REMEMBERING: MEMORIAL TO AFRICAN AMERICANS ENSLAVED BY WILLIAM AND MARY A rendering of the Memorial to African Americans Enslaved by William and Mary Courtesy of William and Mary University 14 PHI KAPPA PHI FORUM LYNN RAINVILLE ROOTS AND REMEMBRANCE: THE ROLE AND LEGACY OF SLAVERY IN HIGHER EDUCATION Institutions of higher education in America have long supported and benefited from slavery In 1619, English privateers brought nineteen Africans to Jamestown, Virginia In the ensuing decades, British authorities developed a series of laws that upheld slavery and distinguished between indentured Europeans and enslaved Africans THE TAPROOTS OF SLAVERY IN THE ACADEMY In 1636, Harvard was the first institution of higher learning established in the British colonies Just four years later, Massachusetts passed the Body of Liberties, which enforced this distinction between “strangers” (usually indigenous people and Africans) and European colonists.1 Over the next two centuries, the “labor, products, and profits of slavery [were] woven into [Harvard University’s] very fabric.”2 This included Harvard presidents who enslaved men and women, students who graduated to become owners of enslaved people, and endowments drawn from the work of enslaved laborers.3 Slavery was outlawed in Massachusetts in 1783, months before the end of the American Revolution, but that did not end Harvard’s profit from this “peculiar institution.” Several generous donations were received during the antebellum period from private donors who profited from the slave-based economies of sugar and cotton.4 Two other colleges were founded in the seventeenth century — the College of William and Mary (1693) and King William’s School (1696, absorbed by St John’s College in the next century) — and both were built upon the labor of enslaved people For example, at William and Mary, enslaved laborers worked on the main campus as well as Nottoway Quarter, a tobacco plantation owned by the college Between 1700 and the beginning of the American Revolution, sixteen more colleges were founded, from Dartmouth in New Hampshire to the southernmost, the College of Charleston, in South Carolina At the geographical and chronological midpoint, in 1764, the College of Rhode Island (named Brown University in 1804) was founded by men who were deeply involved in the slave trade UNCOVERING THE PAST Some colleges and universities have begun the work of researching, sharing, and addressing their involvement in slavery In 2003, Ruth J Simmons, the president of Brown, was the first to appoint a steering committee on slavery and justice to “investigate and to prepare a report about the University’s historical relationship to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.” Students joined in this research as part of an Africana studies course and issued their own recommendations to the committee in a 2005 report.5 Seven years later, Brown went one step further and created the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice that is dedicated to “the interdisciplinary study of the historical forms of slavery while also examining how these legacies continue to shape our contemporary world.”6 In Virginia, the Board of Visitors at William and Mary passed a resolution in 2009 that created The Lemon Project, described as a “multifaceted and dynamic attempt to rectify wrongs perpetrated against African Americans by the college through action or inaction.” This project was one of the first to recognize that this research WINTER FALL 2019 15 S L AV E RY A N D T H E AC A D E M Y Georgetown offers a preference for admission or 'legacy status' to descendants of the enslaved people owned by the Jesuits must include local communities.7 One of the most compelling examples of a partnership between the academy and the public is happening at Georgetown University There, independent researchers (GeorgetownMemoryProject org), faculty and students (https:// slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/ descendants), and descendants of slaves (e.g., http://africanroots-pbj blogspot.com) are working to unravel the 1838 sale of 272 people by Jesuit priests at Georgetown who used the proceeds to pay college debts This history is illustrated through archival documents and oral histories preserved by descendant families In 2019, the Georgetown Memory Project and American Ancestors unveiled a joint website to share these stories with a larger audience: https://gu272.americanancestors org Georgetown continues its commitment to this research by renaming several buildings, designing a memorial to the enslaved families, creating a Department of African American Studies, hiring new faculty, and convening a working group on slavery, memory, and reconciliation.8 One of the most unusual steps that Georgetown took was to offer a preference for admission or “legacy status” to descendants of the enslaved people owned by the Jesuits.9 SLAVE SPACES ON CAMPUS About two dozen American colleges and universities have broadened their inquiry into the analyses of 16 PHI KAPPA PHI FORUM architectural features, archaeological sites, and historic landscapes These include sacred sites such as burial grounds and domestic sites such as slave cabins In 2001, I joined the faculty of Sweet Briar College in central Virginia and realized it was built on the grounds of an antebellum plantation and contained the original “big house,” a cabin for enslaved families, and a cemetery to bury their dead Over the next two decades, I documented the lives and contributions of African Americans using a combination of above-ground archaeological techniques such as ground-penetrating radar to locate unmarked burials, ethnographic interviews with descendants, and a landscape study of the former plantation lands I posted my genealogical and historical discoveries on a website, and multiple families reached out to me to provide a more complete understanding of their history One of the results of this work was a 2008 family reunion where descendants of James and Lavinia Fletcher (the heads of an enslaved family at the Sweetbrier Plantation) returned to the cemetery and held their own consecration ceremonies.10 Years of learning from their family stories and consulting with other descendants resulted in my book, Invisible Founders: How Two Centuries of African American Families Transformed a Plantation into a College (Berghahn Press, 2019) My focus on the post-bellum descendants and their contributions highlights the importance of connecting the everyday challenges and contributions of multiple generations of black families to the presence and vitality of institutions in the present One unpleasant reminder of slavery and its champions is the practice of honorific naming on historic college campuses Many campus communities have debated whether to continue this recognition for individuals who engaged directly with and profited from the sale of people For example, at Yale University, President Peter Salovey announced that the name of John C Calhoun, “a white supremacist and a national leader who passionately promoted slavery,” would be removed from a historic building and replaced with that of Grace Murray Hopper, a trailblazing computer scientist who served as a rear admiral in the U.S Navy and was also a Yale alumna.11 Dozens of other colleges and universities have taken or are debating similar steps RESEARCHING SLAVERY’S ROOTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION The first large-scale conference to examine the history and legacy of slavery’s role in higher education was hosted by Emory University in 2011 A few years later, Dr Kelley Deetz (then at University of Virginia) and Dr Jody Allen (William and Mary) formed Virginia’s Colleges and Universities Studying Slavery (VCUSS).12 This group quickly expanded its geographical reach, and its name was shortened to Universities Studying Slavery (USS).13 Today, individuals from more than fifty institutions in the U.S and abroad (https://slavery.virginia.edu/universities-studying-slavery) attend annual conferences In the fall of 2019, Xavier University and the University of Cincinnati sponsored a gathering called “The Academy’s Original Sin.” Part of the THE “LABOR, PRODUCTS, AND PROFITS OF SLAVERY [WERE] WOVEN INTO [HARVARD UNIVERSITY’S] VERY FABRIC.” Harvard Old College (1638-1670) Photo from Harvard University Archives conference was dedicated to discussing the psychological burden for modern-day researchers whose families were impacted by slavery, the nature of discrimination within the academy today, and a model for reparative justice The research conducted by these schools is usually readily available through online exhibits (UNC’s “Slavery and the Making of the University”),14 museum displays (Sweet Briar College’s “Roots, Remembrance, and Restoration,” installed in a former slave cabin), reports (“Seeking Abraham: A Report of Furman University’s Task Force on Slavery and Justice”),15 and books, both synthetic (Craig Steven Wilder’s Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, Bloomsbury, 2013) and specific (Maurie D McInnis and her colleagues recently published Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s University, University of Virginia Press, 2019) LOOKING TO THE FUTURE After two decades of on-campus research, there are several directions for this work to take • More landscape studies will allow us to locate historic sites For example, at the University of Richmond, efforts are underway to relocate a slave cemetery on campus.16 • Additional interpretive markers will illuminate this once-hidden history for a larger audience For example, Washington and Lee University installed a plaque with the names of eighty-four men, women, and children who were bequeathed to “Washington College” in 1826 upon the death of a slave owner and college donor • Our campuses will be more rich with the use of art and memorials to symbolize and commemorate the suffering, contributions, and resilience of enslaved families and their descendants For example, Virginia has broken ground on its Memorial to Enslaved Laborers, and William and Mary recently unveiled its designs for its Memorial to African Americans Enslaved by William and Mary.17 • There are additional research angles to consider, including how to deepen connections to and assist community historians As part of these efforts, colleges and universities should discuss the ownership of archival materials and their long-term preservation as well as partnerships with local libraries, historical societies, and museums Many institutions of higher education owe their founding and/or continued economic wellbeing to their role in or profit from slavery The legacy of this immoral partnership is an important focus of study in the present.18 Many of the researchers cited here were surprised to uncover such longstanding and deep financial and social connections between their institutions and slavery Descendants of these enslaved families were not Regardless of whether your institution is located in “the north” or founded after the Civil War, the faculty, administrators, students, and staff at our colleges and universities have complex economic, social, and political connections to slavery that transcend geography and chronology For works cited: go to www.phikappaphi.org/ forum/winter2019 LYNN RAINVILLE is the director of institutional history at Washington and Lee University She is a public historian and anthropologist Rainville is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan She was the dean at Sweet Briar College and taught at the University of Michigan, Dartmouth, and the University of Virginia WINTER 2019 17