Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
News

Reckoning With Slavery

Slave Pleading
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.

Dealing with symbols that glorify a racist past is an increasingly common ritual at America’s oldest colleges and universities. But the name Ole Miss sits at the core of the U. of Mississippi’s modern identity.
The Shadow of Slavery
The Trouble With ‘Ole Miss’
By Marc Parry
The University of Mississippi has distanced itself from much of its Confederate past. Will it ever do the same with its popular nickname?
A street sign is visible acknowledgment of the Maringouin area’s past as West Oak plantation, where slaves who were sold to save Georgetown U. in 1838 were sent to work.
BACKGROUNDER
A New Path to Atonement
By Marc Parry
Conflicts have mired the efforts of Georgetown University and the Jesuits to make amends for their involvement with slavery. Now a more lasting reconciliation may be in sight.
Sharron Streeter, a professor at Tougaloo College who is researching its past, ascends a staircase in a campus building that was once a plantation owner’s home, built with slave labor. "People look at these buildings, and they only see the white oppressor," she says. "But I see African-Americans who had skill, who took pride in what they did even though they were being oppressed."
Reckoning With Slavery
A ‘Long Overdue Conversation’: Do Universities That Benefited From Slavery Owe a Debt to Black Colleges?
By Marc Parry
The stories of the University of Mississippi and Tougaloo College highlight the stakes in a national debate.
Hilary Beckles, vice chancellor of the U. of the West Indies
Backgrounder
The Scholars Behind the Quest for Reparations
By Marc Parry
They are propelling a reckoning with slavery’s legacy on campuses, in cities, at companies. What Hilary Beckles is doing represents the next step. It’s the marshaling of scholarship for a political aim: payback.
Tiya Miles at Detroit's Second Baptist Church, whose members and facilities played an important role in sheltering runaway slaves during the Underground Railroad.
The Chronicle Review
An Antidote for American Amnesia
By Marc Parry
Tiya Miles maps forgotten corners of slave history.
Rashauna Johnson stands outside Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, a bar symbolically connected to multiple histories of slavery.
The Chronicle Review
How Should We Memorialize Slavery?
By Marc Parry
A case study of what happens when research collides with public memory.
A granite marker indicates where the U. of Georgia reinterred remains, presumably of slaves, that were discovered during a campus construction project. The university’s handling of the remains has upset some faculty and community members.
The Chronicle Review
Buried History
By Marc Parry
How far should universities go to acknowledge their complicity with slavery?
Craig Steven Wilder
The Review
Stained by Slavery
By Marc Parry
How Craig Steven Wilder became a one-man truth-and-reconciliation commission on colleges and slavery.
slavery-wharf
The Review
Shackles and Dollars
By Marc Parry
Historians and economists clash over the role slavery played in capitalism.
Tags
Scholarship & Research