In the introduction to this important volume, the editors offer a set of questions for scholars of slavery and universities to consider, among them being, “What have recent revelations about universities and slavery taught us about our nation's history and about the history of American higher education in particular?” and “Equally important, what do they tell us about our own time?” (p. 4). The essays that follow, many of which originated from the first ever conference on slavery and the university (organized by volume coeditor Leslie M. Harris and held at Emory University in February 2011), provide crucial answers to these questions and offer a glimpse into the range of scholarship being produced in the burgeoning field of slavery and university studies.
Echoing the two questions highlighted above, the volume is divided into two parts. The first section's essays discuss histories of proslavery and antislavery forces at northern and southern institutions, while the second set examines how universities are presently grappling with their slaving histories. Appropriately, the first essay is by Craig Steven Wilder, whose work has defined the field. Wilder's piece shows how colleges during the Age of Revolution owed their successes directly to the Atlantic slaving economy. It was not a coincidence that “higher education in the colonies ascended as the Atlantic slave trade peaked” in the middle of the eighteenth century (p. 23). After withstanding the trials of war during the American Revolution, the early colleges were desperate for capital, and administrators turned to familiar sources for revenue. Indeed, Wilder ultimately argues that after the American Revolution slavery saved the colonial colleges and enabled the proliferation of new ones. He writes, “The postwar recovery and expansion of higher education in the United States were the consequences of the restoration and escalation of Atlantic slavery” (p. 33).
Wilder's essay provides a useful foundation upon which the subsequent essays build, as they illustrate how universities’ relationship to slavery evolved. Not only did they remain tethered to slaving economies, they increasingly became hotbeds of proslavery thought and slaveholding violence. Alfred L. Brophy explicates the symbiotic relationship between southern universities as engines of proslavery thought with politics and law. Indeed, Brophy traces the evolution of proslavery thought through the works of southern academics, from “the necessary evil” argument of the early republic to the “positive good” thesis of the antebellum era. Their theories were then deployed in courtrooms and the halls of Congress to justify proslavery ideology.
In their respective essays, Jennifer Oast and Patrick Jamieson reveal how southern white men learned to become slaveholders and advocates of slavery at southern universities. Significantly, Oast demonstrates how slaveholding violence pervaded universities in Virginia, where institutions owned enslaved people. Oast shows how, rather than having a single owner, enslaved people where often caught in precarious circumstances that enabled students and faculty to inflict violence on them. Similarly, A. James Fuller vividly explains how Basil Manly, while president of the University of Alabama, violently whipped Sam, an enslaved man, on campus. The cultures of southern white honor and notions of slaveholding paternalism were bound up in the proslavery violence at southern universities. These essays show how slavery was inextricably tied to the university and how universities provided leadership in defending slavery.
The essays on antislavery are particularly rich and offer important insights into specific black educational efforts in higher learning. Two essays in particular explain the context of colonization at colleges and its proponents who aimed to educate African American men as Protestant missionaries for the African continent. Diane Windham Shaw recovers the lives of David and Washington McDonogh, two early black students who attended Lafayette College in Pennsylvania in the late the 1830s. They were both born enslaved in Louisiana and their owner, John McDonogh, supported gradual emancipation paired with colonization. He believed David and Washington showed “great promise” for “Religious Education, preparatory to their becoming missionaries of the Gospel in the Land of their forefathers” (p. 131). The connection between the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions and Lafayette College president Rev. George Junkin, a Presbyterian minister and staunch colonizationist, facilitated David and Washington's admission. The two black students soon experienced the type of racism emblematic of northern society. Shaw explains that, although they received a college education, they lived in separate quarters, sat apart from their white classmates during recitations, and received their lessons privately. In 1842, accompanied by his mother and siblings, whom John McDonogh manumitted, Washington sailed for Liberia, where he would spend the rest of his life as a teacher. David, however, refused to leave the United States and sought a career in medicine. After graduating from Lafayette in 1844, he remained in the US and joined the abolition movement, infuriating his former owner. David studied medicine with a doctor at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York (now part of Columbia University) and was awarded a medical degree in 1875. He practiced medicine until his death, after which a hospital in New York City that predominantly served African American patients—who could receive treatment from black doctors—was named in his honor. The lives of Washington and David McDonogh provide a window into the debates among free blacks whether to leave the United States as emigrationists or fight for abolitionist transformation of American society.
Similar to Washington McDonogh, William Hart shows that Martin Freeman, a black graduate from Middlebury College in Vermont, also emigrated to Liberia. Freeman believed it was the only location where black manhood and autonomy could be realized. Hart argues that although Freeman initially opposed colonization, he eventually embraced its ideology, which he first encountered during his college days. After serving a term as president of Avery College in Pittsburgh, Freeman left for Liberia in 1864 and became a professor at Liberia College, where he taught for over twenty years. Hart's framing of colonization as an antiblack movement and Freeman's subsequent embrace of its ideology merits further explanation regarding the ideological distinctiveness of the American Colonization Society and black emigrationism respectively as well as where they converged in the 1860s.
Kabria Baumgartner's essay illustrates how New England in the 1830s was an important battleground for black higher education. The interracial abolitionist efforts to create institutions for black women and men in Connecticut and New Hampshire demonstrated abolitionists’ belief in education as a liberating force and revealed the potential political power educated black Americans could wield. Indeed, the profound political implications of these efforts is exemplified in the white reactionary backlash and violence that subsequently emerged and destroyed two schools—a boarding school run by Prudence Crandall and the Noyes Academy—and prevented the construction of a manual labor school in New Haven. While examining a familiar history, Baumgartner employs a fresh analytical framework of abolition that adds nuance to the field and distinguishes her essay as among the most innovative in the volume.
Moving to the Old Northwest, J. Brent Morris examines the abolitionist context of Oberlin College in Ohio, where women defied the gendered strictures of domesticity that Oberlin faculty sought to enforce through the curriculum. Instead, Oberlin women refashioned their college education toward activist ends and many became important leaders in the women's rights and abolition movements. The essays on antislavery complicate the relationship between slavery and higher education, revealing important subtleties at northern institutions.
The essays on slavery's legacies at universities contain fascinating depictions of the myriad ways institutions today grapple with this history and reveal important directions for new work. Ywone Edwards-Ingram's study of the St. George Tucker House in Virginia and Tucker and his son's professorships at College of William and Mary reveals the stark neglect of African American history and culture in the public landscapes of Colonial Williamsburg and William and Mary. Edwards-Ingram highlights the numerous ways the college and Colonial Williamsburg can make their histories more representative of black life in their physical and digital landscapes.
Mark Auslander's fascinating essay chronicles the “memory work” of the descendants of enslaved people associated with Emory University in Atlanta and how they have commemorated their ancestors’ history while forcing the university to contend with it. In many ways, ambivalence marks the relationship the descendants have with Emory as they continue to fight for substantive restorative justice from an institution that factors so prominently in their family histories.
An essay on spatial pedagogical approaches to slavery at the University of Alabama and one on the controversy over buildings named after slaveholders complete this section. The latter essay curiously argues against changing building names, asserting that “until we have truly extirpated racism from our culture and society, we need these reminders” (p. 329). Wouldn't working toward the elimination of racism include removing slaveholders and proslavery advocates from spaces meant for commemoration? Wouldn't changing the names of academic buildings commemorating proslavery and racism represent the values universities champion today? The author also claims that keeping the names will prevent the erasure of history. Changing building names does not erase history, rather it represents the very essence of history, change over time. Just as the original naming of the buildings for racist figures has a history, so too will name-changing in the present. The arguments that changing a building name will lead people to forget history is simply false, as if the history of racism and slavery can only be found in the names of academic buildings. Collectively, the essays in this section provide a window into the important work being done on slavery's legacies at universities and provide exciting directions for future work.
The end result is a state of the field volume. Indeed, the introduction and a compelling essay by Dr. Ruth Simmons alone make this a tremendously valuable book. While the arguments of the early essays will be familiar to specialists, the pieces documenting African American history at colleges and its legacies today illustrate new directions in the field. More generally as a result of this volume, at least three categories of historiography within universities and slavery studies emerge: (1) complicity, (2) antislavery, and (3) slavery's legacies at colleges today, with various subcategories therein. As historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham indicates in the afterword, there are still many more histories to be told.
