How Colleges Are Turning Their Racist Pasts Into Teaching Opportunities

In deciding to keep John C. Calhoun’s name on a residential college, Yale University’s president, Peter Salovey, said he hoped to turn the story of the 19th-century statesman who defended slavery into a teaching moment.

“Changing the name ‘Calhoun’ would result in less confrontation with what Calhoun represented,” Mr. Salovey said on Wednesday night, “and less discussion of who he was and why the building was named for him.”

That rationale is unlikely to resonate with student activists who have long called for the removal of Calhoun’s name. And the university has not yet provided many concrete examples of how it will teach about the slaveholder, who led a coalition in support of slavery in the U.S. Senate.

But other campuses have grappled with similar questions, and brought their racially fraught histories into the classroom. Here are three examples:

Clemson University

Calhoun’s Fort Hill plantation, where he lived while serving as vice president to John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, became home to Clemson’s campus. Calhoun’s son-in-law, Thomas G. Clemson, inherited the property and bequeathed it for the establishment of an educational institution in the late 19th century.

Rhondda R. Thomas, an associate professor of English at Clemson, says not many people are aware of Calhoun’s fierce promotion of slavery or the impact his plantation had on the campus — something she is trying to change by blending that history into her classes.

Ms. Thomas teaches 19th-century African-American culture and literature, and routinely asks her students to read Calhoun’s speeches. She says even those who were born and raised in South Carolina are often surprised to learn about his oppressive ideology.

“Because the university is located on the plantation where he lived and worked and enslaved African-Americans,” she says, “we have a responsibility to ensure students can study his life and how his beliefs and ideologies impacted America and affected African-Americans for generations.”

Even less known, Ms. Thomas says, is that the first university buildings were constructed by convict laborers leased by the State of South Carolina. When Ms. Thomas came to the university, she heard many rumors about the laborers, she says, but no one seemed to know the facts. It took her two years to collect enough records and data to offer a yearlong creative-inquiry course, in which about 15 students helped her dig through records to put together a clearer picture of who those prisoners were.

“How is it that a predominantly African-American group of male convicts ends up building a school for white cadets that they couldn’t attend because of Jim Crow in the South?” she asks, pinpointing the question her students are researching. Ms. Thomas and her team have discovered the names of more than 700 convicts. (While poring over records, one student came across her own last name, and discovered that the convict was in fact a distant relative.)

As for Calhoun’s legacy, Ms. Thomas says few in the community know the whole story, but the university is taking steps to change that. Clemson recently installed three plaques to explain the history of slaves on the campus, the location of a convict stockade, and the American Indians who originally lived on the land.

University of Virginia

Kirt von Daacke is one of 18 instructors who together teach a course at the University of Virginia — which was founded by Thomas Jefferson, another well-known slaveholder — called “Slavery and Its Legacies.” On Tuesday he gave a lecture about the memorialization of enslaved people, asking students to think about the implications of a hypothetical memorial for enslaved people at UVa.

Other professors across various disciplines have lectured on eugenics, in which Jefferson believed; Jeffersonian architecture; and the sociological factors of inequality. The professors all teach about various aspects of race and slavery, giving students a taste of where they can look for courses on the same themes.

Mr. von Daacke, an assistant dean and an associate professor of history, is also chair of the UVa president’s commission on slavery, which organized the creation of the course, as well as other educational programs that explain the campus’s historical ties to slavery. The course is new this semester and capped at 45 students, although interest was much greater, he says.

“The students really have a palpable desire to connect on an emotional level with people who suffered here,” he says, adding that as many as 100 enslaved people lived on the campus at any one time. Mr. von Daacke is also working on a map that will allow visitors and students to follow a heritage trail to see where enslaved people lived and worked on the campus.

“We’re using the university itself and its history as a laboratory,” he says. “This allows us to dig deeply.”

College of William & Mary

The Lemon Project at the College of William & Mary blends the Virginia university’s history into its curriculum. Jody L. Allen, managing director of the project and a visiting associate professor of history, says the project is named for a man who was enslaved on the campus in the early 19th century.

Ms. Allen teaches Lemon Project courses about slavery, the Jim Crow period, integration at William & Mary, and women in civil rights.

“The idea is that we have the unpleasant part of the college’s history, but it is part of the history, and there is no reason to hide it,” she says, adding that she incorporates a section of local history into all of those courses. In one, she teaches students about the Jim Crow era through the lens of Henry Billups, an African-American who worked as a janitor, bell-ringer, and food worker at William & Mary during that time.

Upper-level students pursuing capstone projects take her seminars. The campus has no memorial to recognize the enslaved labor that helped construct it, says Ms. Allen, though she hopes to propose one. But beyond markers, she says, embedding the history into courses is essential.

“It’s a way to have lengthy discussions over a significant period of time,” she says, adding that effective education on this history all comes down to communication. “One of the major issues is the reluctance to talk about the serious issues across the country.”

In her classes, students look at primary sources that can dispel myths they may have learned in nonacademic settings.

While she acknowledges that most students in Lemon Project courses are already interested in the subject matter before they enroll, she hopes they will become “ambassadors” who will be able to correct misinformation about the university’s historical ties.