Town of Exeter Residents 'Walk a Mile for Racial Unity'
This past Saturday morning, members of the Exeter community gathered in small groups to walk through the town, following a path marked by balloons emblazoned with the words, “I Stand Against Racial Injustice.” Each group was led by a name-tag-wearing member of the Racial Unity Team. Participants ranged from eight-year-old children to seniors from the Riverwoods Retirement Community.
“We’re not the type of group that go out and protest, we want to make a lasting impact on people and turn them into change agents,”
The event, “Walk a Mile for Racial Unity,” was sponsored by the community-run nonprofit Racial Unity Team. Using historical landmarks in Exeter, they encouraged community members to examine racial injustices of the past and present. Each red balloon either marked the site of a racially charged incident or highlighted institutionalized racism in Exeter.
Stops on the tour included the town hall, where Abraham Lincoln spoke about blocking the expansion of slavery in 1860, the Red Brick Church, the first congregation to allow black members—which just appointed its first black pastor last year—and Phillips Exeter Academy. The Academy, as it was noted on the tour, admitted students of color as early as the 18th Century, but kept housing segregated. In 1864, during the civil war, three Kentuckian students left the school rather than attend school with a black classmate. That black student, however, went on to attend Harvard and Harvard Law School. In addition to the history of race at the Academy, the tour also mentioned the ALES video, as well as the larger student-led campaign for more faculty of color.
The tour also touched on slavery in Exeter. Exeter had at least 50 slaves in 1767, but also had the highest percentage of free blacks in the state by 1790. Most black residents, whether enslaved or free, lived in a neighborhood near the current location of the Harris Family Children’s Center.
Also included on the walk was the site of a former Chinese laundry, now the site of the retail store Ganesh. The owner, who ran the laundry until the early 20th Century, was unable to bring his family to the U.S. as a result of the Chinese Exclusion Act. There were nine Chinese students enrolled at the Academy in 1881, but the act—which went into effect in 1882—prevented any further Chinese immigration until it was overturned in 1943.
"Walk a Mile for Racial Unity," now in its third year of operation, is organized by the Racial Unity Team. Ken Mendis, the Malaysian-American founder of the Racial Unity Team, was moved to action by the 2015 shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in which Dylan Roof killed nine black worshippers during a Bible study with the explicit intention of igniting a race war.
“I was sitting in church the next day thinking about it and I realized that we needed to do more to get people thinking differently about race and the different identities that we have in the world,” said Mendis. His wife, Joy Meiser Mendis, who emigrated from Czechoslovakia, was also involved in the effort. “Dylan Roof wanted to start a revolution of hate, so we decided to start a revolution of love,” she said.
The effort was slow at first, but through his church connections and community involvement, Mendis assembled a group of fifteen volunteers to plan the walk. He also used social media, as well as local newspapers like the Portsmouth Herald, to gain publicity for the project. As the team grew, they also took on other ambitious tasks, including organizing weekly Culture Maker meetings, where residents of town would explore their racial experiences through art-making and discussions, and working with superintendents in local schools to change their curriculum.
Since its creation three years ago, the Racial Unity Walk has undergone several changes, most noticeable of which are changes to the destinations on the tour. Barbara Rimkunas, member of Exeter’s Historic Society and the Racial Unity Team, is responsible for designing and upgrading the tour, according to the information she collects as part of her daily work as a historian. The first Racial Unity Walk, which focused mainly on African-American history, was criticized for not being inclusive of all the different races in town. “We built in the story of how Exeter was founded because of the river, because Native Americans came here,” Rimkunas said. “We also included the small but ever present Asian Americans.” With this in mind, she included the story of the former Chinese laundry shop at Ganesh to this year’s tour.
Mendis has already begun to plan for next year’s event, promising that there will be “a taste of unity”—traditional cuisine from different cultures in Exeter. “Food brings people together,” Mendis said. He also plans to actively to target people from different social groups to make sure that the event does not fall into the trap of “preaching to the choir.”
“It’s still a voluntary thing,” Rimkunas said. “We need to back it up with schools and get involved with people who wouldn’t typically go to these walks on a Saturday morning.” In the future, Mendis hopes that young people, especially children “in the 6 to 12 age range,” will participate. “We need younger people because they can make changes in the world,” he said.
The event has grown in size in the past three years. Meiser-Mendis said that only about 65 people turned up for the first walk and last year it rained on the day of the event. The 2017 Racial Unity Walk, however, had an estimated attendance of over 300. Meiser-Mendis attributed the growing turnout to an increased racial dialogue in the U.S. “I think that people’s awareness of racial incidents is heightened now,” she said.
Organizers of the walk work to make sure that the event stays true to its goal of bringing the community together to deepen racial understand and empathy. “We’re not the type of group that go out and protest, we want to make a lasting impact on people and turn them into change agents,” said Mendis, noting his satisfaction that no signs were brought to the event, which allowed participants to have productive conversations with one another.
The walk drew community leaders from all sides of the town. PEA Instructor of English Alex Myers attended the walk in an effort to connect with Bill Gannon, Exeter’s district representative in the New Hampshire senate. “I went to the walk because our local state senator, who is a Republican, was going to be walking, and I wanted to meet him and tell him my concerns about a couple of bills that are coming up in the State Legislature,” Myers said.
Several other PEA students and faculty members were also in attendance. Mercy Carbonell, Instructor of English and head of the Martin Luther King Committee, attended the walk to help deepen the relationship between community leaders in PEA and the town of Exeter.
“I think the Academy does have a responsibility, because we exist in this community. But there needs to be more awareness before anything can be done, and there’s so much denial,” she said. “It has to be ok to be an activist at school—both at PEA and EHS.”
Carbonell also mentioned that the academy is trying to reach out to the owners of shops in town, as well as students at Exeter High School, and invite them to attend the keynote speaker on MLK day. Carbonell believes that, in order to actually take action and confront these issues, the Academy has to reach out beyond the Exeter bubble and into the community. “I think we have to go grassroots on this, or it’s never going to change,” she said.
Faculty member Olutoyin (Toyin) Augustus, member of the Racial Literacy Taskforce, called upon fellow instructors to take their Saturday classes to the walk. She also sent out emails to groups of students who might be interested, encouraging them to come during their meeting block. “A lot of people wish they could have come but were busy with their individual schedules,” Augustus said. “I walked over with Caroline Meliones’ class of about seven students.”
Reflecting on the event, Toyin wished that the Racial Unity Team had reached out to faculties or students of PEA, considering the school campus was one of the stops on the tour and presented as a place of racial diversity and unity. “It would have been interesting to have students at PEA actually speaking about their experience when it comes to race relations on and off campus,” she said. “They tried to speak on our behalf but because they aren’t actually involved with the Academy, the information presented lacked depth.”
Myers also felt that collaboration between the Academy and the town of Exeter is vital. “We should help to set the tone, we should participate in events, we should be a vibrant member of the community that shows concern for the daily life and the longer term plans for the town,” he said.
Carbonell’s partner, Lisa Woodman, attended the walk to grapple with intense issues of racial discrimination, in her community and on a larger scale. “I’m increasingly disturbed by what I see, both in the community and the world at large, ” Woodman said. “It’s like all the creepy crawlies came out when Trump gave them permission to.” Woodman noted a recent increase of confederate flags around Exeter, and an incident where she and Carbonell were followed agressively by a car with a Trump bumper sticker. When they reported the incident to the Exeter Police Department, according to Woodman, the EPD had suggested Carbonell no longer wear her “pink pussy” hat popularized by the 2016 Women’s March.
Augustus is concerned about the Racial Unity Team’s seeming hesitance when it comes to bringing forth the hostilities between the different racial groups that have been and are still present in Exeter. “They talked about the how the KKK rode through town and how people in town and the pastor...stood up to them, and the story felt romanticized,” she said. “They didn’t let people realize that there are still racist incidents against adults and students and the Exeter community, so that piece was also lost.” She called it “a fallacy” to think that the different races are already united when there’s still a lot of hatred in the town. “We need reminders that we still have a lot of work to do,” she remarked.
Another concern Augustus brought up was the lack of discussion before or after the event, more saliently felt by those attending the earlier tours. Because of the hour-long gap between the end of the 9:00 a.m. walks and the Culture Maker discussions in town hall, most of the groups left after finishing the tour. To solve this problem, Augustus felt that the tour guide could have posed discussion questions to the group throughout the walk. She acknowledged, however, that it was challenging. “You’re going on this walk with strangers whom you might never see again, and you don’t want to be that stereotype. You don’t want to ask questions that make people feel threatened when you haven't established a relationship with them.” Similarly, town resident Courtney Simmons said that she was disappointed at how her tour guide was reading off a piece of paper at each destination. “It’s not really what I expected,” she said. “I thought I would get more content that’s not available in print.”
Despite these concerns, Myers thinks that, overall, the walk was constructive for those who participated. “I learned a lot about the history of black people in Exeter,” said Myers. “I was interested to learn about what percentage of residents were people of color in the past compared to now—it has gone down significantly—and to start to think about why that is and what effects that has had.”
Though dissatisfied with some of the ways the information was presented, Augustus felt heartened by the very fact that there is an organization vested in organizing these events in Exeter. “Sometimes we can do damage when we try, but I think [...] making mistakes is fine,” she said. “I’m glad they did it. One step, any step.”