In an article from Nov. 11, 1948’s edition, Marily Jacoby ’51 reported on election night events in the year Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey lost in a shocking upset to Democrat candidate Harry S. Truman. Jacoby’s article highlights a long tradition of political engagement of Wellesley students. 

While Wellesley does not currently have a Republican chapter, that wasn’t the case back in 1948. Jacoby reported that “victory-hungry Republicans” filled Harvard’s Memorial Hall where it had two television sets and a huge map of the United States, for a joint event with Harvard’s Republican Club.

“Upon the map they expected to place many little elephants, each a symbol of Dewey’s conquest of one state. For those few states which they thought might treat Governor Dewey adversely, they had ready several small donkeys, Confederate flags, and blue stars. In retrospect, we wonder if the supply of donkeys ran out!”

“Around midnight when Truman’s victory became more apparent, several Democrats entered the hall, calling for an imminent change in celebrators. Wellesley Republicans returned to their dorms in the hope of hearing favorable radio reports. 

“Joyce Norton ’51, who wandered into a room from which the voice of a radio commentator was issuing, summarized their attitude. “I don’t understand,” she said. ‘What’s happening?’”

In the lead-up to the 1968 election, published in that year’s Halloween edition, Joane Curtis ’72 and Dorothy Devine ’69 covered a Boston Garden rally “Eleven Candidates for Peace” which had over 10,000 attendees. That year’s campaign was embroiled in the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the upswing in anti-Vietnam War protests, both key topics referenced at the event. 

“The first speaker, Richard Goodwin …reiterated the rhetoric … that the ‘older generation is cutting off the path to power, and that they are more anxious to preserve rather than serve their convictions.’

Oscar-winning actress Shirley MacLaine was also at the rally, advocating for a “revolutionary government out of revolutionary ideas.”

“There can no longer be one law for the rich, one law for the poor, one for the white, one law for the black… It’s time to tell it like it is. Politics alone won’t solve the problem,” she said.

Curtis and Devine observed that the crowd was largely quiet throughout the speeches and gave generously to the donation buckets for the “11 for Peace” campaign. 

“More powerful than anything McCarthy could say, however, was the emotion of those who listened,” they wrote.

Another election year that feels particularly significant to consider today is that of 2016, which had a special resonance for the Wellesley community when Hillary Clinton ’69 ran for the presidency. We reported on the increase in political engagement, particularly organizing following Donald Trump’s win over Clinton. 

Genae Matthew’s article, published on Dec. 2, 2016, covered a teach-in following the election, an important piece of not only how the community engages with presidential elections, but also in how we think and have thought about them. 

“‘How did we get here?’ Professor Brenna Greer asked the crowd. She began by arguing that “we’ve done a lot of forgetting. We either don’t know or we choose to forget our history, particularly in regard to race and racism.” 

“…She presented a number of factors which contributed to the rise of Donald Trump, among them the rise in consumerism and white nationalism inspired by the Obama presidency.

Matthew reported that Greer stressed how important identity politics and political correctness are in language, and the appropriation of political correctness was key for Trump supporters to legitimize their inflammatory rhetoric. 

“‘No one who has come of age in the United States is free of racial prejudice towards people of color,’ Greer argued.

A week after Trump was elected as president, Alexandria Otero reported on the Wellesley community’s response to the election. Karen Su ’19, Vice President and Women Colleges representative for Wellesley Students for Hillary, said she was hopeful that students could be more “activated” after the election. 

“‘They didn’t realize their stake in the election. Now they do, and they are activating that. They are angry, but angry in the sense that they are willing to be productive with that anger,’ Su said.

Contact the editor responsible for this story: Valida Pau

Davis has been the executive director of the Medieval Academy of America since 2013, and has cataloged medieval manuscripts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Yale University, Tufts University and Wellesley College, among others. She specializes in paleography, which is the deciphering of ancient manuscripts and analysis of historic handwriting. 

The Voynich Manuscript, which dates back to the early 1400s, is an enigma: written in a nonexistent and indecipherable language, it features seemingly scientific illustrations of plants, beasts, zodiac signs and naked women. Its author and origin is unknown. It allegedly passed through the hands of Emperor Rudolph II of Germany, Jesuit scholars, American rare book sellers, and finally to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where Davis first “met the Voynich” as a junior in graduate school. 

The text fascinates and puzzles scholars and the public, and has generated more than its fair share of conspiracy theories. Davis explained the methods linguists use to show that the “Voynichese” language of the manuscript is a real and evolved human language. Unlike fantasy languages like Elvish or Klingon, Voynichese passes Zipf’s Law, a linguistic rule showing that in a natural language, the most common word is twice as common as the next, and so on.

 At the lecture, Davis presented her studies of the images and glyphs used in the texts, and her theories on the writers behind it. Her work has found that five distinct scribes wrote the text, two of them writing in their own unique dialects of Voynichese. She remains hopeful about the possibility of someday understanding the manuscript’s mystery. 

“I think we’ll get there. And that’ll be just the beginning, like, that’s not the end! Once you can read it, then you’ve got a whole new world to explore! You know, that’s not the end of the puzzle, I think,” Davis said.

Davis’s visit was arranged by Ruth Rogers, the Clapp Library’s Curator of Special Collections. As curator, Rogers oversees Wellesley’s own collection of over 40,000 items, which originated from the collection of Wellesley founder and rare book collector Henry Durant. 

 Rogers met Davis at a conference of manuscript scholars. Rogers and the Friends of the Library (a group that supports the work of the Clapp Library) decided that the College’s collection of 40-plus medieval manuscripts needed to be cataloged by a specialist, and they hired Davis to do so. 

“It took her more than a year to catalog them, and now they’re really professionally cataloged,” Rogers explained. “People write to us from everywhere, all over the world. Many of them have actually been digitized, thanks to LTS’s commitment to preservation and access, so people can actually study them from anywhere.” 

One attendee at the lecture was Maggie Erwin ’23, a Wellesley alum who now studies with  Davis at Simmons University’s graduate program. Erwin talked about how Wellesley’s unique connection to the world of manuscript archiving led her to pursue a path in archival library sciences. 

 “Because of my work in special collections here, and in the book arts lab, I was very interested in how books were made, and that’s kind of how I became interested in the history of books; and then Wellesley has an incredible manuscript collection,” Erwin said. 

Erwin encourages Wellesley students to get involved with this aspect of the school. 

“I think that it would be great if more students could be involved because as Professor Davis was saying in her lecture, there’s so much we don’t know, and that is true of Wellesley’s collections too; there’s tons of stuff to be researched.” 

As for Davis’s lecture, Rogers agreed it was a success, well-attended and captivating. 

“As erudite as she [Davis] is in the knowledge that she has, she is also equally generous in helping anyone who’s interested in her field. She’ll answer your email, she’ll answer a tweet, she’s always ready to listen to anybody and help anyone,” Rogers said, later adding with a smile, “She’s got some arcane specialties, like Star Wars memorabilia.” 

Davis’s singular overlap in interests was evidenced in the slides she showed of her collection of Voynich items, including a canonical comic strip in which the Voynich Manuscript was stolen from Yale and had to be recovered by the Avengers. 

Davis said she enjoys hearing people’s theories on the manuscript, telling the story of a woman who believed it was a crochet pattern and actually “crocheted” several pages of the mysterious text. 

She also mentioned her own predispositions, saying, “In my heart, what I want it to be — I will whisper to you what I want to be, which is that I really want it to have been made by a community of women, who recorded their knowledge for future generations. That’s what I hope it turns out to be.”

However,  she notes the importance of exploring the artifact with genuine scholarly curiosity.   

“When we approach an ancient object such as the Voynich manuscript, we tend to bring our preconceptions with us to the table,” she said. “The more we burden the manuscript with what we want it to be, the more varied the truth becomes. To truly understand the past we have to let it speak for itself. The Voynich manuscript has a voice, we just need to listen.”

On March 21, 1962, Malcolm X, as he was then known, gave a speech at Wellesley College on his belief in Black separatism as part of the religious and political organization he referred to as the Black Muslims, more commonly known as the Nation of Islam. Below is an article from March 23, 1962 written by Kelly Jacobson ’64. Please note that this article contains outdated and/or offensive language regarding the Black community as a whole and Black women specifically.

“‘The white man is a minority in the world who is fast losing his power, and it is better for him to get his business settled now before he loses all his power and his enemies decide to settle his business for him,’ Malcolm X told a capacity crowd in Pendleton Hall yesterday afternoon.

“In his speech on ‘Integration and Separation,’ the disciple of Messenger Elijah Muhammad, spiritual leader of the Black Muslims, attempted to explain the goals and motivating forces of the movement.

“The doctrine of the movement advocates separation as opposed to integration. However, separation is distinguished from segregation, the force of a superior over an inferior. Separation, according to Malcolm X, is agreed upon by equals. 

“White Man Hypocrite

“The doctrine of separation is deemed necessary by the followers of the Honorable Elijah Mohammad [sic] because integration is only evidence of the white man’s hypocrisy. Malcolm X exclaimed that this was true because ‘if they (the white Americans) were for it (integration), they would have it’ since this government rules by the will of the majority.

“The American Negro, according to Malcolm X, is on the whole against integration ‘which at the best is merely token integration.’ The Black voice of dissent, he claimed ‘is quieted by those Negroes who speak as puppets of the white power structure.’

“Integration is Token

“‘This token integration,’ he elaborated ‘doesn’t solve any problem for the mass of the Negroes, only for the handpicked “bourgeois” Negro.[’]

“The Black Muslim Movement, though, is an accurate reflection of the opinions of the mass of the Negroes in America, according to Malcolm X. This is evidenced by two facts: 1) it is the fastest growing Negro organization in the country and 2) the strength of all other Negro groups is decreasing. For example the NAACP allegedly lost 15,000 in membership in the past year.

“Membership Masked

“But nevertheless, despite this large and increasing following ‘You don’t Know who is a Muslim and who isn’t. Your maid, your butler may be one.’ The Muslims do not always reveal their affiliation with the group since it may endanger their position if they are working for a white establishment. 

“The movement is not only a reform group. It is quite definitely a religious group according to Minister Malcolm. They are followers of Islam, which was defined by Malcolm X to mean ‘complete submission to one God.’ They accept all the prophets as prophets of God and believe that we are now living in the days of the final judgment.

“Days of Judgement

“This is further reason not to integrate with the white man. ‘We don’t want to unite because we feel that God is going to destroy those white societies and governments because they are corrupt.’ The Muslims strive to ‘bring about a moral reformation through a complete elimination of crime.’

“Malcolm X calls this reformation ‘cleaning up the mess made by the white people.’ In the Black Muslim community, he claims, there is no dope addiction, adultery, fornication, or juvenile delinquency.

“‘All we want is a chance. If we have it there can be peaceful relations between the black and white man,’ he concluded. ‘All of the immorality in every city exists in our community. The Black woman has no respect. We want to restore self pride in the Negro,’ who has been deprived of it by the white society.”

In response to this article, Malcolm X sent the following letter, published in the April 5, 1962 edition of The Wellesley News, under the section “The Reader Writes.”

“To the Editor:

“May these lines find the students there at Wellesley enjoying good health and high spirits, and thinking very seriously about the grave problems that presently face this world.

“This letter is to congratulate your paper for its unbiased coverage of my lecture there on the campus. It was the most objective bit of reporting I have ever read in any paper pertaining to statements made by Mr. Elijah Muhammad or any of his representatives. All we have ever asked is to be quoted correctly by the press, and if this is done, then the public is left to its own intelligence to judge whether or not the aims and motives of the Muslims are with an intelligent, religious foundation. In the past, the white press has found itself incapable of doing this.

Sincerely,

Malcolm X”

Despite being remembered as an icon of the Civil Rights Movement, El-Shabazz’s legacy is often stripped of the nuance and ever-evolving nature of his advocacy. In particular, the distortion of his philosophy to one of militant extremism, especially when offhandedly placed in contrast with the philosophy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., diminishes the importance and complexity of his lifelong activism. Additionally, although The News is choosing to specifically highlight Black historical archives in honor of Black History Month, the work to uplift and amplify Black voices cannot be relegated merely to February; for it to have true meaning and worth, it is something that must be undertaken with intention every day of every year.