Nearly a half-century ago, I entered an elite New England boarding school as a sophomore. I was the only black student in my class. Two others were in the class ahead of me, none in the class behind me. Recent media reports of threats mailed to 23 black students at St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., another elite New England boarding school, triggered some painful memories.
Clearly, we have come a long way from the days when I attended Hotchkiss School and the number of black students could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Today, there are 40 black students at St. Paul's, in a student body that exceeds 500, and a minority enrollment of 34 percent. Similar statistics can be cited today for Hotchkiss and similar schools. Bill Matthews, the rector of St. Paul's, wasted no time in publicly condemning the letters as acts of "hatred" and an "outrage," immediately calling a special assembly to discuss the mailing with students, as well as notifying parents by e-mail.
My most searing experience with bigotry at Hotchkiss, however, did not involve racial prejudice, but ethnic prejudice, a form of intolerance with which I was unfamiliar and for which I was quite unprepared. One of the members of the sophomore class, an Italian-American student with terrible acne and dark, slicked down hair, was being singled out for ridicule and ostracism. The practice was called "baiting" at Hotchkiss, a time-honored tradition of hazing, which the headmaster and faculty chose to ignore.
Insults became incessant. He was openly mocked for his "greasy" hair and his skin. The classmates on his dormitory floor would not be seen with him. A special sink and toilet in the bathroom were set aside for him, which no one else used. Shaving cream "bombs," aerosol cans stabbed open with a sharp instrument, were thrown into his room at 3 a.m., covering everything - walls, bed, desk, papers, books - with white, sweet smelling goo. Like all of us, he was insecure when he arrived, overly friendly, anxious to be accepted, but the campaign of baiting, which was not unlike torture, eventually broke him. Helpless in the face of unrelieved scorn, he was moved from the dormitory to the infirmary, until he withdrew from the school. I have never forgotten what happened to him.
As we contemplate the possibility that the next US president will be African-American, it is obvious that, after years of finger-pointing, name-calling, and much, much worse, our national perceptions on race have apparently shifted.
Despite the existence of the letters to the students at St. Paul's, however, we should be reluctant to rush to judgment. An investigation by New Hampshire police, the FBI, and the Postal Service has yet to produce a suspect or to confirm that the letters were racially motivated. It is also worth noting a similar event last fall at Loomis Chaffee School in Connecticut. A racial epithet was scrawled on the door of a black female student, but a police investigation determined that the incident was a hoax and the epithet had been written by the student herself, who was asked to leave the school.
In 2006, I retired after 27 years as a Massachusetts trial judge. If I learned anything from that experience, it was the necessity to withhold judgment until all evidence is in. We must wait until the investigators in New Hampshire have completed their work, and if necessary, until a trier of fact, a judge or a jury, has considered the evidence and found the accused innocent or guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, before we can reach a reliable conclusion. That is as it should be.
But whether the letters were intended to threaten the black students at St. Paul's with harm or whether, they were, instead, a hoax, does not matter in the end. As I have sat in my courtroom over the years, listening to testimony implicating defendants in all manner of criminal activity, it has become apparent that these actions are messages from the dark side of our nature, and must not be ignored.
Julian Houston is a former associate justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court and author of the novel "New Boy."
