5A / NEWS / WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 26, 2011 / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / KANSAN.COM
HARVEY (CONTINUED FROM 1A)
The picture shows the 1893 Kansas football team. With only a date and names penciled on the front, the photo tells the story of Ed Harvey and his two brothers who together helped shape the University's cultural landscape.
The picture has 19 faces, each with stoic expressions. Ed Harvey, Maude's husband, is the youngest of three brothers. He's one of the faces.
Ed's left arm rests gently on a teammate's shoulder. He'll soon be an active community figure, but he'll forever hold the memories from that picture. In the years to follow, Ed and his brothers, Sherman and Frederick, will once again attempt to take on the University and its racial barriers, a battle they started as naive students years before.
But none of that is apparent in the picture. Not at this time.
The portrait is in the simple black and white style of its time, and those are the shades that matter most here. Because one of the faces — and the fluid, sometimes nonexistent relationship between the University and its first black athletes — is the reason the photo is even relevant today.
"You're not ready for a black face to be there," Ed Harvey's grand-daughter Karen Byers said in September. "But there it is."
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So what happened? Why did the University accept the Harvey brothers as students in the 1800s, then push them away two decades later? Why did race relations splinter and opportunities disappear?
By 1914, blacks had been banned from athletics, and the Harveys pleaded with University officials to change course. Ed wrote a letter to the KU Board of Administration asking for answers. At the very least, he wanted an explanation.
I would like to ask the status of the Negro in athletics at K.U.? My understanding is that negroes are barred from participating in athletics...
Unlike the racial issue of the time, today's answers to that problem aren't black and white.
Some say an influx of "new" African-Americans to Lawrence were unfamiliar with racial customs and traditions. Others say early abolitionists started dying off, and the new generation didn't sympathize with the cause.
The opinions and explanations are endless, but they all lead to the same conclusion: Racial discontent reached a new fervor at the start of the 20th century. The open doors that first greeted Sherman Harvey at the University in 1883 slowly started to close.
...Now if these things are true, and I think they are, is it fair? Has not the negro student the same right to show his prowess on the athletic field as the white student?...
The young man in Sherman had sought knowledge through newspapers, books and whatever other means available. Chancellor James Marvin had greeted Sherman kindly when he arrived at the University in 1883, and he had left in the same manner under Chancellor Joshua Lippincott in 1889 upon graduating.
But as a grown man, the changing tide of race relations hovered over Sherman, thick and with deep implications. Sherman was on a committee to protest University discrimination, a group that targeted Chancellor E.H. Lindley, the man in charge as segregation swept the campus.
...Why have conditions changed?
The negro formerly participated in athletics and always with credit to his school and to himself..
The Harvey brothers were adults now, with kids and jobs and taxes to pay, and they knew that the University had led them there. But now the University — their University — was turning other blacks away.
The racism was an undercurrent and a tidal wave. People on both sides thought they were right. The Harneys and others thought blacks deserved equality; Lindley and his supporters didn't think blacks could mesh at the University without economic and social consequences.
...My brothers and I helped make "athletics" at KU. And as you are passing on other athletic problems I would like for you to pass on this one...
Lindley answered Ed Harvey's letter seven days later. He never addressed the issue.
Snemer Harvey steps into the batter's box as the only black member of Kansas' baseball team. The game is in his hands.
It's 1899, and the score is tied in the ninth inning. Manager Alexander Martin Wilcox, a professor of Greek language and literature, calls on Sherman. This is his chance.
And if Sherman's past reveals anything, it's that he usually makes good on his chances.
The idea was stoked long before that cold winter morning in 1883 when Sherman walked six miles across snow-covered ground to the University where his past collided with his future.
As a boy in the 1870s, he watched the trains rumble past Lawrence, pouring clouds of black smoke into the air, and he daydreamed. Maybe he could be a part of that. Maybe he could tame those iron beasts. Maybe he could engineer trains.
Above: Photo courtesy SPENCER RESEARCH LIBRARY
Sherman soon found that life deals many hands. The source of inspiration can also be the cruel source of rejection. His skin color dictated that he couldn't conduct trains, but Sherman had something else going for him, something unquantifiable but valuable. He had the backing of parents who wanted, who insisted, he succeeded.
Rebecca and David Harvey had been through the gnawing life of slavery. Rebecca didn't know her parents or even her own name when she was born in North Carolina. For years, she had no identity.
Only, Rebecca and David knew a plot of land couldn't close the racial gap. They knew they would need something else, something only the University could offer.
After traveling from Arkansas to freed land outside Lawrence in 1863, Rebecca and David share-cropped on a farm owned by local sheriff Stephen Ogden. Five years later, they'd saved enough money to buy a 15-acre patch of land. Their land. No one in the Harvey family ever forgot that.
talks of opportunity and education, and they decided: Their boys would attend the school on the hill, and they would begin the fight.
What Sherman and his brothers couldn't grasp as boys, Rebecca and David could. The only way to fight ignorance – to fight the years of labor and fields and servitude – was to use knowledge as a weapon.
Education became the boys' rifle, their equalizer. Who could help but respect a physician or a
Rebecca and David Harvey watched the opening ceremony of Fraser Hall in 1872, and they started to formulate a plan. They took in the swirling possibilities, the
Rebecca Brooks Harvey,
the Harvey brothers'
mother, was born
in North Carolina
without a name. After
relocating to Arkansas,
a foster mother in
slavery gave her the
name Rebecca Brooks
as a child. She moved
to Lawrence in 1863
with her husband
David Harvey.
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