Evaluating Colby’s dark past with “Janitor Sam” Osborne
Colby Echo (James Burnett)
On November 26, 2017, a picture of President Greene beamed from the front page of the Boston Globe. The headline blared “Honoring ‘Janitor Sam’ — and History” before lauding Greene’s decision to rename Colby’s presidential house after former slave and school janitor, Samuel Osborne. The article praised Greene and his decision for “grappling with [Colby’s] complicated historical ties to slavery.” Thanks to Greene’s decision to rename his house — the article claims — the College has taken a massive step towards addressing and rectifying its previous moral failures.
This Boston Globe story — and the way in which Greene chose to rename his house — are both deeply problematic, many argue. In fact, Greene’s decision seems to exemplify the myriad of ways in which Colby has yet to deal with the problems of racism and racial homogeneity both in the College’s past and present.
The primary issue with Greene’s decision is that he chose to appropriate Samuel Osborne’s complicated relationship with Colby in order to raise money for the Dare Northward campaign, rather than to address the enduring issue of systemic racism that Colby has both propagated and supported throughout its history. In an email to the Colby community announcing Dare Northward’s launch, Greene simultaneously announced his decision to rename the president’s house. This made it clear that Greene’s stunt was a shallow gesture aimed at raising more money for the capital campaign rather than really recognizing Osborne’s complex story.
In the aforementioned article by the Boston Globe, Greene argued that he made the decision to rename the president’s house because he wants the Colby community to “talk about the difficult questions” that the Osborne story raises, of which there are many. One such question — which Greene never mentions — is how much did Colby support racist social structures in the post-war period? Osborne’s story certainly calls this into question, considering he was frequently referred to as “darky,” “negro,” “sooty,” the n-word, and a “primitive man” by Colby students and employees in documents in Colby’s own special collections. One document in the collection appears to be a spoof of a minstrel show script in which Osborne is supposed to read a “plantation melody” that describes Osborne as “de (n-word)” that “looks out for de boys,/ An’ stops ’em when dey make a noise.” The rhetoric used to describe Osborne is explicitly racist and reinforces prevailing discriminatory social paradigms of the time.
Despite Colby’s dark past, Dare Northward pamphlets quote Greene as saying that Osborne “was an incredibly beloved figure to generations of Colby students.” Nowhere in the pamphlet does it describe the vicious and despicable racism that plagued Osborne throughout his time at Colby. Nowhere in the pamphlet does it mention that Osborne was barely paid enough by Colby to support his family, even after working here for decades. Nowhere in the pamphlet does it mention that students constantly played cruel “pranks” on Osborne such as smearing pews with molasses and dumping hay in the library, all so that Osborne would have to work longer and harder.
How exactly is naming the president’s house after Osborne going to stimulate a campus-wide discussion about white-privilege, racism and Colby’s complex past? Well the simple answer is: it won’t. There are plenty of steps Greene could have taken to ensure that students and faculty understand the full complexity of Osborne’s story. For example, Greene could have followed in the heels of other prestigious colleges, such as the “Princeton and Slavery Project,” to officially institutionalize and encourage these difficult conversations. Greene also could have lead a panel discussion on the implications of his decision. The fact that Greene chose to rename his house — a building that students rarely interact with — rather than another building, such as a student center, demonstrates that Greene does not intend for Colby students to grapple with our school’s dark history. Instead, it is clear that the decision to rename the presidential house is a shallow way of virtue-signaling to potential donors so that the Dare Northward campaign will be monetarily successful.
By tokenizing and appropriating his story in order to raise money, Colby continues to disrespect Osborne’s legacy. It is vitally important for institutions like Colby to genuinely take what Cornel West, who recently spoke at the College, describes as a “historical self-inventory” in which they critically examine, confront, discuss and improve upon the mistakes of the past. Rather than committing to a meaningful project in which Colby unpacks its troubled and controversial past, Greene is using Osborne’s story as a shiny medal to brag about Colby’s supposed “progressiveness.” If Greene truly wants to celebrate the College as a beacon of liberalism, first the Colby community must put in the hard work to unpack the school’s extremely bleak legacy.
