arrived the next day, Brawley appealed to Adams’s elevated sense of the academic enterprise and his own place in it. After explaining that he stopped by that morning to request tickets, Brawley notes that “Dr. W. A. Neilson is not only one of my former teachers but an old friend. I dedicated to him my little book, A Short History of the English Drama Dr. McMan[a]way saw a letter in which this dedication was accepted.” Brawley then explained that more than once he had tried to obtain tickets to the Shakespeare’s Birthday Lecture, but always in vain. Year after year passed during which he and his colleagues received no invitation, no tickets to this event. Brawley wrote, “What I want to ask you is, Can we not remedy this situation?” Using the collegial “we,” Brawley applied pressure at the point where Adams would be vulnerable to appeal. For Adams, as for many academics in this period, the republic of letters was a real, living thing. Membership in that community created a powerful feeling of purpose and belonging. And in this republic, Brawley and Adams were equals. Having no other moves available to him, Adams would relent.
The last piece of this story is taken from the Folger institutional archives and Harlan Fiske Stone papers at the Library of Congress. It turns out that Adams sent a second letter to Stone on the following day, this one written as soon as he had received
While Adams did not accede to Brawley’s request to add Howard guests to its future functions, collegiality demanded that he admit him to the lecture. The welcome mat remained rolled up as Brawley arrived just at curtain time to claim an empty seat, but the Howard professor had made his point. There is no way to know whether Adams’s perspective on his African American colleagues—and on African Americans in general—changed as a result of this exchange with someone who was his equal in the academic sphere. When he glanced around the theater after the lecture that night, though, he would have seen the man who may well have engineered the first integrated social function in the Folger’s history.
did seem to want to offer guidance of some kind.
I have chosen to relate this history because it is a reminder of what we must never be: complacent or self-serving about our progress when it comes to advancing a deeply inclusive vision of Shakespeare and our institution, whether that is in our programming, staffing, collecting, Board leadership, or work with audiences and communities. We have the vital resources of time, space, talent, and supporters. We are using those resources to help build human capacity in all its extraordinary and diverse forms, whether that is for growth, renewal, discovery, awareness, or action. Our choices are an expression of that vision, as are the welcoming spaces we create for those who visit and work here. I want to be clear about the breadth and inclusiveness of that vision today because we will be realizing it together in our renovated building and our activities outside our walls. The Folger Board and staff are already working through that vision as we build a more inclusive institution, and we have much work to do. A truthful examination of our history is a first step.
Brawley’s new appeal that morning. Scribbling a note by hand, he enclosed a carbon copy of the letter he had just mailed to Brawley, noting that in light of Brawley’s second appeal, “all I could do was to invite him to come at 8:30, with assurance of admission.”
The letter to Brawley was collegial in tone. “My Dear Professor Brawley,” it began, and in the opening paragraph offered confident assurance that if Brawley arrived promptly at 8:30, there would be a seat available to him among those left vacant by no-shows. Adams then moved to the main business, which was to reiterate the Folger’s position of keeping social functions closed to “Washington institutions,” since widening the circle would “entirely destroy the strictly personal and friendly nature of our gatherings.” Of course, this is disingenuous; we have already seen Adams relate a very different set of reasons to Stone. He closed by commending another of their mutual friends, this one from Wake Forest where they both spent time, and extended an invitation to Brawley to use the Folger collection.
Stone, for his part, took the matter to the Amherst Trustees. At their meeting, the Trustees read the director’s letters and discussed what the Folger’s policy on social events should be in future. Records of that meeting show that the letter was discussed, but no formal action was taken. Stone does note that he would like to meet with Adams soon, in person, to discuss the Trustees’ views: “There was a feeling that we would have to exercise caution in dealing with problems that may arise in the future.” What those problems would be is not clear, but Trustees
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View the full correspondence from the Folger archives at folger.edu/brawley
There is no way to know whether Adams’s perspective on his African American colleagues—and on African Americans in general—changed as a result of this exchange with someone who was his equal in the academic sphere. When he glanced around the theater after the lecture that night, though, he would have seen the man who may well have engineered the first integrated social function in the Folger’s history.
Chris Hartlove
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This history is a reminder of what we must never be: complacent or self-serving about our progress when it comes to advancing a deeply inclusive vision of Shakespeare and our institution.
Benjamin Brawley’s letter to Joseph Quincy Adams, April 18, 1938. Folger Shakespeare Library.
