Washington, D.C. – In case you missed it, it was just revealed that Sen. Richard Blumenthal had a racist, problematic past when he was in high school and college.
Senate Dem part of High School group that held ‘Slave Day’, used racial slur repeatedly in college writing
By: Kyle Morris
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., served as president of the student council at his high school when the group put on a “Slave Day” fundraising event, and he used a term now recognized as racist several times during one of his writings for the student newspaper at Harvard University.
According to images and documentation listed in the 1963 yearbook for Riverdale Country School, a private school located in the Bronx, Blumenthal served as president of the school’s student council and attempted to unify the school through a series of fundraising events that called for student participation.
One of the student council’s fundraising events, according to the yearbook, was the inaugural “Slave Day” on Nov. 21, 1962. Describing the event, the yearbook said a “large number of Upper School students worked at odd jobs around the neighborhood and helped to raise over two hundred dollars for the drive.”
The yearbook also noted that the “Slave Day” fundraiser “exemplified the kind of activity which the Council felt most important to the school, the leadership and the participation being completely under the incentive of the students.”
Following his high school career, Blumenthal attended Harvard University and served as editor-in-chief of The Harvard Crimson, the school’s student newspaper.
During his time as a writer for the newspaper, Blumenthal used a term that is now considered a racial slur at least seven times in a 1966 article for the newspaper titled “Summer School Project Set for Negro Students,” which described a program for African American students to study at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia University in preparation for graduate school.
“Twenty Negroes from Southern colleges will study here this summer under a new program organized jointly by Harvard, Yale, and Columbia,” Blumenthal wrote. “The purpose of the program, Dean Ford said last week, is to provide Negroes with the preparation they need to go on to graduate school, and to help them overcome problems of graduate school admission.”
In the 1960s, there was a debate over whether the word Blumenthal used was a racist term. According to Ferris State University, the word became “totally uncouth by the mid-1980s.”
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Read the full article HERE.
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