Considering the Past: Topics in M.C. History

In the first part of 20th century, festivals celebrating May Day were popular spring celebrations, especially at women’s colleges, including  the North Carolina schools: Bennet College, Salem College, Flora McDonald College and Women’s College at Greensboro (now UNC-G.) Meredith College was no exception.

During the earliest years of Meredith College, May Day celebrations were apparently simple events - if anything happened at all. It was at least a day to note: in the 1905 yearbook, a calendar of events for the past academic year simply lists “May Day” on May 1st, but there is no description of what that entailed.  

More attention, perhaps, was given to annual Field Day celebrations sponsored by the Physical Education Department. Possibly the two events eventually or by necessity overlapped. Held in early May, individuals and classes demonstrated their athletic accomplishments and competed for blue or red ribbons and monogram letters in gymnastic exercises, races and games. As part of the celebrations, the day might also include a “May Pole Drill” and a “May Day Gallop.” The accompanying photo from the 1918 Oak Leaves shows a May Pole on the downtown campus near the Main Building.
 

Things changed after the campus moved from downtown to the “Tucker Farm” location on the outskirts of Raleigh. The May 27, 1927 Twig declared that this was the year of a true celebration, one not confined to the cramped grounds of the downtown campus. While still under the auspices of the physical education department, the field day exercises transitioned to a celebration of spring and beauty. Meredith College now had room for the procession of the May Court (made up of representatives from each class), “aesthetic” dance performances in appropriate costumes, flower girls and a crown bearer, the winding of the May Pole by the freshmen class, and finally the coronation of the Queen on her throne.
 
This festival would be the template for decades of May Days to come. In the 1930s, the daily festivities also came to include a breakfast presentation to the college president of a basket of flowers and a song performance by the seniors. The “little sisters” of even classes would place May Day baskets on the doors of their “big sisters.” Year after year, the Oak Leaves and the Twig contain photographs and accounts of the annual May Day court and celebrations, taking place in the Grove among the oak trees (where the lake is now), on the central quadrangle, or in the amphitheater.

Over the years, updates to the festivities included the addition of a theme, a tie-in with a Hospitality Weekend for dozens of visiting high school students, a Maid of Honor, short plays, folk and modern dances, a horse show, choral performances, tours of the Home Management House and a fashion show by the Home Economics Department, and even the re-introduction of the May Pole. However, in the changing cultural atmosphere of the late 1960s and '70s, students began to question the appeal of such a seemingly frivolous beauty contest. For a couple years in the early 1970s, the name was changed variously to the "Celebration of Spring Festival" or "Spring Court" or "SPRINGS" and the dancing and themes became decidedly more modern.
 
In a 1975 editorial in the Twig newspaper, editor Allyn Vogel argues for the abolition of the “pseudo-festival.”  She noted that while alumnae were reported to love the event, they were rarely in attendance. That even if the criteria for inclusion on the court was expanded to include “personality, participation and scholarship,” it still required “ten girls in pristine gowns posed on a rostrum” before friends and family. Furthermore, Vogel argued, all tradition, beginning with this one needed to be re-evaluated. Despite, or perhaps because of the changes, after  a greatly diminished event in 1975, May Day celebrations ended on the Meredith College campus.