Many universities have investigated their historical ties to slavery. They published reports documenting how they benefited from slavery and the slave trade — or even, in the case of Georgetown University, how cash from that trade saved the institution from crippling debt. They put up plaques honoring enslaved people who worked on their campuses. They erased enslavers’ names from buildings. They apologized.
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Many universities have investigated their historical ties to slavery. They published reports documenting how they benefited from slavery and the slave trade — or even, in the case of Georgetown University, how cash from that trade saved the institution from crippling debt. They put up plaques honoring enslaved people who worked on their campuses. They erased enslavers’ names from buildings. They apologized.
Scholars and administrators at some universities say they want to move past symbolic steps, hoping, somehow, to begin trying to “repair” that history. One question confronting them is this: Do universities that profited from slavery, and later propped up segregation, now also owe a debt to historically black colleges and universities?
Academics studying their campuses’ slave roots gathered at a symposium here recently to confront that question (although, in public sessions at least, none phrased it quite so baldly). The discussion, national in scope, was sponsored and framed by two Mississippi institutions whose stories highlight the stakes.
One, the University of Mississippi, opened in 1848. Slaves built the first buildings on its Oxford campus. Its nickname, Ole Miss, is a term that slaves used for the wife of a plantation owner. More than 95 percent of its first students either owned slaves or came from slaveholding families, according to new research by Anne Twitty, a historian at the university. That wealth, a collective total of some 4,647 slaves, underwrote the tuition and fees of those students. Slavery had made Mississippi one of the richest states in the union by 1860. The public flagship weaned on its profits now commands a $715-million endowment and recently ascended to the elite upper tier of R-1 research universities.
The other sponsor, Tougaloo College, is a private liberal-arts institution that sits on a former slave plantation here in the state capital, 150 miles south of Oxford. Missionaries set it up in 1869 to educate a formerly enslaved population that had been starved of education. African-Americans would continue to be shut out of the University of Mississippi until 1962, when James Meredith’s attempt to register spurred a deadly riot that was put down by the Army and the National Guard. Tougaloo and institutions like it educated the doctors, lawyers, teachers, and other professionals who created a black middle class. But one legacy of desegregation is that Tougaloo — with an endowment of $13 million — struggles to compete for students against wealthier, predominantly white universities that are now keen to diversify.
In recent years, scholarship on the history of slavery has leapt beyond academe to force a societal reckoning. This occasional series explores fresh questions scholars are asking as America confronts its history of human bondage.
A Tougaloo alumnus near Washington, D.C., John Rosenthall, is leading the push to secure a voice for black colleges in the national movement of universities reckoning with slavery. Rosenthall, 69, spent much of his career working on issues of environmental justice, first at the NAACP and later as a federal consultant focused on involving communities in decisions about pollution-causing facilities. He believes universities that benefited from slavery, a list that includes all of the country’s oldest seats of higher learning, should not be the only ones shaping how to make amends for that past.
And those universities should hear from a range of descendants of slaves, he says, not only those connected to their campuses and host communities.
“There is a debt to be paid, because these institutions received the benefit that they not only didn’t pay for — they forced it out of people,” says Rosenthall, president of the Tougaloo College Research and Development Foundation. “The debt is owed to the descendants of [the] enslaved. And how do you pay that debt back? … You pay that debt back by supporting the institutions that have been better to the descendants of slaves than anybody else. And that’s the HBCUs.”
The conversation is happening at a moment of excitement and angst for the country’s 105 black colleges. A recent uptick in freshman enrollment at about 40 HBCUs fuels talk of a “renaissance” in a sector of academe that currently enrolls 9 percent of African-American undergraduates. But these tuition-dependent institutions, which once attracted students from across the economic spectrum, must also contend with a demographic shift that has seen students from wealthier families choosing to attend traditionally white institutions. Sixty-one percent of undergraduates at HBCUs receive Pell Grants, meaning those students are among the poorest in the nation, compared with a national average of 32 percent at all types of institutions.
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In the emerging dialogue between black colleges and predominantly white colleges with roots in slavery, both sides tend to avoid what some among them view as a divisive term: reparations. They talk instead about partnering to confront challenges facing HBCUs, such as limited infrastructure to get federal grants and limited scholarship money to lure students.
Another challenge, and a potential avenue for partnership, is recovering the narrative of slaves themselves. The story of Tougaloo College — how a slave-labor camp became a center of black learning — packs drama comparable to the well-publicized slave-history projects at places like Georgetown and the University of Virginia. Similarly, other black colleges, like Prairie View A&M University, near Houston, are also situated on ex-slave plantations.
But, unlike some predominantly white universities studying their ties to slavery, Tougaloo does not have a team of historians and other experts tasked with that work. What it has, primarily, is one professor: a computer scientist with no time, no money, and no end of enthusiasm for a mystery that has tugged at her imagination for nearly four decades.
What Happened to the Slaves?
On a Friday afternoon last month, the second day of the slavery symposium that took place in Tougaloo’s modern civil-rights research center, Sharron T. Streeter accompanied a reporter through an older campus structure that embodies the history those scholars had traveled here to confront. Streeter, 57, has lived much of her life in the orbit of this 1,000-student college. She went to high school nearby, earned her bachelor’s degree here, sent her children here, and now chairs Tougaloo’s department of math and computer science.
Her curiosity about the slaves who once lived here dates to the early 1980s, when, as a student walking to class, she would pass by an administrative building known as “the mansion.” It’s a wood house whose gray exterior and rust-red trim are meant to mimic a stone building in the Italian countryside. John W. Boddie had it built for his betrothed around 1860 at a time when this land was a 2,000-acre cotton plantation. According to Tougaloo lore, when the woman heard how Boddie mistreated his slaves, she decided to marry somebody else.
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The master bedroom of his house became the Tougaloo president’s office. As a student, Streeter would visit the financial-aid office, then also housed here, and wonder: What happened to the slaves?
She points out one of the arched windows on the top floor. From this height, you can take in a panorama of what Boddie’s plantation has become: cars, chapel, students, library, geese grazing beside trees thick with hanging moss.
“Could they have imagined this?” Streeter says of the slaves.
There is a debt to be paid, because these institutions received the benefit that they not only didn’t pay for — they forced it out of people.
For people visiting Tougaloo these days, it can be difficult to imagine them. Much of the history that greets you in public spaces centers on the college’s role in the civil-rights struggles of the 1950s and ’60s. Black colleges educated “nearly everyone involved” in that movement, says Marybeth Gasman, a historian of education at the University of Pennsylvania, from leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. to student foot soldiers who participated in uprisings in places like Nashville and Greensboro.
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Tougaloo was no exception. It functioned as a safe haven where black and white activists could come together. Its students and professors staged sit-ins and protests to integrate Jackson’s churches, restaurants, and public library. The harassment, violence, and imprisonment they endured are honored across campus in historical markers and wall-length black-and-white photos.
Streeter believes the slaves who preceded those activists here should be honored, too. In her mother’s generation, she says, people preferred to forget the hardships of slavery. But Streeter feels that African-Americans can derive strength and self-identity by reflecting on the slaves’ perseverance and achievements.
“People look at these buildings, and they only see the white oppressor,” she says of Tougaloo’s mansion, which was built with slave labor. “But I see African-Americans who had skill, who took pride in what they did even though they were being oppressed.”
By sleuthing through court documents and other government records, Streeter has begun to sketch some answers to the questions that nagged her as an undergraduate. She knows, for example, that the Boddie plantation’s slave population grew larger, younger, and more female over time, reaching a total of at least 64 slaves by 1860. From Boddie’s will, she knows the names of three slaves: Jonas and Corry (identified as “man servants”) and Cesi (“the master’s woman”).
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She wants to know more. The slaves’ remains, their quarters, their artifacts: She hopes to identify all of that, and eventually to tell their story in a book and a museum. Tougaloo, however, does not have the archaeological expertise needed for such work. Streeter is talking with scholars at the University of Mississippi about a collaboration.
Given that institution’s racial baggage — some in the Tougaloo community attend church with the elderly James Meredith — Streeter feels compelled to explain herself.
“Some of us don’t want to have anything to do with Ole Miss,” she says. “When they hear ‘Ole Miss,’ their blood boils. But, you know, we have to get past that, too, in order for there to be a meeting of the minds and some collaborations and cooperation. People say, ‘Well, you gotta get over it.’ No, not get over it, OK. But you gotta let go of the anger.”
Roadblocks to Repair
A limited collaboration is the easy part. Tougaloo already has a half-century-plus partnership with Brown University, now focused largely on student exchanges. When, in 2006, that Ivy League university blazed a trail with an investigation of its own ties to slavery, it responded in part by pledging to strengthen the Tougaloo link.
The question is whether historically black and traditionally white colleges can realize their ambition of a more systemic program of repair.
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It may help that the leader of one of the main institutions involved, the University of Mississippi, has approached his institution’s slave history with a candor not always found among Deep South academic chiefs.
Speaking to scholars at Tougaloo, Jeffrey S. Vitter, Mississippi’s departing chancellor, said slavery was “a system underpinned by exploitation and violence.” He said slaves “suffered beatings and other abuses documented in the university’s records.” He said his university “acknowledges the injustices” under which slaves lived.
Those statements come from a campus plaque that the university installed this spring. But slavery can’t be boxed off as a solely historical issue, says Twitty, the Mississippi historian. It can’t be disentangled from the role universities played in maintaining post-slavery segregation and discrimination. Or from the generations-long underfunding of black colleges, which spawned a landmark lawsuit against the state of Mississippi. Or from the way the University of Mississippi piled up advantages that helped it achieve R-1 status, giving it an edge in the competition for federal grants.
“This has naturally raised these questions about what these predominantly white institutions owe HBCUs,” Twitty says. “They probably perceive it, rightly, to be a long, long, long overdue conversation, and an opportunity to ensure, potentially, that some of the tremendous resources of some of these predominantly white institutions are not hoarded solely for the benefit of predominantly white student bodies.”
But the Tougaloo discussion also captured some of the dilemmas impeding any move in that direction. Slavery implicated institutions across American society — banks, churches, media, government. Yet efforts to examine reparations at a national level have gone nowhere.
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“In part, there’s a lot of attention on universities precisely because universities have tried to engage this history,” Joseph A. Ferrara, vice president and chief of staff at Georgetown, said during one session at the Tougaloo event. “I can think of lots of other sectors of our economy and our country that have just as deep, if not a deeper, connection to slavery, and haven’t stepped up … in any meaningful way. So there’s a burden you carry if you step up.”
Slave descendants’ sometimes-conflicting views on reparations complicate that situation, as do a variety of other factors particular to individual universities. For example, Georgetown’s response to the issue is entangled with its relationship to the Roman Catholic Church. Public institutions grapple with the politics of state legislatures.
There’s a lot of attention on universities precisely because universities have tried to engage this history.
Kirt von Daacke, an assistant dean who helps lead the University of Virginia’s slavery commission, argues that a collective repair effort could best overcome any roadblocks.
“If one institution has to bear all the weight of the work, I think it’s hard to get those things pushed through administrations,” he says. “But if it’s, hey, we’re joining 10 other schools in attempting this thing, I think that makes it a lot easier.”
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So far, one of the most-developed ideas to emerge from these repair discussions calls for steering more federal research grants and contracts to HBCUs through partnerships with predominantly white universities.
Tougaloo’s Rosenthall, who has proposed a national center dedicated to that work, points to data indicating that HBCUs get less than 1 percent of federal research dollars. They often lack the personnel necessary to obtain and manage such grants. The proposed center would help address that, while also connecting HBCU students to research opportunities — and, ultimately, graduate programs — beyond their own campuses.
Gasman, director of the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions, welcomes Rosenthall’s plan but cautions that black colleges’ partnerships with majority-white institutions often end up giving those majority universities most of the benefits.
Gasman prefers a bolder approach. Universities that benefited from slavery, she says, should pay reparations by investing directly in black colleges’ endowments.
These funds tend to be small. Some HBCUs, like Howard University, Spelman College, and Hampton University, do have substantial endowments, although not in comparison with those of the Ivy League universities that have dominated much of the recent slavery discussion. The biggest private gift to a black college was the $20 million that Bill Cosby gave to Spelman — in 1988. In a recent op-ed, Walter M. Kimbrough Jr., president of Dillard University, an HBCU in New Orleans, said that record “should be a shame on this nation because we have not erased it from history.”
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Gasman argues that support for HBCUs’ endowments would have a better long-term payoff, making these institutions less tuition-dependent and helping to solidify their place in society. It would also show “some giving and sacrifice” on the part of those universities that profited from slavery, she says.
“What a way to say, ‘We apologize, we’re sorry, and we’re going to actually do something about it,’ " she says. “Because, you know, words only mean so much. Actions mean so much more.”