David Frank: Confronting Oregon’s Legacy of Racism
Renaming Dunn and Deady halls is an important symbolic step in recognizing and rectifying Oregon’s sordid racial past. We need to continue interrogating the symbols that celebrate and honor this past.
Editor’s note: If, like me, last night left you more inspired than ever to improve our democracy — the way we vote, the candidates we selected from, the institutions that shape our daily lives — please send me a note at kfraz@berkeley.edu for potential inclusion in a special blog post featuring thoughts from you, members of The Oregon Way community.
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David Frank has been a professor at the University of Oregon since 1981. He is a resident faculty member in the Clark Honors College and is an affiliated faculty member in the department of English's program in rhetoric. He served as dean of the Clark Honors College from 2008 - 2013.
Who you honor matters. Oregonians can and must do better than Dunn and Deady.
Frederick Dunn (A.B. University of Oregon 1882, A.B. Harvard University 1894, A.M. University of Oregon 1898, A.M. Harvard University 1903) was a University of Oregon Professor of Latin for 37 years. He was a well-regarded scholar and teacher. He also served, beginning in the early 1920s—for an undetermined period—as the Exalted Cyclops (the chief officer) for the Eugene branch of the Ku Klux Klan. The historian Eckard Troy observes, “Dunn made no secret of his dual roles as college professor and Exalted Cyclops of Klan No. 3.” Dunn died in 1937 and the University honored his service in 1962, a year the Civil Rights movement was accelerating, by naming a wing of a dorm complex after the professor.
Fifty-three years later that decision came into question. During the 2015-16 academic year, responding to an explosive racist incident at the University of Missouri, faculty and students at University of Oregon called upon the administration to confront Oregon’s legacy of racism, including the denaming of Dunn Hall and Deady Hall (named after Matthew Deady). The University of Oregon drew on the careful investigations of three distinguished historians—David Alan Johnson, Quintard Taylor, and Marsha Weisger—to research the respective pasts of Dunn and Deady to determine if the two halls named should be renamed. They weighed two factors to decide if the halls should be renamed: evidence of racist behavior and redemptive action suggesting an eventual renunciation of racism.
The committee recommended, based on these factors, denaming Dunn Hall because Dunn was the Exalted Cyclops of the Eugene Klavern. No evidence is available that Dunn either publicly acknowledged or renounced his association with the KKK. President Shill and the University of Oregon Board of Trustees agreed with the recommendation, and Dunn Hall was denamed in 2016. For a short period, the hall bore the name “Cedar.” Then, in 2017, the Hall was named after DeNorval Unthank Jr., the first African American to graduate from UO's architecture school.
The committee found evidence that Matthew Deady had partially renounced racism later in his life, meeting the criterion of “redemptive action,” and did not recommend denaming Deady Hall. At first, the University followed that recommendation. Then, in the wake of the George Floyd murder, the University denamed Deady Hall in 2020. President Shill and the University of Oregon Board of Trustees, fully recognizing Matthew Deady’s role establishing the institutional and structural racism in Oregon that has persisted to modern times, dropped the standard of “redemption action” in removing Deady’s name from the University’s oldest building. They provided no explanation for their decision to bypass this aspect of the historical review.
A historical record that must continue to be investigated
The University has renamed both halls—symbolic actions that effectively, but quite belatedly, challenge Oregon’s racist past. Oregonians and the University of Oregon need to continue exhuming and redressing this racist history. Remembering Fredrick Dunn, his dual roles as an honored professor and Exalted Cyclops of the Eugene KKK, and the proper act of removing his name from a University hall, will help anchor a history of an acknowledgment of Oregon racism and its redemptive action.
Linda Gordon, in The Second Coming of the KKK, writes that Oregon in the 1920s was the “most racist place outside the southern states.” Gordon continues:
Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, and extending through the mid-twentieth century, Oregon was arguably the most racist place outside the southern states, possibly even of all the states.
The Klan gained particularly formidable power there, especially in Portland; Oregon shared with Indiana the distinction of having the highest per capita Klan membership. Moreover, the Oregon Klan’s muscle led it more actively into electoral politics than most other state Klans.
White Supremacy was baked into the Oregon Constitution, which Matthew Deady shepherded to completion during the Constitutional Convention of 1857. He was the only delegate to support slavery. While the delegates opposed slavery, they supported Deady’s fallback position—a prohibition of black settlement in Oregon. A small number of delegates opposed Deady’s thoroughgoing racism, including Josephine County’s William Watkins.
Though some fought racism, others failed to push back. Turns out that the KKK was in fertile territory in Oregon. The hate group had no trouble selling its ideology of White Supremacy that Deady planted. Dunn embraced and spread it. To be sure, the historians in their report noted that Frederick “Dunn dedicated his life to scholarship and critical thinking and deeply loved the university” and that Dunn was “one of the best-known university professors in the classics on the Pacific coast.” The historians then displayed the contradiction in Dunn’s life:
The historical record is silent on whether Dunn personally promoted violence against individual or groups based on race, gender, religion, immigration status, sexual identity, or political affiliation. However, the Ku Klux Klan, of which he was Eugene’s Exalted Cyclops, did engage in violence and terrorism in Jackson County and elsewhere against African Americans and others who allegedly engaged in inappropriate sexual acts or crimes, and he never publicly condemned that violence. Moreover, the Eugene Klan repeatedly burned crosses on Skinner Butte, which may be construed as an act of terrorism.
My review of the Dunn archives, located in the University of Oregon archives, tells us much about Dunn, the scholar and citizen. I could not find evidence of Dunn’s participation in the KKK. Dunn was a dedicated scholar (there are 70 publications on his vita), instructor, and member of his church. His wife was a prominent socialite. Historians Johnson, Taylor, and Weisiger did not find explicit evidence of Dunn advocating racist politics, and there is no documentation that Dunn smuggled explicit racist themes into his scholarship. That said, Dunn was a member of several conservative heritage organizations, which may explain why he found the KKK attractive; leaders and members were required members to commit to its doctrines of White Supremacy.
Regardless, we have clear evidence that Dunn was in the KKK, including this document from the Oregon Historical Society listing Dunn as the Eugene Klan’s Exalted Cyclops:
His Klavern, boasting some 144 members, included the 1917 UO Rose Bowl football hero Shy Huntington.
Although some UO colleagues knew Dunn was involved with the KKK, there is no evidence that they confronted him, or sanctioned him. There was significant resistance to the Klan on the University campus during the 1920s. The students opposed the KKK’s efforts to enlist them. The historians note in their report:
Dunn knowingly embraced an organization that certainly by today’s standards, but also in the view of most of his colleagues and students at the time, violated the core values of the University of Oregon.
Opposition was not limited to the young. Prince Lucian Campbell, the President of the University of Oregon between 1902 and 1925, was horrified by the KKK and worked with Catholic organizations to confront the odious secret society. Similarly, Ben Alcott, the Oregon Governor at the time, condemned the Klan, and actively campaigned against it.
Long overdue actions and the path ahead
What then should we make of Frederick Dunn? Dunn was a man of contradictions. The public knew Dunn as a respected academic and professor. History has revealed the private man, a man operating in the shadows and darkness who led the Eugene-Springfield branch of the KKK. Dunn’s legacy is mixed—it is reasonable to conclude that his leadership of a racist organization far outweighs his more positive public contributions as a scholar and citizen. Removing his name from a UO dorm and replacing it with the name of a prominent African American alumni was the right judgment. Both the decision-making process and its product stand out as an effective confrontation of Oregon’s past.
Yet, this confrontation was long overdue. As Matthew Dennis and Samuel Reis-Dennis write, “Dunn’s racist record should have disqualified him” from earning the honor of having a hall named after him “whether judged on the terms of his own time, or on those of the Civil Rights era.” And it was only the outbreak of racial trauma at the University of Missouri in 2015, some 53 years after the University of Oregon awarded Dunn’s name to a dorm, with the ensuing protests across the country and the University of Oregon, that prompted President Schill and the Board of Trustees to dename Dunn Hall. And it was only the outbreak of racial trauma in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder that prompted President Schill and the Board of Trustees to dename Deady Hall, doing so without explaining why Deady’s redemptive actions were no longer relevant.
To uproot institutional and systemic racism in Oregon, we must proactively confront Oregon’s dark history; we should not wait for the next episode of inhumane treatment of fellow Americans. Renaming Dunn and Deady halls is an important symbolic step in recognizing and rectifying Oregon’s sordid racial past. We need to continue interrogating the symbols that celebrate and honor this past. We must also identify and commemorate Oregonians who resisted, against popular opinion, the deeply entrenched racism advocated by Deady and Dunn. These include William Watkins, Ben Alcott, and Prince Lucian Campbell—three individuals who belong in Oregon’s profiles of courage.
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