As colleges in several states struggle to reconcile their current values with their historic ties to slavery, one in Virginia took the unusual step of hiring a historian to explore that past.
Washington and Lee University, named for two famous Virginia generals who owned slaves, appointed Lynn Rainville, a public historian and anthropologist, as its director of institutional history this year. Rainville, who reports directly to President William C. Dudley, is assigned to create a museum dedicated to the university’s history, including its connections with slavery; guide educational programming and research; and serve as university historian.
Even though people may disagree about the university’s controversial past, Rainville says, “I would rather deal with passion than apathy.” More challenging to her as a historian, she says, is “when people feel like they shouldn’t care at all, they absolutely do not care what happened in the past. That to me is a far more alarming moment.”
Rainville, whose two most recent jobs were as community-initiatives fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and dean of Sweet Briar College, has worked in the past to locate and preserve historic black cemeteries and trace descendants of enslaved families. At Sweet Briar, she served as unofficial historian. Sweet Briar’s history goes back just over a century, and she relishes the opportunity to delve into Washington and Lee’s 270 years.
Creation of Rainville’s job arose from the recommendations of Washington and Lee’s Commission on Institutional History and Community, which Dudley established in the wake of the white-nationalist rally that turned violent in Charlottesville in 2017. Other recommendations by the commission include temporarily replacing a portrait of Robert E. Lee in Confederate uniform in its Lee Chapel with one of him in civilian clothes from the time he led the institution and renaming Robinson Hall, which recognizes a man who gave enslaved people to the institution in his bequest. It is now Chavis Hall, in honor of John Chavis, the first African American to receive a college education in the United States.
Rainville has reached out to faculty and staff members across disciplines, as well as residents of Lexington, the university’s home city. “I felt it was critical to learn from and get as many different perspectives as possible as part of compiling all this information,” she says.
Weaving together the oral histories and resources she is collecting is the first step to developing the museum. She has looked at other historical sites in the region, such as George Washington’s Mount Vernon, to see how they are interpreting events that also influenced Washington and Lee.
Rainville, who will begin teaching in the spring, will oversee the other museums and collections on campus. She envisions displays in the new museum that are more interactive than artifacts in a glass case. Rainville knows she is competing with “the fact that students can pull up a Ken Burns documentary on their phone just as quickly as they can look through the exhibit.”
She has found a network of colleagues through Universities Studying Slavery, an organization of 56 colleges — including nine in Canada and the British Isles — that got its start in Virginia in 2014.
Although some colleges have shied away from their complicated histories, Rainville sees the value in facing the past. “People can always have different perspectives, but we can come to a sense of common facts that lend themselves to different interpretations, but that are based in evidence,” she says.
Like Washington and Lee, several other institutions in the Universities Studying Slavery consortium have established panels to study historical ties to slavery and other aspects of their history, but they are relying mainly on current faculty and staff members.
Virginia Tech, for instance, is re-examining its history in anticipation of its 150th anniversary in 2022. Although it was founded 123 years after the institution that became Washington and Lee University and seven years after the fall of the Confederacy, it also has roots in slavery. Former slave-holding plantations formed the university’s early campus.
Robert H. Leonard, a professor of directing and performance at the university, is chairman of the Council on Virginia Tech’s History. “Art of all kinds, and theater in particular, is a way for a community to know itself and to have a dialogue with itself about who we are,” he says.
The council includes people across disciplines in Virginia Tech, and it “was unanimous in its interest in bringing forward stories that have not been heard, stories that had been silenced, stories that have been forgotten,” says Leonard.
The group has given members of the campus community free rein to explore all aspects of the institutional history. Some efforts — like VT Stories Oral History Project, co-founded by Katrina M. Powell, director of the Center for Rhetoric in Society — already existed and became part of the council’s effort.
While the council’s short-term goal is to prepare for the anniversary, Leonard says it is not about a single event on a single day. “Every story told publicly calls up another story,” he says.
A jumping-off point for the group’s conversation is Virginia Tech, Land-Grant University, 1872-1997: History of a School, a State, a Nation, by Peter Wallenstein, a professor of history at Virginia Tech.
“People who teach on campuses don’t ever think, typically, about how the place that they spend their professional careers in came to be,” says Wallenstein, who wrote the book for the university’s 125th anniversary. Reactions to his book have prompted Wallenstein to look into what he didn’t cover in depth the first time around. He will publish an update for the 150th anniversary.
Robert Leonard wasn’t surprised by some of the harsher aspects of Virginia Tech’s history. “We’re going to want to be strong and celebratory,” he says. “But it seems to us really important that we do that in the context of telling all the story, the whole truth, and not try to hide or put aside or ignore those parts of the story that are difficult. That’s not a particularly healthy way to go forward.”
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