Alumni Take Us Deeper into the Hopkins Past
Our Next Webinar Will Re-Examine Past Leaders and the Honors Once Bestowed Upon Them
Our alumni are maintaining a deeper and more enduring connection to the university than ever before. — Johns Hopkins University 10x2020 Progress Report
Baltimore’s local schools were again in the news this past week; Reckoning with the slaveholding past continues. Reported by Rona Kobell for the Baltimore Banner, Goucher College hosted a two-day long gathering — a Descendant Engagement Symposium — part of its accounting for how its “wooded campus … was once part of one of the largest plantations in the state of Maryland, where the Ridgely family enslaved hundreds of Black Marylanders. There was no one to relieve them from the harsh conditions they endured; their enslaver, Charles Carnan Ridgely, was also governor of Maryland from 1815 to 1818.”
Goucher students and the school’s future alumni have a role to play, and a quote from Goucher president Kent Devereaux stands out: “What I would say to students is, ‘Don’t feel guilt about this. This is not about you. This is about our understanding of our country and who we are and the obligation that we all have.” What obligations, it is worth asking, might students and the same individuals as future alumni fulfill at Goucher? At Johns Hopkins?
On Monday, April 15, at 12 noon ET, Hard Histories will talk with two Hopkins alumni — today historians in their own right — to learn how they have embraced an obligation to further understanding and even promote change at their alma mater. Dr. Paige Glotzer, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Dr. Jennie K. Williams, University of Virginia, may be best known for their path-breaking scholarship. Dr. Glotzer is author of How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890–1960, a study of Baltimore’s Roland Park Company. Dr. Williams is completing Oceans of Kinfolk, a study of the coastwise traffic in enslaved people from the Chesapeake region.
These JHU alums are also promoting reckoning as they press the university to engage in new areas of self-examination. Dr. Glotzer is part of a working group that has conducted research on Hopkins’ former president Isaiah Bowman (1935-1948), revealing his white supremacist and antisemitic views and actions. Dr. Williams has written critically about an endowed professorship at the university – the Caroline Donovan Professorship in English Literature – that was named for the wife of a prominent Maryland slave trader. That work, in part, led to JHU’s decision to re-name the professorship, pending court approval.
Please join us! As always, events with Hard Histories are free and registration is easy here.
— MSJ