Black Students, Faculty, and Staff at King’s College

By Robin E. Field, Ph.D. 

On June 28, 1946, Clarence William Bauknight is recorded as the 253rd applicant for admission to the newly formed King’s College. Bauknight joined the first class of Kingsmen for the inaugural day of class on September 10, 1946, one of 380 men accepted out of nearly 500 applicants. A photograph of the “First Students at King’s College” portrays dozens of young white men in coats, ties, and slacks, chatting with Father Scandlon. This “fine group of promising young men” started The Crown, the college newspaper, and Bauknight appears in the masthead as a typist for the publication. The photograph of The Crown staff in that issue includes Clarence Bauknight amongst the two dozen Kingsmen: the only Black man in the photograph. 

The Crown and The Regis yearbooks from 1946 to 1950 confirm that Clarence Bauknight was the first—and only—Black student at King’s College. On June 8, 1950, he was one of 208 graduates at the Irem Temple, receiving his B.S. in Biology. Yet being the first Black student to enroll at and graduate from King’s College was only the first barrier Bauknight broke throughout his long life: after earning an M.S. from Syracuse University, he won recognition as a pioneering Black scientist; he owned many successful businesses; and he earned a Ph.D. in seminary and became a minister. Yet despite these achievements, Clarence Bauknight has not been formally remembered by King’s for his remarkable life—until now. 

Speaking at the Pontifical Mass on September 8, 1946, Bishop William J. Hafey explained the purpose of King’s College: “the advantages of a higher education. . .must be made available to all who merit it by worth and talent, the son and daughter of the working man no less than the children of the well-to-do.” These welcoming words presciently included women, while not overtly inviting the Black community or other racial minorities to enroll; yet Black students applied, enrolled, and thrived at King’s. The stories of Black students, faculty, and staff in the D. Leonard Corgan Library archives reveal myriad instances of joy and triumph, but also multiple examples of racial prejudice, microaggressions, and oblivion about the difficulties experienced by Black people on campus. Taking an honest account of the past seventy-five years allows us—alumni and friends, faculty and staff—to recognize the mistakes of the past and chart an equitable and inclusive future for King’s College. 

King’s has been a predominantly white institution (PWI) since its founding. The College first collected statistics about race in 2000, when the Fact Book recorded student demographics as 90% white, 2% African American, and 8% other races and ethnicities. Nevertheless, throughout the twentieth century, Black students attended classes, lived in residence halls, and participated in sports, theatre, and clubs, although documentation of these students’ experiences is scant. While matriculating only a handful of Black students during its first decades, King’s regularly invited Black speakers, artists, and musicians to campus. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, nationally recognized Black musicians often provided the entertainment at student dances; the Four Tops performed for 3,000 at the Kingston Armory in 1968; and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles appeared in the College’s gymnasium to a near-capacity crowd in 1969. Other Black public figures gave lectures, including legendary baseball player Roy Campanella (1966), Black Power advocate Dr. Nathan Wright Jr. (1969), and comedian and political activist Dick Gregory (1969), who “challenged his audience at the opening assembly to embrace his call to ‘Change the System,’ [provoking] considerable controversy. . .on campus.” One of King’s most beloved symbols—the two-ton anthracite coal altar—was created by a local Black artist. Dedicated on October 21, 1956, the coal altar was sculpted by C. Edgar Patience, a former breaker boy whose anthracite carvings are displayed internationally. After his death in 1972, 9,000 people flocked to the Corgan Library to view and purchase Mr. Patience’s coal sculptures. King’s hired Patience’s great-grandniece by marriage, Marie Patterson, in 2022 in the Occupational Therapy program. Patterson, a biracial, white-presenting woman, said her grandparents expressed immense pride about her working at King’s, as her hiring would not have been acceptable in their day: “It stopped me in my tracks when I realized it was a big deal.”

Half a century earlier, King’s hired its first Black faculty member. In 1966, Crown columnist Ed Klimuska excoriated King’s for its lack of Black students and faculty: “Today at King’s we have a student body of 1,534 whites. Sociologically speaking, this is unhealthy; Christianly speaking, it is incredible.” Klimuska’s suggestions for the recruitment of Black students and faculty was controversial; one respondent asserted that academic standards would decrease for Black students to enroll and that hiring a Black faculty member signaled tokenism rather than true inclusivity. Nonetheless, in 1968, Joseph T. Skerrett was hired by the English Department. While Skerrett’s academic accomplishments and cosmopolitanism were admired by the faculty, he endured overt racism from the Wilkes-Barre community and racial microaggressions on campus. Skerrett was denied housing in Wilkes-Barre, a form of racial discrimination described by C. Edgar Patience as “an acute problem” for Black residents of the city.24 The casual racism of this era is recorded in the pages of The Crown and The Regis. In 1969, The Crown’s satirical page, The Clown, awarded the “First Annual Token Award” to Skerrett as “King’s first black faculty member” and Ronal Stepney ’71 as “first black Sigma Kappa Sigma (soul) brother.”25 Other examples include a Confederate flag in the Homecoming parade in 1967; blackface and yellowface productions of Othello (1973, 1982, and 1999) and The Mikado (1977); and racist comments, cartoons, and terminology in The Crown. Mr. Skerrett departed King’s in 1972 for the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; and only in 1990 did another Black faculty member, John Bello-Ogunu, teach at King’s, but just for two years. Thirty years later, Theatre Department professor Jahmeel Powers became the third full-time Black male faculty member. Hiring and retaining Black faculty and staff remains a challenge for the College even today. 

On the student side, the number of Black students slowly increased in the 1960s, with these men playing increasingly prominent roles on campus. Clarence “Toots” Brown ’60 and Seth Tanner ’74 were captains of their primarily white basketball teams, while Roger Rice ’72 escorted the first Black Homecoming Queen in 1969. Bob Crawford ’72 ran unopposed to become the Chairman of Student Government in 1970.

Between 1969 and 1975, Black men appear in photographs for such clubs as Knights of Columbus, Forensics Union, The Crown, the Monogram Club, Glee Club, Men in Red, and WRKC. In 1970, Krista (Davis) Chase ’72 made history as the first Black woman enrolled at King’s. While she remembered King’s students as friendly, Chase also recalled her frustration about the football team singing “Dixie”—with its lyrics glorifying the “old times” of the South—to hype themselves up. Despite the protest letter she and other Black students wrote, the football team declined to end the practice. Breon Williams ’76 recalled his surprise that only nine Black men were enrolled at King’s during his first year and how he felt “a bit leery” about the primarily white environment. While his professors treated him appropriately, his athletic coach attempted humor during practices by saying, “C’mon Williams, run like you just stole a TV!” and “You Black guys should be first to finish!” Some King’s students were more explicit about their animus: “Every now and then when my friend and I would walk through the campus past [Holy Cross Hall], someone would shout out racial expletives. . .but overall, I began feeling more comfortable as time went on.”

The 1980s and 1990s saw the arrival of Black international students, due to Holy Cross connections in Africa and the Caribbean. Francis Ananya ’82, from Uganda, featured in several photos of the cross country team in the 1981 Regis and was celebrated as “a key asset to the Monarch team.” Ananya “did not personally experience any overt or indirect racism at King’s” and recalled his “experience at King’s College was one of the best in my life." Kenyan Joseph Madiany ’88, recipient of the Holy Cross Fathers of East Africa Scholarship, co-taught African Cultures with Dr. Donald Farmer in 1989. Other Black students enrolled from Nigeria, Virgin Islands, Bahamas, Haiti, and Bermuda.  

Michelle Asha Cooper, Director of Multicultural and International Affairs from 1997 to 2000, recalls a general openness towards international students at the time. This attitude, however, may not have extended to native-born Black and Brown students. In 1990, reports of racist behavior toward Black students and their friends led the College president, Rev. James Lackenmier, C.S.C., to establish a task force to promote diversity and cultural harmony. The task force recommended hiring a coordinator of minority and international students, and Kraig Pannell arrived in 1992 to support and recruit these students. He recalled, “King’s was trying to do what was best for those students.” Although he instituted new programming, such as soul food dinners, Kwanzaa celebrations, and a gospel concert, Pannell was frustrated by his overtasked job description and miniscule budget and left the position after two years. During his tenure, the first annual celebration of the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was held in 1994. Subsequent multicultural programming included the celebration of Black History Month in 1996, featuring special Masses for Imami Sunday, a “We Are Africa” performance by Soul in Motion, and biographies of Black Americans by students in the African American History class; additionally, Brother Jim Miller, C.S.C., directed the all-Black woman production of Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem, for colored girls who considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. Despite these changes, few Black students enrolled and graduated in the 1990s. As Kishara Lewis ’98 wrote in The Crown in 1996, “The majority of ALANA students [African, Latino-Chicano, Asian, Native American] transfer out because of King’s inability to meet our social, personal, and academic needs. For instance, I am the only remaining non-commuter, African- American female in the Class of 1998. . ..I deserve to have the right not to feel alone or unsupported.” A few months later, after a Black student found a racist note in his dorm room, Lewis organized a rally attended by 200 students, faculty, staff, and community members in Regina Court. The Crown published a full-page petition with hundreds of signatures, affirming “We, the undersigned students of King’s College, will not allow prejudice, intolerance, and hatred of any sort to continue on our campus. Recent events will not pass in silence. By signing this petition, through our speech, and through our actions, we stand strongly behind all victims of prejudice and pledge to continue our efforts supporting diversity in this, our institution of higher learning.”

Lewis’s concerns about the low enrollment of full-time Black students persisted into the early 2000s. Delight Yokley, Director of College Diversity from 2004 to 2010, noted, “In my first year, there was one other African American colleague, and my last year there was one Afro-Mexican colleague, but the remaining time I was the only one.” Students were more likely to see Black staff working as custodians and in dining services than teaching their classes. Yokley recalled asking hard questions to senior administrators: “I presented to the Board to challenge them to think of ways to attract more diverse candidates for faculty and administrative roles.” Philadelphia-born first-generation college student Kabria Rogers ’10 chose King’s despite its lack of Black faculty and students; she recalls thinking, “If diversity is a problem, it’s because Black people don’t come. I can try.” Rogers did not experience overt racism, but she remembers a faculty member requesting her to offer “the Black experience” and a classmate saying, “you’re not really Black,” because she differed from media stereotypes. Jasmine Giddings, Director of Multicultural and International Student Programs since 2015, noted that, while the King’s community is welcoming and inclusive, Black and other minoritized students have experienced racial microaggressions with resignation: “It is what it is . . .We are used to it.” When she was made aware of students casually using the N-word, Giddings organized a program to discuss this topic, but the students who most needed to hear the discussions did not come. “Black students desensitize themselves for protection” against microaggressions in the classroom and other college spaces. “We cannot always teach others, especially if we don’t know whether we have a safe space to do so,” Giddings notes. “Safe spaces have been fostered within clubs and programs like the Black Student Union, Impact and Elite, and the Multicultural and International Club, as well as in individual classrooms and offices where faculty and staff go the extra mile to actively listen to students' experiences and serve as advocates.”

By 2020, Black students comprised just 5% of the student body. However, important changes occurred at King’s because of the #BlackLivesMatter movement in 2013 and national protests over the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Quincy Clark ’22 started the Black Student Union (BSU) early in 2021, asserting, “I’m hoping that the BSU gives our African American students a place of belonging. They need it.” In July 2021, Rochelle Plummer, Ph.D., became the first Black woman to hold an Associate Vice President position; as the former AVP for Academic Success, Plummer hoped “to be visible as a support system for anyone who needs her assistance and understanding.” Upon assuming the college presidency in July 2021, Rev. Thomas P. Looney, C.S.C., Ph.D., initiated the Presidential Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, which held listening sessions, offered mandatory anti-discrimination trainings, collected resources for students, and is revising advertising and hiring practices to attract more diverse employees. In January 2024, the McGowan Hispanic Outreach Program hired Afro-Latino educator Martin Lacayo as its Director; and already Lacayo’s presence on campus is “a really big help as a mentor for the young men. Mentors cannot always be peers—the students need someone older and in positions of influence." Powers observed that the atmosphere at King’s has “definitely gotten better” in recent years, as “faculty and staff have been much more open and welcoming.”

In a 2023 promotional video, a young Black woman in a King’s t-shirt says, “My name is Maritza, and I am proud to be a Monarch.” Maritza Shalon Colón ’23 studied neuroscience, psychology, and chemistry and served as President of the Neuroscience Club and a mentor for LGBTQIA+ students. Maritza’s academic achievements led her to the Neuroscience Ph.D. program at Brown University. At the end of the video, Maritza appears at her graduation ceremony, wearing a cap and gown festooned with honor society cords, and holds up her diploma triumphantly. No longer are Black graduates from King’s relegated to anonymous faces in yearbook photos; the King’s College of today celebrates the inherent dignity of every person. 

Image at Top: Students playing pool in the Sheehy Student Center in the early 1970s.