Smith held its annual celebration of Otelia and Adelaide Cromwell, its first Black alumna and professor respectively, on Nov. 15. The keynote speaker on this year’s theme, “Ignorance Is Not Bliss: The Necessity of Teaching and Learning about Race,” was author and professor Dr. Crystal Fleming. Additional workshops included Q&A sessions, choir justice songs, art making, a dance performance and a poetry reading centered on the theme of racial literacy and education.
Cromwell Day is named for Otelia Cromwell, Ph.D., and her niece Adelaide Cromwell, Ph.D. Otelia graduated from Smith in 1900 and taught for a number of years before resuming her education at Columbia and Yale. She was the first Black woman to receive a Yale doctorate. Adelaide Cromwell was the first African American professor hired at Smith. After her time at Smith, she went on to teach for more than 30 years at Boston University.
The keynote began at 1:30 p.m. with an introduction by Kathleen McCartney, President of the College, and Floyd Cheung, Vice President for Equity and Inclusion. Blackapella, Smith’s all-Black acapella group, performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which Cheung called a “history lesson and a rallying cry.”
This performance was followed by a video presentation about the legacy of the Cromwells at Smith College. “In my view, the legacy of the Cromwells is that you can achieve anything you want to, but it will take hard work and perseverance and belief in yourself,” said Kim Alston, Program and Communications Manager of the Center for Religious Life and co-chair of the Cromwell Day Committee, during the presentation. “This is your inheritance … that’s what we are building: a pipeline and an inheritance.”
Isabel Cruz ’24 then read “Maven” by Nikky Finney, a poem commissioned by Smith in honor of Cromwell, and Cheung introduced Fleming as the keynote speaker. Fleming is a critical race sociologist who does research on dismantling structures of white supremacy in the U.S. and abroad. She is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at SUNY Stony Brook.
“Why is the classroom so central to debates over race and racism? What does literacy have to do with justice?” Fleming asked the crowd to start her speech. “We’ve all heard the saying ‘knowledge is power.’ Rarely do we stop to ask power for whom or for what purpose and what do we mean by knowledge … What responsibility do we have, not as individuals but as a community, to ensure that what counts as knowledge reflects a broad range of human experience and not merely what reinforces the powerful?”
Fleming asked people to indulge her in a social experiment, joking that she was a sociologist at her core. She had students raise their hands if they had heard racist remarks in their presence, stand up if they had read a book about race and remain standing if they had taken a college course on racism, slavery, colonization or racial capitalism. The number of students standing dwindled with every question. But most everyone stood up when she called on the audience to “rise up if you believe that antiracist education is worth fighting for, that the beliefs and knowledge of indigenous and black people matters.”
Fleming framed her talk with three questions: what racial literacy is and why it is essential for social justice, how educational institutions have traditionally promoted white supremacy and lastly what we can learn from the history of antiracist education that can inspire us to make the commitments that we need. Her talk focused heavily on the importance of communities in doing this antiracist work.
The key to destroying racial supremacy is racial literacy, according to Fleming. “Literacy means understanding, in this case, the histories and structures of racism. It requires shining a light on an unflattering, traumatic and frankly barbarous regime of terror, a system of violence founded on racial genocide, child slavery and racial capitalism.”
“Antiracism is not a box we check or a personal identity or something that we become when we read a book or two or take a single workshop for class,” said Fleming. “Antiracism is a mission we build together when we take that knowledge for collaboration.”
“No matter our background, no matter who we are, no matter our identities, we all have a role to play in shining a light on social justice,” she said. “Lord knows we need some light!”
Fleming’s speech was part of a larger program of events on combating racism as a community through racial literacy. One, an artmaking workshop, served “to provide a space to restore, reflect, and respond and come and spend some time in a community to prepare for the day ahead,” according to its organizer Nina Pelaez, Associate Director of Learning & Interpretation at the Smith College Museum of Art. “We want to offer a space for how we can think about justice, think about power, think about ancestry and how those come through to the present. We want to use creativity as a way to reflect on the day ahead, whatever that means to each student.”
“Our normal everyday classes – depending on major – don’t necessarily address issues of race as often as they should,” said Bethany Stephens ’25, who attended the artmaking workshop. “Having this day where classes are canceled lets us focus on something important that my chemistry class isn’t necessarily addressing.”
However, some students had complaints about the way the day was organized. “I like the workshops, I like things done by students and that involve students,” said Indigo Casais ’23. “The individual activities are good. It would be better if [administration] had them all throughout the semester because people can’t go to three in one day and engage with them all at the same time.” They were only able to attend one workshop for this reason.
“Cromwell Day provides opportunities for people who are not used to talking about race to get a specific framework to talk about race, but the fact that it happens once a year in the middle of the semester makes it hard for students to have time to learn and engage,” said Casais.
As a whole, the student body sees Cromwell Day as a valuable tradition. “It is obviously important because we are in a predominantly White institution,” said Paula Ogalde-Carmona ’24. “It is important to be educated on issues that are prevalent and to acknowledge issues of race. The value [of Cromwell Day] is to learn about issues and confront them as a community and find ways to fight them together.”
Fleming agreed with Ogalde-Carmona in a separate interview with The Sophian. “I think it’s pretty extraordinary in terms of a tradition,” she said. “It’s relatively rare to have an educational institution — or any institution — to set aside this amount of time annually for collective reflection, collective edification and renewing that community to uplift the voices of Black students and faculty and the broader value of antiracism. I think it’s really impressive.”
“It is only one component of a more comprehensive institutional approach to these issues,” Fleming said. “All traditions provide an opportunity to have communities remember and renew a set of values. That’s the beauty of something that repeats itself from year to year.”
To Smith students, Fleming offered a piece of advice. “Knowing that you have power is one of the most important things,” she said. “You have more power than is sometimes acknowledged and it’s important to know that and to know that when you protest or point to institutional failures or areas of needed growth, that has an impact. Your voice matters.”
“A better world is possible, but it’s not going to come through magic, or wishes, or hopes or dreams,” said Fleming. “We have to build it and we have to fight for it and we can’t do it alone. It is when we rise up, speak up and join in solidarity right here in our communities that we shine a light of truth on what we need to change.”
