Town of Exeter Hosts Racial Unity Day
“I have a dream…”
A woman at the town gazebo begins singing Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 speech from the Exeter Town Hall. Townspeople gather nearby in pitched tents, offering face-painting, bracelet-making, and pamphlets about Exeter’s history. Racial Unity Day is in full swing, and Project Manager Ken Mendis stops by each tent to make sure everything is going as planned.
Last Saturday, Sep. 28, the town of Exeter hosted its 5th annual Racial Unity Day and engaged in art showcases, musical performances, discussions and historic walking tours.
The idea for a Racial Unity Day started after the 2015 Charleston shooting, where a white shooter killed nine black people in a Charleston church, Mendis said. “What’s important about churches in the south is that the churches are the sanctuary for black people in South Carolina,” Mendis explained. “After the memorial service [in Exeter], I was sitting there in the pews, and I said, ‘That’s it? Nine people died. What else can we do?’”
Thus, Mendis created a Racial Unity Team of people who shared his mission “to connect people to people, and to have a conversation.”
Board member Derek Haddad elaborated on the goal of Racial Unity Day. “We want more white people to come and talk about their white privilege and really learn and think about and grow with us,” he said.
Haddad agreed with Mendis that the team tries to bring community members together through various activities that spur the discussions and action. “We want them to come to racial unity festival to feel part of the community,” he said, “And for white people in our community, we want them to come [to the] racial community festival to really talk more and learn more and grow with us in building a more just and equitable society.”
A unique aspect of Racial Unity Day has been its focus on the town of Exeter’s history and the evolution of its racial dynamic.
In 1790, Exeter had the highest population of free black men in New Hampshire, with a 4.8 percent black population; many black Revolutionary War veterans settled in the town. For art show volunteer Renay Allen, a significant question regarding achieving racial unity in Exeter was, “Why that isn’t the case any more?” According to United States Census Bureau data, Exeter’s population is now only 1.3 percent black.
The historic walking tours, which ran throughout the day, took participants through various points of pride and shame in the town’s racial history. While the Town Hall was the place of Abraham Lincoln’s abolitionist speech in 1860, Exeter’s cotton mill refused to hire black employees throughout the 19th century. Similarly, the Ioka Theater, which opened in 1915, advertised its first showing, Birth of a Nation, by sending two horsemen through town in KKK robes.
Mendis elaborated that the tour was significant since it acknowledged concrete impacts of racism in Exeter. “Exeter has a history of displaced minorities: the blacks, the Native Americans, etc. There was a Chinese person here [who] was displaced because he couldn’t bring his family here [because of the Chinese Exclusion Act],” he said. “All of these things are not good for the city, so that’s why we take the tour to educate the community as to what they have done, before moving forward.”
In the present, both the town of Exeter and the state of New Hampshire have had numerous instances of racial strife, from the illegal detention of Jordanian immigrant Bashar Awawdeh by the Exeter Police Department this year, to the racial slurs targeted towards people of color on the streets, to instances of race-based bullying in schools around the state. Notably, two years prior in Claremont, NH, just 90 miles from Exeter, a group of teenagers taunted a 9-year-old black boy with racial slurs and pushed him off a picnic table with a rope around his neck, instigating state-wide discussion.
In light of such school incidents, the team hosted a workshop about raising children to be race conscious. The group is also working with the school district superintendent to prevent intentional and unintentional race-based aggressions, according to Joy Mendis, one of the founding members and the wife of Ken Mendis. “These incidents have brought to the forefront a need to make some changes within the school districts. Ken is working … to make sure that kids are taught not to do this and to monitor this,” she said. “We are also working to change the social studies curriculum so that history is taught correctly.”
Attendees of the event expressed that the day’s activities provided insight into the racial history of the town of Exeter and solutions to the injustices that people face every day.
“[Racial Unity Day] is providing a necessary service to provide people the opportunity to discuss issues that are somewhat uncomfortable, but more importantly they are providing the opportunity to have this discussion,” attendee Rogers Johnson explained. “This is something that is necessary in order for progress.”
Nina Jones, who also attended Racial Unity Day, echoed Johnson's opinion. “I think we have to be intentional about encouraging people to open up doors and expand their understanding, and Racial Unity Day is creating the opportunity for this.”
Ken Mendis concluded that Exeter is simply a microcosm of the state, and that local racial dynamics are a reflection of a larger issue. “Exeter is not too different than the entire state. When you’re looking at a state of 1.3 million people and you have the total number of black people in this state be 15,000 people, you get a general feel of what the problem is,” he said. “Until we can increase that diversity, nothing’s going to change. But in order to have that conversation, we need to have events like this.”