College administrators are struggling to figure out how to comply with a little-known law passed by Virginia’s legislature in 2021 that requires them, in part, to make reparations through scholarships or other means.
The law orders five public colleges, all of which enslaved people during the antebellum period, to document and memorialize their involvement in slavery, and either provide scholarships to descendants of enslaved people or invest in economic development for communities negatively impacted by slavery.
The Enslaved Ancestors College Access Scholarship and Memorial Program, as it’s known, applies to the College of William & Mary, Longwood University, the University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the Virginia Military Institute.
Colleges are not allowed to spend state funds or raise tuition to pay for the program.
Scant record-keeping on how many slaves were owned by each college has hampered efforts to recognize all of the enslaved people who contributed to the colleges. So far the University of Virginia, William & Mary, and Longwood are the only institutions to offer scholarships. All three colleges will offer a total of five annual scholarships to students.
The law is the brainchild of David Reid, a white Democratic member of the Virginia House of Delegates.
Scant record-keeping on how many slaves were owned by each college has hampered efforts to recognize all of the enslaved people who made contributions to the colleges.
“There is only 30 miles of distance and three weeks of separation between the formation of the first elected legislative body in the country, the Virginia House of Burgesses, and the first Africans who were brought here,” said Reid. “That confluence of events in 1619 made me look at the five colleges that formed during the colonial period and were built with and made operational through the use of slave labor.”
The program comes as access to selective colleges for Black students has been further hampered by the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to mostly ban the consideration of race in admissions and Republican legislators in states across the country attempt to outlaw colleges’ racially explicit efforts to recruit and retain Black students, faculty, and staff. Reid was careful in how he talked about the bill during its infancy, fearing that using certain language would make the bill an easy target for conservative opponents.
“When it was working through the legislature, I didn’t use the word reparations,” he said.
Several colleges in recent years, including Brown, Harvard, and Georgetown Universities, have attempted to better understand their role in the enslavement of Black people and provide reparations, though their efforts are highly controversial.
Slavery was a fixture at all the colleges targeted by Virginia’s law. At the College of William & Mary, enslaved men and women were used as domestic laborers for the college’s administrators, and they worked on a tobacco plantation that helped fund the operations of the institution. Enslaved workers constructed many of the buildings on the University of Virginia’s campus, and then worked as the college’s maintenance staff. Enslaved people worked in the kitchen at VMI, laundered uniforms, and collected firewood. One enslaved person provided barber services to the corps of cadets, according to Col. Keith Gibson, executive director of VMI’s museum system.
In 2020, as activists took to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer, the Virginia House of Delegates went into special session to tackle criminal-justice reform and Covid-19. Reid thought the moment would allow him to push for a reparations bill, albeit narrowly tailored.
The bill he authored called for at least one scholarship to be provided by the colleges per year. The bill passed in 2021 almost exclusively along party lines, with only one Republican voting in favor.
A year later, the Virginia State Council of Higher Education required colleges, through regulation, to provide scholarships based on either the total time the institutions held enslaved people or the total number of enslaved individuals owned. Colleges were also given the option of investing in economic development aimed at the descendants of slaves who live near any of the five campuses.
Reid had initially wanted the scholarships to target direct descendants of those enslaved by the colleges. But as Lee Andes, interim director of finance policy and innovation and associate director for financial aid at the state council has pointed out, the records of who was owned by the colleges is incomplete or in some cases nonexistent.
“Some of these records only provide first names and sometimes those are nicknames, so limiting this to someone who is only the descendant of slaves owned by the university wouldn’t have worked,” Andes said.
Many of the colleges lack a complete list of the enslaved people working on the campus. That’s the case with Longwood University. The record-keeping at the college was not nearly as thorough as the record-keeping at the University of Virginia or the College of William & Mary, according to Matt McWilliams, deputy to the president at Longwood. So far, the university has uncovered two names of enslaved people associated with the college.
Some of these records only provide first names and sometimes those are nicknames, so limiting this to someone who is only the descendant of slaves owned by the university wouldn’t have worked.
According to Virginia’s State Council on Higher Education, William & Mary has provided two scholarships per year since 2022. The University of Virginia has funded two scholarships each year since 2023. Longwood University offered its first scholarship under the program this fall.
Meanwhile, VMI is not offering scholarships and instead is investing in a local business incubator. VCU formed a commission to study how it would recognize its role in slavery. The commission recommended funding from five to eight scholarships per year. The college has yet to adopt those recommendations.
VMI is trying to figure out how to tally the number of enslaved people who worked at the college, as part of the memorialization requirement.
VMI officials estimate that 50 to 75 enslaved people were hired out to the college by surrounding slave owners, but it remains only an estimate, according to Gibson, who is leading the research. The receipts from the slave-leasing program will often have the first name of the enslaved person listed. Are duplicate names the same person working at the college multiple times, or did different enslaved people work at the college and have the same name, researchers have asked.
“It is a historical detective job,” Gibson said.
In December, the state will publish another report detailing progress the colleges have made to comply with the law.
