How Colleges Confront Their Racist Pasts

The sun starts to set at the University of Virginia, and barely visible through the trees is the Rotunda designed by Thomas Jefferson and built in part by slaves. Summer students lounge in front of Brooks Hall on a patch of grass where the university will build a memorial to those slaves.

Less than a four-minute walk away is Jefferson’s statue, where last summer hundreds of torch-bearing neo-Nazis surrounded a couple dozen young activists locking arms around the statue’s base. The counterprotesters chanted “Black lives matter!” but were drowned out by the alt-right chants of “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” The marchers attacked with pepper spray.

The racist present complicates colleges’ reckoning with their racist pasts but also underlines the urgent need for those efforts. Slavery, Jim Crow, the forced removal of Native Americans, and exclusionary practices against other minorities are as woven through America’s institutions of higher education as they are through America as a whole. As an increasing number of colleges chronicle and mourn ugly periods in their histories, draw lessons from them, and make amends, they must also defend against similar threats today.

White-supremacist propaganda on campuses rose 77 percent last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League. In the 10 months after President Trump’s election, BuzzFeed found more than 150 cases of hate speech and violence on 120 campuses. Students of color reported feeling unsafe and unwelcome, and the divisive rhetoric on the national stage continues to play out in college settings.

“The history of universities in this country, as in the world, is one of creating an elite. And that elite was defined as European,” says Leslie M. Harris, a historian at Northwestern University. “So it’s not surprising that embedded into the ways that the university functions there remains this sediment of racism.”

The move to rigorously examine colleges’ historical role in racism began roughly 15 years ago, when Brown University’s then president, Ruth J. Simmons, appointed a committee to research the university’s relationship to slavery, resulting in the report “Slavery and Justice.” Instead of following Brown’s example, most Ivy League institutions initially remained mum on their slave histories. That sidestepping of the issue became harder, however, in 2013, when the historian Craig Steven Wilder, in his book Ebony and Ivy, exposed the essential role slavery played in the founding of America’s most prestigious universities. The book prompted student and faculty calls for colleges to take a deep look into their souls — and their special collections.

The reckoning began at Brown University, and then a handful of colleges and universities, among them William & Mary and Emory, followed suit. The publication of Wilder’s book put Ivy institutions on the spot, and soon big state schools like the University of Maryland were examining their ties to slavery too. Dozens have joined the Universities Studying Slavery consortium, created by scholars at the University of Virginia who wanted to be in contact with other institutions looking into similar pasts.

Now some of those institutions are turning their eyes to the next chapter, segregation and Jim Crow, and their roles in enforcing those systems of oppression and in furnishing ideological arguments for them. Others, like the University of San Francisco and Western Carolina University, are delving into their histories of bigotry against Asian-Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and other groups and asking themselves how they can atone.

Here are some of the ways colleges are dealing with their troubling racist pasts.

Renaming a Building

After Donald J. Trump’s election, many students at the University of San Francisco fell into despair. Trump’s rhetoric had been anti-immigrant and racially charged, and the university had one of the most diverse student populations in the nation.

“There was a very serious fear amongst the student body,” said Shaya Kara, who was president of the student senate and has since graduated. “Many of our students were, and continue to be, in increasingly vulnerable positions after that election.”

Kara made it her mission to rename Phelan Hall — a move students had been demanding intermittently for more than 25 years.

The hall’s namesake, James Duval Phelan, was a mayor of San Francisco from 1897 to 1902, a U.S. senator, a philanthropist, and an alumnus. He was also virulently anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese, calling for the segregation and disenfranchisement of Asians already in California and for an end to Chinese and Japanese immigration. In 1920, while seeking re-election to the Senate, he campaigned on the slogan “Keep California White.”

In May 2017, the university’s board of trustees agreed to rename Phelan Hall for Burl A. Toler, a celebrated African-American alumnus who was the NFL’s first black on-field referee and who went on to become the first African-American secondary-school principal in San Francisco.

At the University of Pittsburgh, following a student petition, the board, in June, called for the renaming of its public-health building, Parran Hall. As U.S. surgeon general from 1936 to 1948, Thomas Parran Jr. oversaw the Tuskegee and Guatemala syphilis experiments. In the Tuskegee study, treatment was withheld from African-American patients, resulting in infections and deaths. In the Guatemala study, subjects were intentionally exposed to syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases to test antibiotics.

In 2017, the University of Virginia renamed its Jordan Hall, which had honored the prominent and influential eugenicist Harvey E. Jordan. Eugenics was a pseudoscience that led to the mass forced sterilizations of minorities and those considered “feeble minded,” usually low-income women. Virginia sterilized 7,300 to 8,300 people between 1924 and 1979. The building is now named for Vivian Pinn, the only African-American in her 1967 class at the university’s School of Medicine and the first director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health.

For others, renaming is not as important as naming new buildings.

When you rename, you erase, says Deborah Gray White, a historian at Rutgers University and chair of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Populations in Rutgers History. She wants those in the university community to know of its associations with slavery.

But in 2017, Rutgers named a new dormitory — “the nicest dorms on campus,” White says — after the abolitionist and women’s-rights activist Sojourner Truth, whose family, Rutgers historians learned, was owned by relatives of Rutgers’s first president. Rutgers also named a prominent walkway Will’s Way, honoring a slave who helped lay the foundation for the college’s very first building. It renamed a library for James Dickson Carr, the university’s first African-American graduate. Plaques and African-American history have been integrated into campus tours, says White, “so that when you’ve come to visit it’s not just a white university they’ve come to talk about.”

Princeton University plans to rename a building’s archway for James Collins (Jimmy) Johnson, a fugitive slave who worked on the campus.

Memorials and Research

In 2009 the College of William & Mary formally recognized that it had owned and exploited slave labor. To study that history, it began the Lemon Project, named for a slave named Lemon whom the college owned. Today, the college is establishing a memorial.

“There’s a saying at William & Mary, ‘One tribe, one family,’ but not everybody felt a part of that family,” says Jody Allen, a historian who directs the Lemon Project. While the college doesn’t have a lot of Confederate monuments like some other Southern institutions, the statues on campus are mostly of white, slave-holding men — Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, John Tyler, and James Blair, the college’s founder and first president.

Called “a journey of reconciliation,” the Lemon Project held town meetings in the community and on campus to determine what type of memorial might be built and where it should be placed. The college is holding a national design competition for the memorial.

“I’m black and Mexican, so after reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X my sophomore year, I had a racial awakening,” says Andrew Ojeda, who graduated from William & Mary in 2012. “I made a decision to make it my mission to improve race relations.”

The professor who had assigned the book put Ojeda in touch with Allen, and Ojeda became the project’s first research assistant. Inspired by the project, Ojeda, who now works in finance, found a way to continue his commitment to improving race relations. Along with his family, he created and helps support the Lemon Project’s Gaither-Johnson summer research fellowship, which gives an undergraduate student the opportunity to research African-American history.

A Lemon Project class co-taught by Allen and Edwin Pease, a senior lecturer in architectural design, focused on the memorial to enslaved laborers, incorporating the history of slaves at the college with discussions of design and memorials’ significance. Allen actively recruited people from Williamsburg to participate, and the class led to the formation of the Lemon Project Committee on Memorialization.

The Lemon Project also puts on an annual symposium on African-American history to connect the Williamsburg community, particularly the black community, with the college’s students and professors. The symposium gave Emma Bresnan, a 2017 graduate, the chance to present her report on Donald W. Davis, a prominent eugenicist and head of the biology department in the first half of the 20th century. “This was stuff,” she says, “that was definitely not public knowledge.”

Slavery’s Aftermath

At Rutgers, after students of color protested the university’s racial history as detailed in Wilder’s book, then-Chancellor Richard L. Edwards appointed two committees, one to research that history and the other to discuss contemporary issues African-Americans and other minorities face on campus.

White, the Rutgers historian, teamed up with Professor Marissa Fuentes, 14 graduate researchers, and 25 undergraduates to write the history of the African-American and Native-American experience at Rutgers. “Rutgers gave us hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this, because that’s what it takes,” White says. Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, the first volume of three, was published in time for Rutgers’s 250th anniversary in December 2016. The second volume will examine Rutgers’s African-American history from the end of the 19th century to World War II, and the third will focus on World War II through the freedom movements to the present.

Thomas Jefferson, who espoused equality and considered slavery a sin, nonetheless owned more than 600 slaves during his lifetime and freed only seven, all from the Hemings family. He died in debt, says Christa Dierksheide, a historian who is a senior fellow at Monticello, and his family sold more than 150 slaves, some of whom were purchased by professors at the university.

Following the first commission on slavery, UVa’s President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation will examine the university’s and Charlottesville’s actions during Reconstruction and Jim Crow, says Niya Bates, a public historian of slavery and African-American life at Monticello, a University of Virginia alumna, and a member of the commission. Chaired by Andrea Douglas, a Virginia alumna and executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center in Charlottesville, and Kirt von Daacke, an assistant dean and professor of history at Virginia, the commission will scrutinize the period 1865 to 1965.

“You can’t talk about slavery,” says von Daacke, “without talking about its aftermath and its legacy.”

At UVa, African-American history has been incorporated into history, English, and architecture courses. Ibby A. Han, a 2017 graduate, and Sophie Schectman, a 2018 graduate, were grateful for an interdisciplinary class taught by Kenrick Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross that considered the university’s history of slavery with regard to the campus landscape. Han also praised Lisa Woolfork and Laura Goldblatt’s course “Making the Invisible Visible.” The historian van Daacke cites the popularity of an introductory course called “Slavery and Its Legacies,” which, despite being expanded, consistently has a waiting list.

Community Involvement

Probably the hardest part for colleges reckoning with their racist history is making amends.

“Some locals still call the school ‘the plantation,’” says Bresnan, the recent William & Mary graduate. “We have a lot of atoning to do.” The college has begun that process through town meetings, the annual symposium, and porch talks.

Western Carolina University, in Cullowhee, N.C., has a fraught history with the local Cherokee population.

“Every university in North America is built on indigenous land, and so in one sense we all contend with that,” says Ben Steere, an assistant professor of anthropology and co-director of Cherokee Studies Programs. “But Western Carolina is unique in being situated only a 30-minute drive from Cherokee, N.C. and the Qualla Boundary which, in addition to being land held in a federal trust by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, is the ancestral Cherokee homeland.”

In the late 1820s and the 1830s, the government began forcibly removing Native Americans from the southeast United States, including North Carolina. Thousands died on the Trail of Tears. Few remained on their homelands, and those in the Qualla Boundary are their descendants. While the university wasn’t founded until the 1880s, it was built on Native land.

“There could be no place more Cherokee than this,” says Brett Riggs, a professor of Cherokee studies in the department of anthropology and sociology. In the 1920s and ’30s, the university simultaneously acknowledged Cherokee history and erased the Native-American presence, says Andrew Denson, an associate professor of history. “They turned the Cherokee history of this place into something that is like an interesting bit of local color for the university, something that doesn’t really suggest there’s any sort of contemporary responsibility toward the Eastern Band or that this is a living relationship between these communities and institutions.”

In the 1950s, the university bulldozed a sacred mound on the campus for a new building. By the late 1960s and ’70s, with increased Native American enrollment, the red-power movement, the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act, and stronger cultural-research management laws, the university began more outreach to the Native American community. In the mid-1970s, the university began offering Cherokee studies and founded the Cherokee Center, which today serves as a liaison between Western Carolina and the Eastern Band. And “since the ’70s, there’s been archaeology on campus every time prior to a big construction project,” says Steere.

Sky Sampson, director of the Cherokee Center and a 2010 graduate of Western Carolina, says that there have been many years of heartache but that the relationship is improving.

“If you just jump right in and you try to tell many tribes in the United States how to do things, or, ‘We want to research you,’” she says, “they’re automatically going to be resistant to you, because that’s all that outsiders have done to our tribes.”

“Archaeology,” says Riggs, “was really a dirty word in Indian country.” But archaeologists, some of whom were affiliated with the university, began working with and for the tribe, and formed lasting relationships. Today, the Western Band is the No. 1 sponsor of archaeology in the region.

Many credit the late Chancellor David O. Belcher for making cooperative efforts with the Cherokee a priority. The university has helped preserve the Cherokee language. University officials in 2017 commemorated the university’s relationship with the Eastern Band by dedicating a dorm to Judaculla, a Cherokee legend. For the construction of the new science building, WCU installed a comprehensive archaeology plan and reached out to the Eastern Band to get Cherokee ideas for the design. At the groundbreaking, Western acknowledged that the university was built on Cherokee land, and in May 2017, the university awarded Jeremiah (Jerry) Wolfe, an elder of the Eastern Band, an honorary degree. The theme for WCU this past year was Cherokee culture, and faculty were provided with ways to incorporate it into their curricula.

Next Steps

More is wanted even from universities that are vigorously engaged in this work. At Rutgers, the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Populations published its recommendations to the university in the epilogue of Scarlet and Black. While some of the easier suggestions were followed — placing historical markers around campus and naming buildings — others haven’t yet come to fruition, says White: scholarships for minorities, special programs, a lecture series, more African-American professors, and a diversity course.

At UVa, some students are calling not just for studying the history of local black communities but taking actions to benefit them now: better pay for university service workers, more affordable housing, and scholarships for local low-income, minority students. They also call for better handling of present-day instances of racism and white supremacy, and point to university officials’ failure to warn students on campus about the Unite the Right rally in August 2017.

“I personally do not trust UVa as an institution to confront or handle its white-supremacist past if it … has actively ignored its white-supremacist present,” says Clara Carlson, a 2018 graduate.

But while distrust remains, hope has grown. Niya Bates, the Monticello historian and 2013 UVa graduate, says the university is “miles ahead” of where it was when she was an undergraduate there.

James Campbell, who chaired Brown’s committee on slavery and is now at Stanford University, says that while pressure from students and faculty to confront ugly histories can be powerful and constructive, sustained, concerted effort requires institutional commitment. He is reticent about giving advice to other universities examining their past, but he does have a few guiding principles.

“This is not an exercise in moral self-congratulation,” he says. “This is an opportunity for serious reflection on our own complicity and the injustices of our own time.”

“Don’t simply point your finger accusingly at the past,” he says, and don’t be afraid of it. “Universities are truth-seeking institutions. Honor that fact.”