Honors class unveils discriminatory community histories

Three groups of CSB+SJU honors students have conducted research projects this spring that allow the community to explore our present and future by diving deeper into the past.

History professor Brittany Merritt Nash’s honors class, titled “Community Histories,” is the fourth out of five classes that students in the Honors Program may take as they work through the curriculum. Students in this class complete a research project directly related to local public history and how it continues to impact CSB+SJU today.

“Students in that class research, in the campus archives or off-campus repositories, under-told or underrepresented stories either from our campus or wider community histories,” Merritt Nash said.

There are three projects that are part of Merritt Nash’s class this spring: one focused on sexism on college campuses, one on LGBTQ+ students and the Catholic Church and one on uncovering racial covenants in Stearns County.

This history-focused honors class was also offered in the fall, where the additional three groups from that section based their projects around the Chinese international student experience, the experiences of Hispanic and Latino students and historical sexism in the workplace with a focus on some of the first female faculty members at SJU. Another honors class at the same level taught by economics professor Sucharita Mukherjee was also held this past fall, where students completed similar research projects.

Many of the research groups from this fourth level honors course will present their project findings at this year’s Scholarship and Creativity Day on Thursday. Merritt Nash said her class is unique in how it empowers these students to use their experiences in the honors program to complete their own research and draw their own conclusions about what they find through a research proposal that they create at the end of the semester. Each group collaborates with a community partner, who will help them execute their projects during their fifth and final honors course next year.

“This is where students take what they’ve learned in their first few honors classes and apply it outside the classroom,” Merritt Nash said. “They are doing their own research, discovering their own information, analyzing it and putting it together themselves.”

Each of the three groups from this spring include four students, many of whom are from a variety of different majors, such as political science, history and biology. Merritt Nash said this is part of why the projects are so interesting, because it allows the students to bring their personal interests and specialties to the group.

“It’s a really great opportunity for students to bring their different disciplinary skills and backgrounds to their research,” she said.

**Sexism on College Campuses**

The first of these three projects in Merritt Nash’s spring class sought to connect historical events of sexism at CSB+SJU with the St. Patrick Hall incident of last year to understand why these issues persist on campus today. This group includes CSB juniors Emma Lundgren, Liz Hamak and Morgan Ebel, as well as SJU junior Mark Spangler.

“What we’ve been researching is the history of various sexist events, acts and cultural norms that have perpetuated sexism on the two campuses,” Spangler said.

Spangler said most of the work he and Hamak did was with historical primary sources and searching through archives, while Lundgren and Ebel focused on secondary sources on campus sexism and completed literary analysis on those sources for the project.

Some of the sexist incidents that the group found through their research included the “panty raids” of the 1960s, where SJU students would break into CSB dorms and steal their clothing, as well as “Bennie jokes” where it was a tradition for Johnnies to make frequent sexist jokes towards Bennies regarding their physical appearances. They also found stories of the early Rat Pak, whose members used to verbally and sometimes physically heckle Bennies until an amendment to the code of conduct for sporting events and a resurgence of the Rats a decade later made the group into what it is today.

Spangler also mentioned the details they found about the Alpha Kappa Sigma fraternity, which used to exist years ago alongside the service sorority of the same name which is still active today. The fraternity was shut down due to an incident where some members created a competition around who could get the most photos of unclothed AKΣ sorority members. Spangler said this scandal in particular seemed to sound somewhat familiar to the details of the Pat Hall incident.

“As a history major, I find that I’m pretty comfortable working with the past, and I can understand it, study it and wrap my head around it well. But when I read about the stuff that Johnnies did, at a school that I love and am proud to represent, I was mortified,” he said. “I have never felt more distant from our institutional past as I had when I was reading about what these Johnnies did.”

Spangler said that, despite what he learned about the history of sexism at CSB+SJU and how it still may continue today, he believes that progress is possible and can be seen in how the student body will no longer tolerate these incidents.

“I think that’s the big lesson from Pat Hall, that the minute it happened there was a huge outrage,” he said. “I know some Johnnies who lived in Pat and [St. Boniface] hall last year who were saying, ‘they’re blowing this out of proportion, it was just a joke’ or whatever, but I see the immediate reaction as a positive thing, because it shows that these campuses are not going to put up with that behavior anymore.”

Spangler and his fellow group members spoke with CSB alumna Nancy Bellmont, who developed the women’s basketball team at CSB, and will feature her as part of their project with their community partner, the Great River Children’s Museum to create an interactive exhibit in her honor.

“My group interviewed [Bellmont], and she’s amazing… she’s the one who got Bennie athletics going,” he said. “We’ll have a biographical panel for her, and we’re still working some things out, but there might be a cultural connection kit in the museum for the kids to play with, with props and clothes and things like that.”

Spangler said he hopes this project will continue to keep CSB+SJU students and community members informed on the history of sexism at the institutions while also teaching students how to handle incidents in the future.

“Cultural change is slow… but I can tell we’re moving forward overall,” he said. “Getting it started with children at the museum will be a good start for something, and I’m very proud to make that part of my legacy.”

**LGBTQ+ Students and the Catholic Church**

The second project group, which included SJU juniors Uriel Espinoza and Ryan Engel as well as CSB juniors Sara Hoppe and Sarah Skrove, focused their research on the various conflicts between the LGBTQ+ community and the Catholic Church.

Skrove said the historical basis for this topic came from two events which exemplified the struggle between the church and LGBTQ+ students on campus. In 2005, a member of the Magis Ministries leadership team was asked to step down because of her sexuality, and in 2010, visiting Archbishop John Nienstedt refused communion to students in the church who were wearing rainbow pins and other pride items in protest of his stance on non-heterosexual marriage.

“We researched the events themselves, student and alum responses to these events, and the larger contexts that these events played out within,” Skrove said via email. “We learned a lot about specific Catholic doctrine, Minnesota and U.S. marriage legislation and even the development of LGBTQ+ supportive clubs on campus.”

Skrove said that two members of her group focused on primary sources in the campus archives. Another used old articles from The Record to gain student perspective on the topic, and the last member searched for secondary sources to give the topic some context outside of CSB+SJU.

“There was no shortage of sources, so we had to spend a significant amount of time sifting through and finding a couple of main events to focus on in our research,” Skrove said. “We realize that we can’t do the entire topic justice, so we will be leaving a pretty large amount of leads that we didn’t have time to follow that hopefully someone will pick up in the future.”

This group found their community partner in the Stearns History Museum, where they hope to help them compile resources from the museum’s archives on the topic of tensions between the LGBTQ+ community and the Church so that it’s more easily accessible to the public.

“They were very appreciative of our efforts to find what resources they have on the topic so that they can build a list for people to come and explore,” Skrove said.

Skrove said she believes that although there have been shortcomings in how the LGBTQ+ community has been treated on campus, there have been improvements that will continue to happen as time goes on, like the endorsement of QPlus as a campus organization.

“While I can’t speak for the experience of LGBTQ+ students at CSB+SJU, I can acknowledge the historical shift in perspective that we discovered,” she said. “While we have witnessed a significant amount of negative and harmful reactions as our campuses historically began to talk about creating space for the LGBTQ+ community, it helps me to appreciate where we are at now.”

Skrove said she hopes the research her group completed can be a stepping stone for understanding the relationship between LGBTQ+ students and the Catholic Church, both at CSB+SJU and in the community as a whole, and help with moving forward with this relationship in the future.

“We are in no way finished with the systemic changes that need to be made here at CSB+SJU and in the broader community, but research like this can be an important step in the process,” Skrove said.

**Uncovering Racial Covenants in Stearns County**

The final group of students, comprised of CSB junior Eileen Otto, CSB senior Olivia Schleper and SJU juniors Connor Veldman and Robbie Smith completed their research on the existence of racial covenants in the Stearns County area, or property deeds which included clauses that were intended to keep certain neighborhoods primarily white and exclude other racial or ethnic groups.

“Eileen and I had both learned about racial covenants and redlining before this class, and after a little bit of preliminary research, our group, along with Merritt Nash, decided to continue looking into housing segregation in Stearns County,” Schleper said via email.

The group received funding from the Office of Undergraduate Research to get a subscription for the digital records at the Stearns County Recorder’s Office. They sifted through property deeds using keywords to look for racial language and ended up finding 97 deeds in four neighborhoods.

“We haven’t been able to exactly locate all of the houses with covenants, but we know generally where they are,” Schleper said. “Racial covenants were made unenforceable in Minnesota in 1953, but they remained in deeds, and by that point, the damage was mostly done.”

These racial covenants and others like them continue to perpetuate discriminatory attitudes in neighborhoods despite being unenforceable, because the racial housing patterns they created still exist today. The group worked with Chris Lehman, a professor at St. Cloud State and author of “Slavery’s Reach,” through whom Schleper said they learned that many of the deeds were created in the 1920s, when very few people of color were living in St. Cloud. They also worked with the Stearns History Museum for their community partner in order to access their archives to further their research. The group hopes to create an exhibit or write articles for the museum on their research for the final portion of the project.

“The goal of this partnership, when all is said and done, is to have some kind of project that has been produced with them,” Schleper said. “Right now, our end goal of the semester is to write a project proposal that presents our research and how we think it can best be used for the community.”

Schleper and her group’s research were featured in a story on Minnesota Public Radio earlier in the month, and as the story mentioned, the covenants they uncovered serve only to prove that the discriminatory practice of racial covenants goes farther than the Twin Cities, where the most obvious examples of these covenants can be studied.

Many cities in Minnesota who have discovered evidence of racial covenants have taken steps to strike the clauses from property deeds. Stearns County may someday follow suit, although right now, the focus is awareness.

“Essentially, what we learned from this research is that Stearns County is not unique,” Schleper said. “The Mapping Prejudice Project out of the University of Minnesota has been doing this kind of work in the Twin Cities metro area for years now, and given all that they found, it should really be no great surprise that we found these racial covenants here, even though we are in a much more rural area.”

As each group prepares their research proposals and gets ready to execute their projects next year, Merritt Nash said the hope is that these projects and others like them give the community a sense of historical context for the world they live in and the issues that exist today. She said that they seek to prove that observing the past can provide a blueprint for handling the future.

“Think about any problems you try to solve. You don’t just solve them in a vacuum. You have to understand how you got there,” Merritt Nash said. “If we want to address problems on campus or in our community, we have to understand how we got to that issue in the first place in order to know what to do about it.”