In January 2020, with the support of Exeter’s Trustees, Principal Bill Rawson ’71 announced the formation of a steering committee to examine the ties between Phillips Exeter Academy and the institution of slavery. At the time, he wrote, “The work contemplated by this charge will provide a more complete and complex understanding of the early history of our school, will expand the voices involved in helping us understand and tell that history, and thereby will advance the mission and values of our school and our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and a deep sense of belonging for all members of our community.”

But the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the committee’s progress. In May 2023, Rawson issued an expanded charge fort he Committee to Study Slavery and Its Legacy at Exeter, co-led by Director of Equity and Inclusion Stephanie Bramlett and Magee Lawhorn, head of Archives and Special Collections, and made up of Exeter faculty, staff, alumni and students. That fall, the committee embarked on the first phase of that charge, which included reporting on the known information about Exeter’s history and connection with enslaved people; developing recommendations for appropriate recognition to help the community understand this history; and collaborating with the Exeter Historical Society to incorporate the history of enslaved people in the town of Exeter.

“Telling these stories is a way to honor the people who made Exeter what it is today,” Bramlett says. “It’s powerful to know the stories of the people who came before us, and to consider the way their legacy shapes our current experiences.”

In undertaking this effort, Exeter joined a growing movement among educational institutions. When Universities Studying Slavery, a consortium led by the University of Virginia, expanded its membership to private high schools, the Academy signed up, as did peer schools including Andover and Loomis Chaffee. The consortium has more than 100 members in six countries, including Brown, Georgetown and Harvard.

Histories of the Academy have documented John Phillips’ ownership of several individuals during much of his life, including 1781, the year he founded Exeter with his second wife, Elizabeth. Although slavery does not appear to have been associated with the physical construction of the school and he was not an enslaver at the time of his death, “that [John Phillips] owned and kept slaves for at least a part of his life, with no thought of there being anything morally wrong about it, is a matter of record,” Laurence M. Crosbie wrote in The Phillips Exeter Academy: A History, published in 1923.

In 1743, Phillips married his first wife, Sarah Gilman, the widow of his cousin Nathaniel Gilman, who had owned and operated a general store. Sarah, who was 16 years older than Phillips, brought her significant estate into the marriage, including three enslaved individuals: Robin, Phillis and Dinah.

Among wealthy white New Englanders of his time, Phillips was far from unique. As historian Wendy Warren wrote in her 2016 book, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America, by the early 18th century “slavery was embedded in the New England colonies, an accepted and familiar part of the society.”

Instructor in History Kent McConnell, a member of the Exeter steering committee to study slavery, says, “Many men of [Phillips’] stature would have owned enslaved persons.” He adds that many men would have similarly inherited themas part of their wives’ dowries, a common way of ensuring financial security at the time. “There’s so much profit being generated around chattel slavery,” he says. “It’s part of a global economic system that deeply reaches into the lives of the colonies in so many ways.”

As the Revolutionary War dawned, attitudes toward the institution of slavery began to change. “White enslavers are struggling — in varying degrees, obviously, but they can’t ignore the realities of the proclamation of ‘all men are created equal,’ ” McConnell says. Antislavery sentiment built across New England in the 1770s, and individual states — beginning with Vermont in 1777 — passed laws to restrict slavery.

Sometime in the late 1770s, Phillips most likely joined a growing movement among New England slave owners by manumitting, or granting freedom to, at least some of his enslaved people. By 1778 — three years before he and Elizabeth signed the founding documents of theAcademy — neither Phillis nor Dinah was part of the Phillips household. Crosbie wrote that town records show Phillips was taxed for two male enslaved people from 1778 to 1780, and for one from 1781to 1785. When he died in 1795, Phillips owned no enslaved people; his will stated, “I give to my man-servant (Slave I have none) such part of my wearing apparel as my Executor shall think fit.”

Among the untold stories the steering committee seeks to illuminate are the lives of the men and woman Phillips enslaved. From the Exeter News-Letter article and other contemporary accounts, we know a fair amount about Dinah’s later life and interactions with early Academy students. The historical record contains less information about the two other individuals Phillips acquired in the 1740s with his first wife’s estate. Phillis, described in Nathaniel Gilman’s will as“my Negro woman,” was most likely older than Dinah, who was described in that will as “the Negro girl named Dinah.” A Gilman family history later stated that Phillis was a gift to another Gilman relative in Yarmouth, Massachusetts, around 1771.

Information is notably lacking about Robin. Unlike Phillis and Dinah, he does not appear in the Gilman family genealogy but was probably enslaved by Phillips for more than three decades. Judging from Exeter tax records, Robin was most likely the last individual Phillips enslaved, and he was either emancipated or died around 1785.

Just as Crosbie in 1923 acknowledged John Phillips’ ownership of enslaved people, later chroniclers of the school’s history have shed light on sometimes difficult truths about minority representation at Exeter through the years. The Committee to Study Slavery and Its Legacy at Exeter has also made efforts to further illuminate the experiences of early generations of Black students at Exeter, and to share some of their largely untold stories.

Moses Uriah Hall, who came to the Academy in 1858 and fought in the Civil War after his graduation in 1861, was previously reported (including in this magazine) to be Exeter’s first Black student. But as Julia Heskel and Davis Dyer wrote in After the Harkness Gift: A History of Phillips Exeter Academy Since 1930 (2008), “many believe that blacks were enrolled in the school as early as 1790.” They note that formal student records were lacking until the mid-19th century. And current Academy archivists say that explicit collection of student racial identification data did not begin until the late 1990s.

By the late 19th century, Exeter saw a growing number of Black students, many of whom lived in a boarding house owned by J.W. Field. They represented a small minority of the student population, but a number of these early Black Exonians became leaders on campus and went onto distinguished careers.

Although it’s difficult to cite exact figures, given the nature of student records at the time, the number of Black Exonians appears to have declined after the first decade of the 20th century and did not begin to rise until the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s.

This lack of racial diversity at Exeter reflected a much larger societal shift in the country. After the collapse of Reconstruction, many Southern states enacted legislation that restricted the freedom, safety and economic opportunity of Black citizens. As a result, beginning in 1910, millions of African Americans left the South and moved to urban centers in the North, Midwest and West, a so-called Great Migration that transformed the country.

An escape from the Jim Crow South did not mean freedom from racial prejudice.The years after World War I saw a sharp increase in racial violence, with riots breaking out in Chicago and other cities. The widespread success of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation — screened at the White House and praised by President Woodrow Wilson — helped legitimize the resurgent Ku Klux Klan. The Birth of a Nation was also the first film shown at the Ioka Theater in downtown Exeter when it opened in November 1915. As Rimkunas reported in the Exeter News-Letter in 2015, the advertising campaign for that debut featured several costumed Klansmen riding around town on horseback.

In addition to this complicated historical context, Heskel and Dyer explore one explanation for the limited number of Black students at Exeter during the first half of the 20th century: the per-onal views of Principal Lewis Perry, wholed the Academy from 1914 to 1946. The authors drew on the words of Perry’s successor as principal, William G. Saltonstall, who weighed in on what he called the“sensitive” subject of minority representation at Exeter in his 1980 biography, Lewis Perry of Exeter: A Gentle Memoir.

“Blacks had attended Exeter long before Perry’s time and done well,” Saltonstall wrote. He then quoted from a letter Perry wrote in March 1936 to his longtime correspondent Vernon Munroe, a graduate of the class of 1892 who served as president of Exeter’s General Alumni Association. Perry had received a missive from Lucien V. Alexis, a Black alumnus of the class of 1914 who appears to have inquired about sending his son to the Academy.

“We have not had any colored boys in school for eight or ten years,” Perry wrote to Munroe in the letter, which is included in Perry’s correspondence files in the Academy archives. “Now the intimacy of the Harkness Plan, with all the boys in our own dormitories, makes things still more difficult. Frankly, I have learned enough about the school since I have been here to be very sure that a colored boy is hurt rather than helped by his entrance into Exeter.”

To support his position, as chronicled by Saltonstall and later by Heskeland Dyer, Perry cited advice that he said Booker T. Washington, president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had once given Al Stearns, who was principal of Andover from 1903 to 1933. Washington,Perry wrote, had told Stearns that “it was a great mistake for colored boys to come to either Exeter or Andover.”

Washington, who died in 1915, was probably the most prominent Black thinker in the country when he gave that advice. Having shot to fame with the publication of his autobiography, Up From Slavery, he wrote and spoke extensively about his belief that Black Americans should pursue training in trades like carpentry, mechanics and farming. He saw this as a crucial way for them to attain employment and economic stability without actively challenging the segregationist systems of the time. (Washington’s own son, Booker T. Washington Jr., attended Exeter for a time but left in 1907 before graduating. According to a report in the New York Times, Principal Harlan Amen denied that his departure was due to racial discrimination, stating that the younger Washington had left after being ordered to “confine himself in his dormitory certain hours for study.”)

Washington’s views had put him at odds with Black leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois, who argued against racial segregation and co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). But they struck a chord with Stearns, who — like Perry — grappled with the question of minority students at the school he led.

In Youth From Every Quarter: A Bicentennial History of Phillips Academy Andover (1979), Frederick S. Allis cited a letter Stearns wrote in 1928. In it, Stearns explained that in his early years as principal, he “fought vigorously for the colored boys in our midst and for those who sought to enter.” Later, Stearns began to doubt that position, writing that it seemed “these fellows were being harmed more than helped by the school.”

Stearns sought advice not only from Washington, but also from Hollis B. Frissell, a white Andover alumnus who served as principal of the historically Black Hampton Institute in Virginia; both men helped confirm his later perspective. From 1910 until Stearns’ tenure ended 23 years later, only one African American student graduated from Andover, according to “Our DEI History,” published on the school’s website. (In 2021, Andover introduced its Committee on Challenging Histories, the equivalent of Exeter’s committee.)

In his biography of Perry, Saltonstall wrote with warmth and admiration, calling him one of “the great headmasters who led their schools for decades and shaped much of independent secondary education in the twentieth century.” Thanks to Perry’s leadership, along with the revolutionary $5.8 million gift from the philanthropist Edward Harkness, Saltonstall wrote, Exeter embarked on “anew era of education,” transforming thes chool into what it would become today.

Yet when it came to the “question of minority representation at Exeter,” Saltonstall was no less direct. “Even within the context of [Perry’s] day this was a blind spot,” he wrote. “While it may not be fair to judge a person by the standards of a different age, Perry denied Exeter’s democratic tradition in permitting limits on the numbers of blacks and Jews in the academy. He never specifically discussed quotas of any kind, but he did suggest that limits would be advisable.