the Storer campus. In 1944 Storer's first black president, Richard Ishmael McKinney, was welcomed with a burning cross on his lawn. Benevolent paternalism Some modern scholars view Storer as a reconstructed plantation. Students were taught that they should efface themselves. The school had at one point a Modern Minstrel Company, which performed "Plantation Songs and Melodies” and renditions of numbers like “If the Man in the Moon Was a Coon". President Nathan Brackett said that the school’s “humble and illiterate” students "generally show a desire to work and submit to wholesome discipline.” To instill moral character, students were obliged to “march in military columns” between classes, were not permitted to “jump, dance, or scuffle” inside campus buildlngs or go on “pleasure excursions, rides, or walks in mixed company.” Other rules deterred students from socializing in town or mingling with townspeople. Students did most campus labor, cooking meals, cleaning buildings, maintaining the campus, and caring for the animals on the school farm. NAACP not permitted to post plaque on Fort Paternalism is particularly linked with Storer's second president, Henry T. McDonald, who tried to smooth over the growing ideological divide between the college and the town. The biggest single such incident was McDonald's full participation in a controversial ceremony, the 1931 dedication of the Heyward Shepherd monument. The monument was the project of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and was intended to support their claim that the enslaved in the South did not desire freedom, and did not support John Brown. McDonald, in his capacity as the president of Storer, made introductory remarks. Two attacks on John Brown then followed; Heyward Shepherd allegedly showed that Brown was wrong and the slaves didn't want freedom. In a dramatic moment, the Storer musical director then praised Brown. McDonald was much criticized in the Black press. One newspaper called the college a failure, and asked African Americans to ostracize the college. The Afro-American called for his resignation. Making things worse was his response to the NAACP which, under W.E.B. Du Bois, prepared a new plaque in response to the Hayward Shepherd monument. However, McDonald, backed by the trustees, refused to allow the NAACP to place this plaque on a wall of the Fort. The Fort already had a plaque honoring Brown, put up in 1918 by the alumni of Storer. The plaque was not erected until 2006.